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A Question of Character

Wed, 6 Aug 2008 -1:00:00 GMT

Prospect August 2008

The first headmaster of Stowe school, JF Roxburgh, declared his goal to be turning out young men who would be "acceptable at a dance and invaluable in a shipwreck." A mixture of courtesy and courage used to be essential to the idea of a British citizen's character. Brits were the sort of people who knew both how to survive a Blitz and queue politely. Similarly, Robert Baden-Powell, the founder of the scout movement, aimed to induce in his young charges "some of the spirit of self-negation, self-discipline, sense of humour, responsibility, helpfulness to others, loyalty and patriotism which go to make 'character.'" He described his movement as nothing less than a "character factory."

But in the postwar shift towards a less constrained and judgemental society—"character-talk" in Stefan Collini's phrase—dropped out of public discourse, except when considering someone's suitability for high office. The idea of good character came to sound old-fashioned and patronising.

"The reason we find the concept of character difficult is because of class conflict in British society," says Matthew Taylor, former head of strategy for Tony Blair, in an interview for my recent Radio 4 Analysis programme "Character Factories." "There was a sense that good character was handed down from a patrician class to the great unwashed."

But thinkers and politicians across the political spectrum are now trying to revive "character-talk." Taylor is pushing the idea of "pro-social behaviour"—recognising, he says, that changes in personal behaviour are essential to successful policy in everything from climate change to obesity. David Cameron called in July for politicians to tackle issues of "public morality." Against the backdrop of the impoverished east end of Glasgow, he insisted that politicians had to drop "moral neutrality." He criticised the political classes for "a refusal to make judgments about what is good and bad behaviour, right and wrong." Some people on the left are also starting to argue that character might matter as much as resources in improving life chances.

Bestselling books like Lynne Truss's Talk to the Hand: The Utter Bloody Rudeness of Everyday Life speak to a generalised anxiety about the breakdown of positive social norms of behaviour. But it is important to keep this in perspective. There is some evidence of a weakening of certain norms—more littering, public profanity, drunkenness and selfishness on the roads and public transport. But most of the time, most people are perfectly pleasant. British society as a whole is not "broken" in any meaningful sense.

Of course, it is notoriously hard for politicians to get traction in the area of behaviour. They often fall into the trap described by philosopher Jon Elster of "willing what cannot be willed." And Cameron is certainly taking some risks with his incursions into morality. By insisting that individuals should take a share of responsibility for their obesity or poverty, he ensured headlines such as "Cameron tells fat people it's their fault" and revived fears of a war against the undeserving poor. Behind the headlines, though, Cameron is thinking his way towards an integration of his ideas on responsibility, morality and "broken Britain," which may lead him towards a consideration of character formation.

Conservativism and character seem like natural political bedfellows given traditional right-wing concerns with social order and reducing state dependency. What is more surprising is the number of people on the centre-left who can also see the point of a new focus on character. For them, the concern is less with general social interaction—although they worry about that too—than with the character of a small, influential and expensive group who Tony Blair once labelled the "deeply excluded."

Why a nudge from the state beats a slap

Wed, 6 Aug 2008 -1:00:00 GMT

The Observer - 20th July 2008

Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness

Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein

Yale £18, pp293

One of the many competitive advantages American public intellectuals have over their British counterparts is the ability to capture their thesis in a single word: Chaos, Sway, Faster, Blink. The most successful of these endeavours colonise the word for the author's purposes. Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein, both professors at the University of Chicago, have done it again with Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness

Nudge has become the 'it' book for politicos. Thaler is in the middle of a fortnight in the UK and is being courted and feted by the chattering, thinking, wonking classes. Everyone who is anyone has been nudged by the amiable prof (I bought him dinner). The Conservatives moved quickly to stake their claim to his brand of 'libertarian paternalism', seeing in it a way for the state to act non-coercively for the greater good.

The Tory embrace of Nudge shows how far the party has moved in its approach to free markets: Thaler and Sunstein are a long way from the old Chicago School inspired and led by their most famous predecessor, Milton Friedman. Nudge portrays the Rational Economic Man who shops and trades in Friedman's free markets as a myth. 'If you look at economics textbooks,' its authors write, 'you will learn that homo economicus can think like Albert Einstein, store as much memory as IBM's Big Blue and exercise the willpower of Mahatma Gandhi.'

Real men and women are inconsistent, ill-informed, weak-willed and lazy. We can't be bothered to fill out the form that would get us in the company pension plan, we forget to cancel subscriptions and we slump on the sofa eating doughnuts when we should be doing yoga. We are virtually incapable of balancing the temptations of today with the rewards of tomorrow; for some of us, even instant gratification isn't quite quick enough.

Thaler and Sunstein want to help real, fallible people make better choices without removing their right to choose. In many cases, the nudge required is to remove the need for people to do anything at all, on the grounds that inertia and bone idleness are fixed components of human psychology. Occupational pension schemes, for example, can be established either on an opt-in basis - meaning employees have to make a positive decision to join - or as an opt-out, with workers automatically enrolled in the fund unless they choose to get out.

For Rational Economic Man, there's no difference. He carefully weighs up the pros and cons of the scheme and makes his decision. But a real person, afflicted by both a 'status quo bias' and what Thaler and Sunstein dub the 'yeah, whatever' heuristic, the differences are pronounced. Opt-in schemes have participation rates of around 60 per cent, while otherwise identical opt-out funds retain between 90 and 95 per cent of employees. It is no wonder that Adair Turner, in his report on pensions, urged legislation to push pension schemes to an opt-in default position and that policy is moving in this direction.

Irrational humans also tend to follow the crowd, which means that peer comparisons form an important part of the 'choice architecture'. Showing people how much energy they are consuming compared with their neighbours can reduce energy use. It also helps to put a smiley face on the bills of those consuming less than the average and a sad face on those consuming more. There's something slightly absurd and infantalising about such strategies, but Thaler and Sunstein have good data to support their claim that 'everything matters' when it comes to choice environments.

Some of Thaler and Sunstein's examples of choice architecture are trivial and can be used to trivialise their argument. One policy problem used to exemplify the approach is the failure of men to pee into urinals with precision. The bosses at Amsterdam's Schiphol airport, fed up with urine all over their floors, painted black flies in the centre of the urinals. By giving men something to aim at, accuracy was dramatically improved.

Nudge remains true to its promise to preserve freedom of choice, hence the apparently oxymoronic description of its authors' approach as libertarian paternalism, but it is unashamedly interventionist in framing those choices. This is not libertarian by any sensible use of that term and actually not even very liberal. The most honest description offered by the authors of their approach is 'a relatively weak, soft and non-intrusive type of paternalism'.

A strictly liberal approach to pensions would require people actively to choose to opt in. Liberals know that people are very often their own worst enemy, but, unlike nudgers, they do not feel compelled to intervene and act as peacemaker. Yet thoughtful liberals, unlike libertarians, will always be open to persuasion away from a purist application of their principles and Nudge offers a persuasive argument in policy areas like pensions and credit card regulation.

It is harder to go along with the nudgers' enthusiasm to act in other areas where people foul up. Thaler and Sunstein float the idea of a mandatory waiting period before allowing people to marry, an indication, I think, that their paternalism runs a little deeper than they protest. Some people will indeed have too many mojitos and get married in a drunken haze in Vegas and then regret it. It is hard to see why this is any business of the state. Our frailties may often be irrational, but they remain ours.

These are fairly minor quibbles. Nudge distils a scholarly and timely argument into a highly accessible book. There's definitely a publishing opportunity with these single-word theses. I am going to write a book called Wink: How Small Signals Transmit Big Messages. It's a winner; I can feel it. Except I can't be bothered. I need a nudge. Or maybe a smack.

When talent is a luxury

Wed, 6 Aug 2008 -1:00:00 GMT

Management today - 1st August 2008

Having developed a nurturing culture in the way they treat personnel, are HR departments finding it hard to frame the best strategy for their firm?

This October, the luminaries of the HR world will make their annual pilgrimage to Harrogate for the main conference of the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD). The northern spa town has been the mecca for human resources bods for six decades, and for three days the town will be filled with the usual earnest crowd discussing talent, recruitment and leadership.

But this is the last year attendees will be able to curse the appalling train connections and decaying hotels of Harrogate. In 2009, the CIPD is moving its festival of empowerment to Manchester. The elite divisions of HR are dropping the doilies and cream teas for the hip cafes and bars of Canal Street. It's a sign that the CIPD, and HR generally, might be entering the 21st century.

The CIPD's brand has been that of an organisation that is - how to put this politely? - spine- crackingly dull. It is like John Lewis or the WI: full of fantastically well-meaning, nice people attending to the needs of the HR community and being ignored by pretty much everyone else.

But the CIPD has a new chief executive in the shape of Jackie Orme, formerly HR director for PepsiCo UK. The organisation has avoided the temptation to go for one of the 'great and good', appointing instead someone who has led the HR function in a fast-moving consumer goods firm known for its tough, no-waste culture. She is bright, businesslike and articulate, and will soon be a powerful new voice and face for the organisation. (I worked as a consultant to Ms Orme a few years ago: nobody has made me work harder for my fees, nor earned my respect more quickly.)

The CIPD has also launched a new series of publications - with the excellent general label of 'Futures' - intended to be a forward look at the 'people' dimension of the challenges facing the business community. Unfortunately, the first issue, Leading Through Uncertain Times (available free from www.cipd.co.uk/futures), is a failure. With a few exceptions, the contributions from both CIPD insiders and external practitioners are a mish-mash of old platitudes about the importance of investing in people, the need for strong leadership and the benefits of engaging with staff. Linda Holbeche, director of research and policy at the institute, catches the reader's attention with 'Let me state my position clearly'. OK, prepare for some fireworks. 'I believe that leader- ship is going to be crucial if organisations are going to survive the downturn and even thrive.' I suppose it is clear, but it is a numbing cliche.

One of the external contributors, Neil Roden, head of HR at the Royal Bank of Scotland, urges readers to 'excel in leadership and management capability', 'drive engagement in people', 'actively manage talent', 'work collaboratively' and - no, please, don't say it - 'align HR and business strategy'. The HR community has been banging on about aligning HR and business strategy for at least two decades. But if people are the vital accelerator of business success, then the business strategy itself should contain the investments in people required for success. If HR strategy is seen as separate from the main business strategy, no amount of aligning will save it. If the series keeps up like this, they should rename it 'Histories'.

Perhaps I'm being harsh. So I should declare another interest: I used to be director of a Futures division at what is now the Work Foundation, a quasi-competitor of the institute. I believe the CIPD has a chance to lead a vital debate about the future of work and business. It has yet to seize it.

The strongest theme running through Leading Through Uncertain Times is a call on business leaders not to react to the economic slowdown by shedding staff. Holbeche argues that firms that chopped headcount in the recession of the early 1990s lost valuable intellectual capital, as well as the loyalty and commitment of remaining staff. Jeffrey Pfeffer of Stanford University warns that dismissed staff are often snapped up by longer-sighted competitors. John Philpott, the CIPD's chief economist, points out the cost of replacing staff and urges 'avoiding the self-inflicted wound of letting people go', then broadens his appeal to the conscience of bosses: 'Add to all this the fact that rising unemployment can itself reinforce a weak macro-economic situation by dampening consumer confidence and further depressing the housing market, and the merit of holding on to workers for as long as possible becomes crystal clear.'

It's striking that whereas all the CIPD contributors issue 'Don't lay off your staff!' warnings, the external writers or interviewees are silent on this issue. Perhaps they know it's not as easy as all that. It's true that many firms, in a panic-stricken state, lay people off too quickly. But the thing about people being your most important asset is that they are often also the most expensive asset - which means that if costs have to be cut in response to falling demand, people are likely to have to go.

Most successful business leaders know their people are vitally important. But they fear that HR professionals too often confuse the general message that human capital should be guarded and maximised with a specific belief that it is wrong to sack people or make redundancies.

The HR community will secure the ear of business leaders only if it stops sounding like a lobby group for the workforce. That is what trade unions are for. As for the CIPD, it now has a new conference home, a new publications stream and a new boss. All it needs is some new ideas.

The value of a self-governed life

Mon, 14 Jul 2008 -1:00:00 GMT

The Guardian - 20th Novemeber 2007

John Stuart Mill's On Liberty demonstrates that freedom is not a right – it is a choice

"The only freedom which deserves the name," according to John Stuart Mill, "is that of pursuing our own good in our own way". The sentence appears in surely the most famous book on the subject of liberty, On Liberty, published in 1859. For Mill, liberty (or freedom – he used the terms interchangeably) was the supreme political and ethical value because each of us is the expert on what makes for a good life for ourselves.

For Mill, there was no "natural right" to liberty; he agreed with the description by his secular godfather Jeremy Bentham of natural rights as "nonsense on stilts". Liberals could not avoid political argument by recourse to some essential, unchanging element in human nature. Mill would have supported human rights as devices for protecting certain key ingredients for a fully autonomous life; but for him these "rights" could only ever be means to an end, rather than an end in themselves.

The big idea of On Liberty is the supreme value of a self-governed life. He wanted us to lead our lives from within, asking: "What do I prefer? or, what would suit my character and disposition? or, what would allows the best and highest in me to have fair play, and enable it to grow and thrive?"

Mill's idea of liberty requires freedom of opinion, expression and lifestyle in order to produce the broadest possible palette of ways of life for us to choose from. The state should not impose a single view of the best way to live – for Mill, the idea of a centrally imposed national curriculum was horrifying. Equality before the law, and rights to fair trial were important precisely because they allowed people to live the way they chose, even if eccentric or even disgusting to the majority, so long as they did not actively harm others in so doing.

For Mill, liberty could therefore be threatened as easily by peer pressure, majority opinion and social intolerance, together creating "a social tyranny more formidable than many kinds of political oppression". The state could coerce and oppress: but so could the citizenry. Society could "issue its own mandates" and when it did it left "fewer means of escape, penetrating much more deeply into the details of life, and enslaving the soul itself. Protection, therefore, against the tyranny of the magistrate is not enough: there needs also protection against the tyranny of the prevailing opinion and feeling."

Mill's version of liberty is not a piece of historical abstraction or arcane legalism. Liberty is the vital foundation stone for free, flourishing lives, ones that are free from the mercy of others. Liberty is not a right: it is a way of life

Cameronism

Mon, 14 Jul 2008 -1:00:00 GMT

New Statesman - 20th June 2008

The Tory leader has done a brilliant job rebranding the "nasty party", but he has yet to come up with a coherent political philosophy - or anything especially new. Richard Reeves on the continuing Conservative makeover

David Cameron, plus a sizeable entourage, swept past, drawing the attention of the senior Labour politician (now a cabinet minister) from our conversation. It was November 2005, and the self-styled "modern compassionate conservative" was on course to lead the Conservative Party. "Does he worry you?" I asked my lunch companion. "A bit, to be honest," was the reply. "But he's fantastically right-wing, you know. You should read some of his old speeches."

I did. And they were, indeed, a deep shade of blue. The trouble is that the electorate was apparently unwilling to make the same effort. Lab our's attempts to portray Cameron as a right-wing wolf in woolly compassionate clothing failed in the face of his determined rebranding of his party. A Tory leader who praised gay couples to his own party conference - as Cameron did in 2006 - was hard to paint as a reactionary.

The other principal line of attack against Cameron - that he is a toff, out of touch with real people - has also foundered. The prospect of a prime minister and mayor of London who are old chums from Eton and the Bullingdon Club at Oxford may stick in Labour throats, but it doesn't seem to bother the electorate.

If Labour politicians were a bit worried in 2005, they are terrified now. Unless there is a significant change in the political weather, Cameron is set to be prime minister within two years. For a long time, Labour refused to believe that Cameron was executing a brilliant strategy to return the Tories to office by reshaping Con servatism. Cameronism is real - as real as new Labour, or the Third Way - and is likely to be the guiding light of the next government.

As a political strategy, Cameronism represents a largely successful attempt to detoxify the Tory brand. Andrew Cooper, the Tory modernisers' favourite polling guru, spent years presenting evidence to party elders showing that people supported various Conservative policies - until they were told they were Conservative policies. Cameron was the first leader to understand this. The first two years of his leadership was like a sorbet between courses, intended to cleanse the electorate's palate of late Thatcherism. It consisted of a relentless marketing exercise to dem onstrate that Cameron was, variously, a "compassionate", "modern", "liberal", "centre-right", "practical" Conservative: and that he was leading his party in the same direction. At his boldest, Cameron has claimed himself as the true "heir to Blair". He and colleagues such as Oliver Letwin now audaciously claim to be pursuing "progressive ends by conservative means".

Now the bitter taste is gone, tougher policies on welfare, immigration and public services can be pursued without being dismissed as typical products of the "nasty party". Cameron was perhaps a little more explicit than he intended when he said last year: "We've prepared the ground by moving to the centre."

The success of Cameron's rebranding campaign, and his heavy reliance on Steve Hilton, a brilliant marketeer, has led a few Tories to dismiss him as nothing more than a pre-packaged, ideologically vacant product. A former minister, George Walden, has written that, in calibrating his position, Cameron asks himself: "What would Diana have done?"

Cameronism is certainly not an ide o logy, nor even - yet - a coherent political philosophy. Cameron himself, in his 2005 Keith Joseph Memorial Lecture, explicitly rejected "ideological" politics in favour of "practical Conservatism". But the broad contours of his thinking, and that of the bright politicians and advisers around him, are now visible. Cameron ism displays certain features: it emphasises the pragma tic over the theoretical; takes an essentially optimistic view of human nature; favours the devolution, rather than centralisation, of power; stresses social, rather than economic progress; and places more faith in society than in the state.

When he was studying philosophy, politics and economics at Oxford, Cameron was enamoured of the Scottish Enlightenment philosopher David Hume. "After David Hume, he loved the free market and Thatcher," recalled his old friend James Fergusson. "He thinks exactly like Hume - he's a complete sceptic . . . it's all about throwing out dogma and starting from scratch." Cameron's view of human nature also appears to draw on Hume's conviction that, in affluent nations, progress would come from the growth of both knowledge and "humanity", by which he meant the "fellow feeling" necessary for "civilisation". While Thomas Hobbes believed the state was a necessary buffer between self- interested individuals engaged in a "war of all against all", Hume thought that, in the right conditions, people would willingly act in concert, for the greater good. Cameron said in 2007: "What builds society, what encourages civility, is people taking responsibility. Putting each other before themselves." Cameron is Humean, rather than Hobbesian.

Social recession

It is this essential optimism, that individuals and communities can usually organise their lives more successfully than any government, which underpins Cameron's rhetorical commitment to move power from central to local government and give users more power over the manner in which public services are provided. It remains to be seen whether he will be as much of a localiser in power, but the Tories now support directly elected mayors, a shift towards more locally based taxation, and much more choice over schools and hospitals. Cameron is honest about the fact that Thatcher's governments started the centralising trend long before Blair and Brown arrived on the scene, but defends her on the decidedly weak grounds that many councils had fallen into the hands of the "loony left".

But Cameronism diverges most sharply from Thatcherism with its focus on social, rather than economic, matters. Cam eron and his lieutenants argue that the nation is in a "social recession" and that "it's the society, stupid". One of Cam eron's mantras, a deliberate wedge between himself and Thatcher, is that "there is such a thing as society. It's just not the same thing as the state."

In a speech in May this year, widely reported for its revival of the Thatcherite drive for "good housekeeping", Cameron remained clear about his overall objective. "All this supports the overriding mission we have set for ourselves: to revive our society, just as Margaret Thatcher revived our economy; to reverse Britain's social breakdown, just as she reversed our economic breakdown," he said. "We want to respond to what should be a new post-bureaucratic age, by decentralising power, by giving people more opportunity and control over their lives, by making families stronger and society more responsible."

This paragraph is the best summary of Cameronism that Cameron himself has yet articulated. All the work on family breakdown, poverty, education and antisocial behaviour fits into the basic Cameron analysis: society is broken, and the state cannot put it back together again. "The big question," Cam eron suggests, borrowing heavily from JFK, "is not what will government do - but what will society do? Not so much what will I do - but what will you do? And what will we do together?"

This is all coherent and plausible, but it is neither especially new nor particularly Conservative. The Social Justice Commission, established by John Smith, and reporting in 1994, argued that "what central government can do for people is limited, but there is no limit to what people and communities can be enabled to do for themselves". Of course, the differences between political parties are often overstated, but nonetheless it is difficult to cope with the level of political disorientation caused by Cameronism. Consider this statement by Oliver Letwin: "We have put on the agenda issues of well-being, quality of life and social breakdown that Labour has ignored. These are central contemporary challenges - but Labour's focus on markets and economic value at the expense of all other concerns, their obsession with . . . notions of private sector 'efficiency', have rendered Labour incapable of addressing them." There is no way a shadow Labour minister would have dared write such socialist heresies in 1995.

Cameronism is, however, starchly critical of state initiatives to solve underlying social problems, lambasting Labour for nationalising social problems. Cameron has been much mocked for encouraging us to "hug a hoodie" (although it was an Observer subeditor who coined the phrase). "There are two ways you can try to make those kids behave better," the Conservative leader told a conference at the RSA last year. "You can put a policeman on every bus, an Asbo on every teenager and a parenting order on every parent . . . Alter natively, you can build a society where those kids know how to behave in public, because that's how they've been brought up and that's what society expects."

OK, Dave, that sounds great. Nobody can sensibly argue against a more socially responsible, civilised society. Labour would love to be able to cut the law-and-order budget following an outbreak of Humean humanity. But how - given that you, mostly correctly, suggest that the state can't do it - are you going to lead us to this Brave Responsible World? Cameron says: "We can actively build the responsible society we need by creating a framework of incentives that encourages civility and pro-social behaviour."

But - and this is the big question for Cameron - can we really? There is more than a hint here, in the philosopher Jon Elster's phrase, of "willing that which cannot be willed". Cameron wants to "roll forward society", but it is not yet clear how this is to be achieved.

Unthinking anti-statism

Indeed, Cameron verges on hypocrisy on the issue of state action. He has set up the Young Adult Trust, a charity that he says is "working in partnership with many of Britain's leading youth organisations, to develop plans for a national programme for all 16-year-olds that helps teach them the responsibilities of adulthood". A national programme to teach adulthood? If Ed Balls had announced it, the Tories would be turning it into a piece of "nanny state gone mad" propaganda. Cameron is quite right that Labour is very often guilty of a knee-jerk statism, but he is equally at risk of following an unthinking anti-statism.

Cameronism will only be a new political movement if it can get past the defunct "pro-state" versus "anti-state" divide. More thoughtful Conservative modernisers have already got to the properly liberal attitude towards the state, which is an agnostic one. "The purpose of reform and reducing demand for government services is not tax reduction - that is a (welcome and necessary) by-product," writes Danny Finkelstein, a Times columnist and influential Tory thinker. "The purpose is to change the relationship between citizens and the state, to build a stronger society and to improve the quality of things like health and education."

The Cameron critique of the state is very often that it simply isn't working properly. Take the issue of family breakdown, which the Cam eronites say is a major cause of a range of other social ills: this is true. What, then, is to be done? A tax break for marriage is mostly a symbolic measure, as Cameron himself has come close to admitting. The Conservatives have looked hard at the stress points for families and proposed policies to offer some relief. The birth of a child is one pressure point, so the Tories are advocating the provision of a dedicated maternity nurse for every new family, for up to six hours a day, similar to a Dutch scheme. The difficulty of combining work with childcare is another strain, so the Conservatives want a new law giving all parents the right to request part-time work. These are welcome measures: but it does seem as if it is the state, rather than society, that is rolling forward here.

It is clear that some of Cameron's anti-state rhetoric is designed to help the Conservatives paint Gordon Brown and his allies as statist, centralising meddlers - a task made easier by the fact that they often are. But the truth is that, in many areas, the Conservatives want to improve the state, rather than shrink it. And it might be as well to start saying so.

Yet there are many areas, such as antisocial behaviour, individual health and local governance, where Cameronism represents a genuine stepping back of the state, in the optimistic hope that "society" will fill the gap. This is the genuine radicalism of Cameronism, and also the greatest paradox about the man himself. Even before becoming PM, he is making a compelling argument for his own powerlessness at the head of the next government: real power lies in society. If elected, Cameron will be the first prime minister from Britain's ruling class for half a century - but one who proudly claims not to be able to rule.

Lapses into laddishness

Tue, 3 Jun 2008 -1:00:00 GMT

Management Today - 1st June 2008

A sales executive takes a picture of a female colleague to show to a new client. A worker in an open-plan office selects a screensaver from Nuts magazine. A senior manager requests a new PA who is 'blonde and busty' This is all done in the right spirit, you understand. It's not serious. It's harmless banter. A bit of a laugh. In these post-feminist times, most women are surely cool about it? Similarly, entertaining a client in a lap-dancing club is fine, so long as everyone sees the post-modern, pole-dancing irony. Come on, loosen up, why don't you?

This is the modern battleground for gender equality. Women no longer face high legal or structural barriers to career success, but instead face a culture of sexism fuelled by a climate of sexualisation. The net result of the behaviour described above is a climate in which women often face the choice between being demeaned as a sex object or dismissed as a prude. It represents - to borrow a phrase from the economist Thomas Schelling - a tyranny of small decisions.

The Fawcett Society, which campaigns for women's rights, collected the examples cited above for its recent 'Sexism and the City' campaign. It is leading the fight against what it sees as an insidious trend. 'Post-feminism is an oxymoron,' says campaigns officer Kat Banyard. 'We still need feminism. Women are still paid less than men at every level of society. But what's really new is the level of sexual objectification taking place - lapdancing clubs are the most blatant expression of a deep problem.'

Research by Lynda Gratton at the London Business School suggests that women's career chances improve once about 40% of senior managers are female. There are various possible explanations for this finding: women may be more likely to hire and promote women than men; successful women may act as role models and/or mentors to up-and-coming women; policies on flexible working and parental leave may improve. But it may also be that having enough women near the top changes the day-to-day interactions between employees, the thick of everyday life.

Without enough senior women, the sexist variants of what some sociologists have dubbed 'micro-behaviours' - a little joke here, a wolf-whistle there - might accumulate into a female-hostile environment. This cultural sexism also reinforces stereotypes about what women 'should' be like - usually sexy and submissive.

It has long been recognised that one of the reasons women don't get pay rises and promotions in line with their male peers is that they don't ask for them as often. But there may be a good reason for this reluctance. Research by Hannah Riley Bowles, associate professor of public policy at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, shows that women who ask for more are viewed as grasping and selfish, contrary to the selfless persona expected, while men displaying precisely the same behaviour are seen as confident and successful.

'This isn't about fixing the women,' Bowles says. 'It isn't about telling women: "You need self-confidence or training." They are responding to incentives within the social environment.' Women are caught between meeting the expectations created by a culture of sexism and being marginalised, or rebelling against it and risking ridicule. No wonder so many opt out altogether.

There are two main difficulties with tackling sexist corporate climates. The first is to distinguish harmless social interaction between the sexes from harmful micro-behaviours that contribute to an inhospitable culture. Context is often vital; an elderly welder gently asking 'would you like a cup of tea, love?' is perhaps not to be found guilty of crimes against feminism; but a laddish trader doing the same with dripping sarcasm may be. How to act against the latter without crazily pursuing the former? This is difficult territory for any line manager, but who said being a manager was easy? Perhaps the most important task is to regularly seek honest intelligence from women about the culture of the firm, making it clear that no incident is too trivial to raise.

The second challenge is that many of the incidents, taken on their own, seem too minor to warrant disciplinary action. But if firms are serious about equality, there is no choice but to come down hard on offenders, not least as an example. Pour encourager les autres, as Voltaire's Candide innocently remarked. Above all, if a company has a clear policy on specific behaviours, it must enforce it. It's no good having a rule against downloading porn or using sexist swearwords if an offender is then let off lightly because they're a brilliant salesperson.

Above all, this new front in the sex wars requires that the hearts and minds of both sexes be won. The single most shocking finding in the Ipsos Mori survey accompanying the Fawcett Society's manifesto was that 48% of men and 41% of women think it is 'acceptable for businesses to use lapdance clubs as venues for entertaining clients'. This is incredible. Who are these people? It is one thing to accept people's freedom to visit lap-dancing clubs in a private capacity and another to endorse company-funded trips that either exclude women or put them in a horrible position.

The most powerful argument for affirmative action on behalf of women in the workplace is to save a culture from regressing into laddishness, with all its 'harmless' innuendo and banter. Until women are pulling the corporate strings, they are in danger of being condemned to their G-strings.

Liberalise or die

Mon, 2 Jun 2008 -1:00:00 GMT

In the drama of British politics, a Labour tragedy is unfolding. A combination of strategic errors, political mishaps and bad luck has left the party in a vulnerable position. The economy is turning soft and the electorate sour. The focus, at the moment, is on the lead characters—Gordon Brown and David Cameron—rather than the stories they are telling. Of course they matter. Leadership is about character. But Labour's woes do not flow simply from weak leadership and poor politics.

Labour is failing to win—or even to grasp—the big political argument: how to ensure people are in control of their own lives. The government has tested, often to destruction, the idea that a bigger, higher-spending state can deliver a better society. It has enjoyed some success in rehabilitating the idea of the state as an enabler. But Labour has reached the limits of what can be achieved through central-state diktat, and is running out of money.

For New Labour to survive, it must become new liberal. The key dividing line in politics is no longer between left and right, but, increasingly, between liberal and authoritarian. The Labour government too often finds itself on the wrong side of this divide. One of the lessons Labour ought to have learned from 11 years in charge of the state is to be humble about the limits of that power. Another lesson is that the demands of individuals for more say in how public services are provided and delivered are growing stronger.

Labour is being left behind. The governing elites of the Conservative and Liberal Democrat parties have got the point—and may be planning to prove it together in government. Nick Clegg is more liberal than social democrat. David Cameron is right when he talks about the "post-bureaucratic age." (Although neither has yet developed a full programme, and both are hampered, to an unknown extent, by the parties they have to carry with them.)

There are shards of new liberalism in Labour's programme, some of which were in evidence in the recent Queen's speech preview. The government may extend the idea of individual budgets from social care to health care. And there are some steps, albeit small ones, to give more power to social tenants.

But, in general, Brown and his allies retain a benign view of the power of the central, expert state to build a fairer, better society. The government genuinely seems to believe that "Britishness" can be legislated for. It has a tin ear on civil liberties. The plans for regulating new casinos include a ban on paying by credit card. Ed Balls, the secretary of state for children and families, wants a national play strategy.

Such gestures remind us that Labour's faith in central government draws from the deep, poisoned well of its Fabian tradition. Leonard Hobhouse, the foremost new liberal theorist at the beginning of the last century, recognised early the dangers of the Fabian brand of "mechanical socialism," which was inclined to "applaud the running of the machine merely because it is a machine and is being run."

Labour has too often fallen into this trap: a list of the institutions created and abolished since 1997 represents a significant amount of "machine" money spent to little effect. Labour politicians too often see a social problem—obesity, children at risk on the internet or declining interest in high culture—and make two assumptions: first, that the problem is amenable to a policy solution; and second, that this solution ought to involve the establishment of a council, commission or task force. But many of the issues facing modern society are too complex and too cultural for such a wooden approach.

It needn't be like this. Labour is heir to another tradition too. Radical liberals, seeking to provide the conditions for people to live flourishing lives of their own choosing, drove many of the social advances of the 20th century. "New" liberals such as Hobhouse, John Hobson and Lloyd George recognised that the state had a role to play in creating these conditions, and that Gladstone's laissez-faire liberalism was defunct.

The break between Gladstonianism and new liberalism was the recognition that freedom was made, not born: that barriers to liberty, such as sickness and poverty, could be huge. A late-19th century editorial in the Progressive Review declared that liberals "must… assign a new meaning to liberty: it must no longer signify the absence of restraint, but the presence of opportunity."

But new liberals have also been wary of the dangers of the central state drawing power to itself. There are often good reasons why power should be collectively exercised through the state. The point is that this should be the exception rather than the rule. Unless there are strong arguments to the contrary, power should reside with individuals. The historian GDH Cole called this strand of thinking in Labour's theory "federalism"—which he contrasted to the dominant strain of "centralism." The Clause IV of 1918 was a centraliser's charter. The Clause IV of 1994 was a federalist work.

David Miliband has recently suggested that the future for the British left lies in a marriage of these two traditions. A nice thought, but the two traditions lead to quite different places: for example, on public service reform, the environment and taxation.

A new liberal starting point for the way public services such as health and education are organised is that the individual should be in charge. Politicians often say this; but they rarely mean it. The NHS is a great social democratic monument. But the truth is that it can only survive through the use of liberal principles. The range of medical treatments is too large, the population too old and their expectations too great for the NHS simply to carry on as it is. As healthcare becomes increasingly about chronic care, control over funding and treatment has to pass from the profession to the individual. This will make the care people receive more appropriate and more cost-efficient, while institutions will join up, finally, around the patient. Passing control to individuals means they can spend their NHS entitlement on double glazing if they think it a better treatment for their asthma. Such a service is designed to produce good outcomes, because individuals are granted as much control as possible.

New liberals also part company from New Labour on the environment. They back strong state intervention, in the form of more aggressive "cap and trade" systems, as John McCain wants, but also tighter regulation of and higher taxation on emissions. This level of intervention is not only permissible on liberal principles, but is required by them. Liberals have always insisted that actions become subject to legal sanctions if they harm others. It is now irrefutable that the emission of greenhouse gases, mostly by rich nations, is causing climatic changes which will harm those in the low-lying, equatorial nations, which are mostly poor: a clear form of "passive killing."

Labour has just abandoned plans to give each person a tradable carbon allowance on the grounds that the idea is "ahead of its time" and would cost too much to implement. Of course the politics of the environment are hugely difficult. And the call for more action is not a liberal monopoly: many social democrats, especially on the continent, back a greener position than Labour. The point is simply that new liberals, bound by the harm principle, can clearly see the case for radical change.

There is no advantage in fiddling with the tax system for short-term political gain. But the government urgently needs a clear direction of travel and a real argument about the moral and philosophical basis for taxation. A new liberal fiscal policy would be based on two clear principles. First, tax "bads" (like carbon) not "goods" (like work). Second, tax "unearned" rather than "earned" income. The distinction between earned and unearned was developed by new liberal theorists such as Hobhouse and Hobson and brilliantly politicised by Lloyd George in his "people's budget" of 1909.

The application of the principle raises a whole host of questions, of which the most difficult concerns the degree to which wage inequalities represent real differences in "earnings." Has the hedge fund manager "earned" his £100m?
Nonetheless, the broad implications are clear. The riches flowing from inheritance or soaring house values should be taxed more heavily than at present. While people should be able to take some increase in the value of their house free of tax—up to, for example, what they could have received from a risk-free investment like a gilt—anything above that should be subject to substantial taxation. On the other hand, income in the form of wages, especially at the bottom of the pile, should be taxed as lightly as possible, if at all. But new liberals worry about the 40p tax band too, which now kicks in far too low. Liberals instinctively dislike income tax; Fabians will always see income—especially high income—as ripe for state confiscation.

Labour has been in thrall to the Fabian branch of its history for decades, even as its purchase on the world has loosened. It is telling that there has been no big work of social democratic theory since Crosland's The Future of Socialism in 1956. Labour's future, after three terms, looks bleak. The only hope for the party is to excavate its liberal treasure. The choice is stark: liberalise or die.

Splitting the vote

Thu, 1 May 2008 -1:00:00 GMT

The Guardian - 28th April 2008

London elections 08: We need a progressive metropolitan alliance of greens, liberals and social democrats.

It has become a staple of political commentary that Gordon Brown's fate is now entwined with that of his old enemy, Ken Livingstone. But this presumed "political spillover" effect is based on an outdated view about the allegiance of voters to particular party labels. Livingstone is now the official Labour candidate, but Londoners remember that the first time round he won as an independent, defeating the Labour candidate, Frank Dobson.

For most voters, Ken is seen as Ken, rather than as a representative of the Labour Party. Similarly, Brian Paddick has been a Liberal Democrat for less than two years and in many areas, especially the environment, significantly deviates from the party line. Party labels sit uncomfortably on the lapels of both men. Meanwhile the Green Party, represented by Sian Berry, can do little more than take first-preference votes from Livingstone and hope for a lucky third place. Only Boris Johnson - a shadow minister for and intimate of David Cameron - is a clear flagbearer for a national party.

If he wins, it ought to prompt some soul-searching among the progressive-minded about the dissipation of their energies. Even under a transferable vote system, the splitting of votes between greens, liberals and social democrats is insane. Before future London elections, let's hope the politicians learn some history. In the early years of the London County Council, between 1889 and 1907, the dominant political grouping was the Progressive Party, a loose bunch of liberals, Fabians and trade unionists.

The first leader of the council was the Earl of Rosebery, who would later become Liberal prime minister, but the ruling progressives also counted the technocratic Fabians, Sidney Webb and Graham Wallas, as well as the firebrand leader of the dockers' union, Ben Tillett, among their number. Another Progressive Party councillor, representing East Finsbury from 1889 to 1822, was John Benn, great-grandfather of Hilary Benn, the current Labour secretary of state for the environment.

Those who stood under the Progressive Party banner in London were perfectly free to stand as liberals or Independent Labour Party members, for parliamentary seats. (It would perhaps have been better if the idea of a Progressive Party had gained purchase in Westminster, but that's another story.)

The "progressives" didn't agree about everything - not all of them supported the dock strike in 1889, for instance - but they shared a broad view that municipal government needed to exercise more power over transport, sanitation and education in order to make London healthier and safer. They were all, in this sense, "municipal socialists". The London-based Progressive Party had close links to the Liberal Party nationally, but was the broader church required to achieve electoral success in the capital. It was a metropolitan political response to the metropolitan political scene.

Livingstone has done a deal with the Green candidate, Sian Berry, to urge their supporters to give their second preference votes to the other; he has also made a bid for Paddick's supporters by suggesting he would give the former policeman a job in his administration. All this deal-making may be too little, too late.

If BoJo becomes mayor, one silver lining might be a belated recognition of the fatal error of trying to squeeze London politics into outdated, national party structures. A progressive metropolitan alliance of greens, liberals and social democrats would have swept its leader to power. It is too late this time around, but London needs to break free of the Westminster tribal system. The London School of Economics has a fine collection of Progressive Party banners. They are a century old, but ready for unfurling.

A lifetime of questing and questioning

Thu, 1 May 2008 -1:00:00 GMT

Nesta 28th April 2008

"I love to learn", said Oscar Wilde, "I just can't bear to be taught". Wilde, then, is a model student for the 21st century. With the shelf-life of professional knowledge falling, it is clear that the most important skill will be the capacity to abandon old skills and embrace new ones. Learning, rather than being taught, is the future. Click here to read the full article.

Click here for the associated blog

Make the Lords history

Thu, 24 Apr 2008 -1:00:00 GMT

The Guardian - 24th April 2008

Make the Lords history

The upper house should be reformed - into an ornamental thing, with Commons power boosted

The 10p tax-band rebellion has made a drama out of a crisis. Parliamentarians are simply doing what they should (but so often fail to do): hold the government to account. It demonstrates that the Commons can still bite. But it also shows that it needs more teeth. If the Commons was taken more seriously, Labour wouldn't be in this mess. The Treasury select committee's report on the 2007 budget included a clear warning about the 10p band abolition. Robert Chote, director of the Institute for Fiscal Studies, gave evidence indicating trouble ahead. Who was listening?

Rather than trying to modernise the Lords, Gordon Brown should be boosting the power of the Commons. Sadly, our major parties remain wedded to bicameralism. Norway is preparing to ditch its upper house next year, but no British political party queried our need for one. Even the excellent Power inquiry did not address the issue. The government is now planning a reform package likely to include election by proportional representation, payment and long parliamentary terms for the new Lords-Senators.

It is a sign of how timid our politics has become over the past century; during the constitutional struggle between the Commons and the Lords leading up to the Parliament Act of 1911, Liberal politicians such as John Robertson MP, a member of the Rainbow Circle - a sort of Lib-Lab dining club - were urging a single chamber solution. In a pungent 1911 essay, Robertson quoted the (then) well-known challenge to bicameralism from Emmanuel Sieyès, the French revolutionary priest: "If a second chamber dissents from the first, it is mischievous; if it agrees with it, it is superfluous."

The result of the 1911 conflict was an unsatisfactory victory. Thenceforth, the Lords could delay legislation for two years, so long as it did not concern finance; in 1949, the Labour government reduced the delaying period to one year. The distinction between finance and non-finance bills was advocated by the Liberal government to ensure that its welfare reform measures could no longer be strangled by the Lords. But a situation in which the Lords can block legislation so long as it does not concern money is ludicrous. Taxation and spending go to the very heart of the political and democratic process. If the Lords can't stop money bills, what's the point of them?

Making the Lords democratic seems, on the face of it, to be a wholly progressive position. But, in fact, it betrays a lack of faith in democracy. The only sensible argument for an upper chamber is that it can provide a check against "democratic excess". This was the explicit argument made by the framers of the US constitution. When Thomas Jefferson asked George Washington why America needed a Senate, he asked in return: "Why did you pour your tea into that saucer?" To Jefferson's answer - "to cool it" - Washington responded: "Just so. We pour House legislation into the senatorial saucer to cool it."

The question is which particular legislation passed by an effective, democratic, representative assembly would need "cooling". The answer seems to be that which a particular group opposes at a particular moment in time. Right now, liberals are grateful to the Lords for resisting some of the more illiberal elements of the government's anti-terror legislation, just as the hunting lobby were grateful for the Lords' attempted veto of the hunting ban in 2003. In the 50s and 60s, American racists were similarly grateful to the Senate for stymieing civil rights laws. Upper houses can always find allies among the opponents of the measures currently being pursued by the lower house; but this is an unworthy argument for their continuance.

The Commons, as currently organised, is a poor proxy for a democratic assembly. It should be elected by proportional representation; its committees ought to be given much more bite, including confirmatory powers over ministerial and other significant public appointments; and parliament must have more power to initiate legislation. But if democracy needs "checks and balances", these should be built into the principal democratic body, not bolted on to it.

We probably don't need to abolish the Lords, any more than the monarchy. It can just be permitted to wither away as a constitutional force, with its delaying powers withdrawn bit by bit. This process would result in the Lords, like the crown, becoming an ornamental rather than instrumental part of our constitution. The Commons simply needs to muster its courage, for - as Robertson pointed out - "the self-styled Mother of Parliaments is afraid of the single life".

The upper house should be reformed - into an ornamental thing, with Commons power boosted

A week to remember?

Thu, 17 Apr 2008 -1:00:00 GMT

New Statesman - 17th April 2008

Faced with an almost unprecedented drop in popularity, some in the Labour Party are starting to think the unthinkable: what would follow election defeat?

So, how bad is it for Gordon Brown? The polls are obviously terrible, with one showing the biggest drop in a prime minister's approval rating since 1940, when Neville Chamberlain lost the nation's confidence after the German invasion of Norway. Since the March Budget the Conservatives have consistently polled above the 40 per cent mark needed to win power. In YouGov's latest respected snapshot, Labour was trailing 16 points behind the Tories, who scored 43 per cent - their most popular rating since before Black Wednesday. The voters, who gave Gordon Brown the benefit of considerable doubt when he took over, seem to have turned away.

The commentariat, even some of the friendlier columnists, are coming to a similar conclusion. The Commons rebellion over 42-day detention without trial for terror suspects is growing. Anger about the abolition of the 10p tax band is rising. Most worrying of all is the effect on the nerve and discipline of the Parliamentary Labour Party. Graham Stringer MP explained that "it's sorrow, more than anger, with Gordon". Ian Gibson MP described his Prime Minister as being "a bit like a scared rabbit in the headlights". An unnamed former cabinet minister chose to sum up the position thus: "We're f***ed." Some MPs have switched from plotting against Blair to plotting against Brown with barely a pause for breath. The Prime Minister may be the architect of his own misfortune, but the spinelessness of his MPs is still shocking.

The loyal Hazel Blears took to the airwaves to defend the PM as "a pretty serious person who thinks very deeply about decisions and is also a man of conviction". Few would challenge the first claim: but if anything Brown has been hobbled by lack of confidence. The paradox is that he almost certainly does have a vision of a more communitarian, more equal nation. But if this is Brown's real agenda, he seems to have been persuaded that it would alienate voters. Having tucked away his own moral compass, he appears directionless. It is difficult for him to appear as the friend of business, following the capital gains tax reforms which - on the upside - seem poised to push Digby Jones out of government. Yet it has also become harder for Brown to be seen as a staunch ally of the poor after the 10p tax band blunder. He has tacked on public service reform, trimmed on tax and triangulated on China.

It is nonsense, however, to suggest that he will be replaced before the next general election. Things might yet get better. The snazzy new communications team might get a grip. The PLP might find their cojones. Anxious voters might begin to worry about handing power to the sixth-form prefect duo of George Osborne and David Cameron. The downturn might be shallower than feared, and Brown credited as the one who kept his head. There is always a fight to be had.

But the only hope for Brown is to be Brown. He should launch a passionate, outright campaign for a fairer and more democratic Britain; rein in the Blairite marketisation of public services; raise taxes on inheritance and high incomes to fund more aggressive redistribution; and introduce much tougher regulation for the financial markets. He needs to persuade the voters that an unashamedly social-democratic government is the only one that can really be On Your Side. Even if he loses, at least he will do so on his own terms.

Bad news, good news

The hard truth, however, is that everything now has to go right for Brown - and Brown has to get everything right - to save Labour's chances. "We have to be thinking about opposition now," admitted one level-headed senior adviser, indicating that the smart money is not on a fourth term. In this case, the party would also be electing a new leader.

The bad news is that there is no superstar candidate, no Blair or Clinton, waiting in Labour's next generation. The good news is that this means the next leader will have to set out a compelling direction for Labour and its path to reconnection with the British people. The most likely contest would be between David Miliband and Ed Balls. This would present the party with a real choice, not only between two very different personalities, but between two distinct philosophies.

Balls has declared himself, on these pages, to be uncomfortable with the label "social democrat", because it reminds him of the treacherous SDP. He prefers the term "socialist", he said: "Socialism, as represented by the Labour Party, the Fabian Society, the Co-operative movement, is a tradition I can be proud of." Balls is Fabian to his fingertips. He is the guardian of the government's pledge to abolish child poverty. He may not have said "So what?" in response to Conservative claims that Labour had ratcheted up the tax burden, but it is the sort of thing he might say. Balls is a passionate advocate of Sure Start and a national strategy for play. Confronted with evidence that poor children are more likely to suffer death or injury in the home, his Fabian instinct was to put £18m into a fund for domestic safety equipment for low-income families.

Miliband's nascent philosophy has a different starting point. As a backbencher, he told an audience in Berlin that Labour "needed to reach back into the history of progressive thought in Britain to develop a 'liberal socialism'" and he argued for not only "regeneration of local government", but a wider agenda that would "include issues of ownership and control of local public services". By 2005 he was suggesting "liberal social democracy" as an alternative label, but the import was the same: power should go to patients, parents, local citizens.

He has been a consistent, if cautious, advocate of greater devolution to local government and an enthusiast for citizen-focused public service reforms. In an article in the Times a fortnight ago, Miliband insisted that a "successful ideology for the 21st century" would be built on "two rich intellectual traditions": state-focused social democracy and the "radical liberal" tradition, whose "goal was the freedom and flourishing of the individual".

Balls the Fabian socialist wants to use central power for progressive ends; Miliband the radical liberal thinks those ends require the devolution of power. This critical battle, not yet joined, would be for the very soul of the Labour Party.

Martin Bright is away

Wonky women

Fri, 4 Apr 2008 -1:00:00 GMT

New Statesman - 03rd April 2008

The political agenda is increasingly being set by women from leading research organisations. Poorly represented in government, are they having a greater impact from outside?

"A brilliant woman is a plague," lamented Jean-Jacques Rousseau. "A plague to her husband, her children, her friends, her valet, everyone." Rous seau would not be happy if he cast his eye over the think tanks of the centre left today, as they are experiencing an epidemic of femininity.

So complete is the feminisation of progressive think-tank leadership that when Jennifer Moses, former head of the Liberal Democrat-leaning think tank CentreForum, was scooped into the new Downing Street talent pool last month, interest was sparked in her nationality (American), her party allegiance (non-Labour) and her Goldman Sachs-generated wealth (gigantic) - but not her gender. Meanwhile, Demos is run by Catherine Fieschi; the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR) is co-directed by Lisa Harker and Carey Oppenheim on a job-share basis; and the Social Market Foundation is run by Ann Rossiter. At least on the non-Tory side, all the top wonks are women.

This feminisation is, in part, a simple reflection of the general rise of women in public life. "Part of it is purely statistical," says Fieschi. "There are simply more women in public positions." But Fieschi, and others, think there may be more to it than that. These organisations are important ideas factories for progressive politics, but are also independent organisations at some distance from the dysfunctional, tribal, macho culture of Westminster and Downing Street. As such, they provide perfect platforms for women who want to make an impact on politics without having to play the boys' games.

"The kinds of demands that being a special adviser makes on your life are ones that women in particular might reject," suggests Oppenheim. "A think-tank role gives you more control over your time." Journalism and research organi sations also provide perches for high-profile women such as Polly Toynbee at the Guardian and Julia Unwin, director of the Joseph Rowntree Foundation.

"It is a cause for celebration to see women in these jobs," says Katherine Rake, director of the Fawcett Society, which campaigns for women's rights. "But if you look at Downing Street or even the cabinet, where the number of women has actually fallen, you see that governmental power remains mostly male."

Access to key government jobs still appears to require a Y chromosome. Moses will be one of the very few women in Gordon Brown's No 10, alongside Oona King, the former MP with the tough task of making the government more female-friendly.

The rise of the wonky women can also be seen as part of the evolution of the think tanks themselves. The principal progressive think tanks have been through three stages, suggests Fieschi. The first stage was a "blue-sky" period, when idealistic directors were encouraged to think boldly about a progressive future. James Cornford, the first director of IPPR, was an academic by background and a marvellous iconoclast. He cared little for what ministers, or shadow ministers, thought. But this was at a point when Labour had been out of power for three terms, and was keen to demonstrate that it was fizzing with ideas about how to make the nation better.

The second stage came in parallel with Lab our's terms in office. With the party securely in power, the priority for centre-left think tanks was to provide realistic, grounded, sensible policy advice. This technocratic era was unsurprisingly marked by a revolving-door relationship between the think tanks and the government. Geoff Mulgan, the founding head of Demos, went on to run the prime minister's Strategy Unit and then the No 10 Policy Unit; Phil Collins, a former director of the Social Market Foundation, became chief speechwriter to Tony Blair.

IPPR acted as a training college for Labour politicians and advisers. Patricia Hewitt, a former deputy director, became an MP and then cabinet minister. So did David Mili band. And James Purnell. Miliband was formerly Blair's head of policy, and that job was subsequently filled by Matthew Taylor, who had previously run IPPR. It is now held by Dan Corry, IPPR's former head of economics. Indeed, to list the number of IPPR staff who have worked for a Labour government, or vice versa, would take the rest of this article. (And yes, to declare an interest, me too.) Chris Powell, when chairman of trustees of the IPPR, boasted that IPPR actually had two departments: the research and development section in Southampton Street (the think tank's HQ) and the "applied department" in government itself.

Now, however, the progressive think tanks are entering a third stage, one resembling the first in its emphasis on free thinking. Now that Labour's hold on power is tenuous the rules have changed again. The value of ideas has risen, both for a government in desperate need of intellectual reju venation and for an opposition anxious to prove itself fresh, modern and ready to govern.

This requires a different style of leadership, and especially a greater openness to work across party lines. It is likely that this would be happening under male leadership, although perhaps to a lesser extent. "Let's be honest - it is partly a reflection of the political situation," admits Fieschi. "Having said that, I do think that women may be slightly better at handling ambiguity, acting as critical friends, and perhaps working with different partners in a different way."

Oppenheim agrees, though she is wary of being too deterministic about the gender element. "I think there is a likelihood that women are more consensual in their approach, and less bound to a particular political party." The job-share arrangement at IPPR (unprecedented in UK think tanks) is itself a powerful symbol. "Lisa and I are often asked how we can possibly share leadership," she says. "It is a different way of leading, and for us it is a very powerful one."

One of the other factors reducing the level of tribalism in the think tanks is the career stages and ambitions of the new breed of women leaders. According to Fieschi: "The women who run these think tanks have no ambition to end up in the government's Strategy Unit. They have either already been in government, or have no interest in being in government."

It is certainly true that Rossiter, Oppenheim and Harker have all been government advisers, but they can now be considered as in the post-hack, rather than pre-hack, stages of their careers. Consequently, these female leaders have more latitude. They tremble less when a Labour minister rings to complain about a critical report.

As a result, the Conservatives, energetically triangulating to prove their changed condition, are mustard-keen to work with the centre-left think tanks. IPPR submitted substantial evidence to the Conservative "quality of life" task force, is working with the Liberal Democrats on immigration and is trying to build a cross-party consensus on climate change. Demos, while anchored in progressive politics, is also less prescriptive about where it is to be found: "I am quite happy to work with Steve Hilton [David Cameron's key strategist]," says Fieschi.

IPPR had a major presence at the Conservative party conference for the first time last year. Demos is taking a more dramatic step away from party politics and eschewing the drunken party conference scene altogether. Instead, there will be Demos events at the Hay and other literary and cultural festivals around the country. For Fieschi, shaping radical ideas and building a consensus for progressive change is now a more subtle and complex game that reaches far beyond political party.

In 1997, the era of the Blair Babes, it seemed as if politics itself might be on the cusp of a new, more feminine era. It hasn't quite worked out like that; women are in short supply in senior government roles. But they have scaled the commanding heights of the progressive intellectual powerhouses. Rather than being a "plague", these brilliant women may be the medicine that progressive politics urgently needs.

A lifetime of questing and questioning

Thu, 3 Apr 2008 -1:00:00 GMT

Nesta - February 2008

Some individuals proudly declare themselves self-taught - parading their lack of an academic background and highlighting the knowledge they have acquired through their own solo efforts. Of course, this distinction should not be pushed too hard. There is a set of basic skills, such as reading, which are necessary ingredients for these individuals and which certainly can be taught. There will always be a need for institutions which provide a framework, culture and opportunity for the acquisition of knowledge.

Debates about education tend to focus on either structures - for example, in arguments over selective versus comprehensive education and the role of quasi-independent academies - or upon the nature of the examination system. The ongoing argument about the relative merits of narrow, deep A-levels and a broader, more flexible baccalaureate approach to post-16 education is the most obvious example of the latter. Very often, this particular argument is couched in terms of a battle between 'academic' qualifications and 'vocational' exams. But this misses the point.

A baccalaureate system is preferable to A-levels, not because it allows for more vocational learning, but simply because it would permit young people greater flexibility in their choice of subjects.

Indeed, precisely because the specific skills that will be required in the labour market of the future are impossible to predict or plan for, the very notion of 'vocational education' is an oxymoron. It is not possible to impart to young people the knowledge they will need for their careers. Javier Bayer, a learning consultant and the former head of the Talent Foundation, a charity that works to improve learning skills, says our preoccupation with courses and technical skills is misplaced. "What matters most of all is having the emotional capacity and desire to learn", he says. "Technical skills are disposable - we have to be ready to drop them and pick up new ones."

In the end, the debates about structures and tests are a sideshow. The challenge is to enable young people to develop the characteristics, motivation and attitudes necessary to support lifelong learning. Those who succeed in the labour market of the future will be those with a self-development mindset and character. Three attributes are critical: autonomy, open-mindedness and application.

It is clear that individuals with a strongly developed 'locus of control' - the sense that they are in charge of their own destiny - enjoy better economic and social outcomes. With the crumbling of traditional career ladders and life plans, the capacity for autonomy has become even more important. But future learners must also retain an open mind. It is harder to let go of existing skills than it is to acquire new ones (in a slightly different context, economists refer to this as 'loss aversion'). But a willingness to question and, if necessary, abandon our opinions will be increasingly important as the halflife of knowledge continues to atrophy.

John Stuart Mill, the great 19th century liberal, declared that any person worth listening to "has kept his mind open to criticism of his opinions... No wise man ever acquired his wisdom in any mode but this. The steady habit of correcting and completing his opinion by collating it with those of others, so far from causing doubt and hesitation in carrying it into practice, is the only stable foundation for a just reliance on it".

It is, of course, much easier to declare the need for a 'steady habit' than to acquire it. Along with autonomy and open-mindedness, application is a key predictor of life outcomes. The acquisition of knowledge will not become easier, except in the trivial sense that Information Communications Technology (ICT) speeds up the retrieval of information. Learning will remain the hard graft of reading, thinking, reflecting and absorbing. An ability to do this hard work - to crack the books, rather than hit the town - has always been essential, but is likely to become more so. What the Oxford Professor Avner Offer describes as 'commitment strategies', character traits that allow us to make short-term sacrifices for longterm gain, will grow in importance. In this sense, the ability to develop certain aspects of individual character is a vital part of any future-oriented education system. There is a tendency to see the social and environmental aspects of learning as a separate part of the curriculum. In fact, developing the necessary personal characteristics to support a lifetime of learning is not separate from education, but integral to it. The capacity for 'prudence', as Offer labels this trait, may seem opposed to the entrepreneurialism upon which our economy and society relies. In fact, it is those with the greatest confidence in their abilities, and a capacity to bounce back should things go wrong, who are most likely to take risks.

Joel Mokyr, in his book The Gifts of Athena - Historical Origins of the Knowledge Economy, shows how specific institutions played a vital part in the development of what he describes as 'useful knowledge' during the industrial era: "The existence of organisations in which such knowledge is preserved, defused and augmented (such as academies, universities and research institutes) were of central importance in explaining progress over past centuries". Institutions will continue to play an important part in preparation for life's uncertainties. But, over the coming decades, the future of learning will rely as much on the instincts of individuals as the wisdom of institutions.

A lifetime of questing and questioning will, of course, in many ways be more demanding than one in which the skills necessary for a particular trade or profession were learnt before the age of 21, and only slowly, if ever, became obsolete. We should be honest about the downsides of this new world - uncertainty, instability and risk - especially if we are among those who are currently benefiting from it. But the future in which specific skills will quickly go out of date is also one in which talent should be able to rise, application should be rewarded and each of us will have the opportunity - and perhaps the responsibility - to keep developing ourselves as individuals. It does mean questioning ourselves and our knowledge base regularly. But as the Chinese proverb reminds us, the person who asks the question is a fool for today, while the person who never asks it is a fool forever.

Work isn't working

Wed, 19 Mar 2008 -1:00:00 GMT

New Statesman - 19th March 2008

Families and firms are at war. It will only be won when parents - fathers as well as mothers - can care for their children without harming their careers. It's the economy that must change

The Sex War is over. Girls outperform boys at school and are streaming through higher edu cation. Young women are now taking home the same size wage packets as young men. But the celebrations have to wait. A new, tougher battle has to be fought. It is not a duel between men and women, but between families and firms. This family war will be won only when parents - fathers as well as mothers - can care for their children without dumbing down their careers.

Women now compete with men on a virtually equal footing in both business and politics - but only until the precise moment they become mothers. It is not a question of old-fashioned notions about their capabilities. "Women don't lose out because of outdated views about them as women," says Mary Gregory, an economics lecturer at Oxford University and expert on gender and work. "They lose out because they make different choices about work when they have children." It is not possession of a womb that now holds women back, but its use.

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Is a degree just the job?

Fri, 29 Feb 2008 -1:00:00 GMT

Management Today - 29th February 2008

The official line is that universities should equip students with work skills. But in a fast-changing world, people need a broader grounding for life.

What do you say to a sociology graduate with a job? 'Can I have fries with that, please?' An old joke. An unfair one, too. It is simply not true that all sociology graduates end up flipping burgers. According to the most recent survey, only one in seven were working as 'retail, catering, waiting and bar staff'. (This compares, however, to just under one in 10 for graduates as a whole.)

But as the numbers entering higher education rise - 43% now enrol on an HE course before they turn 30 - the question 'What is a degree for?' is being asked with greater urgency. A university education used to signal membership of the intellectual elite of the nation. But as we enter an era of mass higher education, this can, by definition, no longer be the case.

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The naughty nation

Thu, 14 Feb 2008 -1:00:00 GMT

New Statesman - 14th February 2008

Should the state force us to eat well, drink wisely and behave nicely on public transport, or should we leave people alone unless they are directly damaging others?

Smoking, smacking, snacking and boozing: ours is a naughty nation. Billboard advertisements for St Trinian's, the UK Film Council-funded hymn to anarchy, were covered in the punitive lines: "I must not misbehave. I must not misbehave. I must not misbehave." It is not too difficult to imagine the Prime Minister setting the same lines for the country as a whole. From diets leading to obesity to alcohol-fuelled violence, reducing misbehaviour is now a political priority.

Politicians have historically been wary of appearing to pass judgement on our behaviour, but are becoming more outspoken as the impact of Brits Behaving Badly is more keenly felt. David Cameron has pledged to fix our "broken society", though the chances of a tax break for marriage curbing the behaviour of tanked-up teen agers have to be ranked as thin at best. Early this month, the Home Secretary, Jacqui Smith, unveiled plans to give the police powers to seize alcohol from underage drinkers in response to research showing that young people are drinking more heavily - and that alcohol explains a rising proportion of violence among school-age young sters. Most 13-year-olds surveyed said they have had a drink. "This is a very interesting political space at the moment," says David Halpern, a former government adviser, now at the Institute for Government. "There is still a fear of being seen to be manipulating people. But Gordon Brown has long talked about the need for culture change."

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Unfashionable character

Fri, 1 Feb 2008 -1:00:00 GMT

Management Today - 1st February 2008

The official line is that universities should equip students with work skills. But in a fast-changing world, people need a broader grounding for life.

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The Trouble with targets

Tue, 8 Jan 2008 -1:00:00 GMT

Management Today - 1st January 2008

There's a new word lurking in the lexicographical undergrowth. It's not in the Oxford English Dictionary yet, but I fear it will be. So far, it has appeared in a few academic articles and research papers, but it seems likely that it will enter the mainstream at some point. The word is 'targetology'. It's well-known that the Government is target-mad. But in fact, as usual, the politicians are merely following in the footsteps of business, especially the human resources profession.

The HR community has embraced targetology with embarrassing fervour. Discussions in HR are dominated by benchmarks, metrics, scorecards and key performance indicators (KPIs). The US-based Conference Board, a research alliance business, has established the 'Defining New Performance Targets for HR Research Working Group'. As the board alluringly explains: 'Evidence-Based Human Re- sources is the next generation in Human Capital Analytics'. The days must just fly by.

But one of the principal frustrations of dealing with people, rather than with things and money, is the difficulty of finding adequate measuring tools. It's straightforward to set a sales target, to count the money in the bank or ask the supplier to halve their delivery time. But ever since managers started thinking in terms of human capital, rather than human resources, the fetish for metrication has taken hold.

Targets are not intrinsically bad: clear objectives for any organisation, expressed as specific goals, should improve performance against them, whether that is to reduce hospital waiting times or sell more chocolate bars. Since the Government set a target to cut the number of people waiting for more than four hours in A&E, it has fallen from 23% of patients to just 5%. Targets are a powerful mechanism for communicating to an organisation: 'this is what matters most'.

But there are a number of caveats. First, it's vital not to confuse measurement with target-setting. In their famous article for the Harvard Business Review in 1992, Robert Kaplan and David Norton described a 'balanced scorecard', consisting of a range of measurements that a firm should be monitoring in order to check its health and performance. 'Think of the balanced scorecard as the dials and indicators in an aeroplane cockpit,' they said. 'For the complex task of navigating and flying an aeroplane, pilots need detailed information about many aspects of the flight.'

But the use of 'scorecard' to describe these measures has proved unhelpful: managers are inclined to start keeping score. But Kaplan and Norton were very clear about the limitations of individual targets, arguing that a good leader 'establishes goals but assumes that people will adopt whatever behaviours and take whatever actions are necessary to arrive at those goals. Senior managers may know what the end result should be, but they cannot tell the employees exactly how to achieve that result.'

Once an organisation becomes infected with targetology, things can get quickly out of hand. One or two clear targets can be powerful. A hundred targets is a recipe for confusion, stress and disaster. Employees can quickly come to feel as if they are being asked to throw darts in all directions at once. Just because targets are good, it does not mean more targets are better.

Targets also become less useful when they're a means to driving people to heroic levels of performance. Once an organisation sets 'stretch' or 'aspirational' targets, you know targetology has taken a dangerous hold. Targets should represent what senior management thinks ought to happen, not the contents of their wildest dreams.

Other problems occur when targets are closely attached to individual performance. If indi- viduals are rewarded for reaching certain sales targets, for example, a vicious internal market can be created, with colleagues scrambling over each other to get to the client and win their bonus. Healthy competition is a good thing: but it should be for promotion and advancement. As a rule, team targets are better than individual targets: and if a member of the team is letting the side down, you can be sure the others will soon be on their case.

Ironically, given the HR profession's enthusiasm for them, there's a particular problem using targets in this area. Human capital is an unhelpful term, because it implies a degree of objectivity and precision in an area that is, in fact, complex and deeply personal. Individual workers are not depositories full of human capital; creativity, friendliness, ambition, loyalty and energy can't go under the slide rule.

But there's a deeper problem. It's clear from a vast body of research that the more freedom an individual has over the way their job is done, the higher their productivity and the bigger the rewards reaped by the firm for which they work. People need to know the objectives of their organisation and they need to know how their performance contributes to them. Employee engagement is much more likely to follow from autonomy than from a battery of management-dictated targets.

There's lots of rhetoric in the HR world about nourishing the 'whole person' and letting employees 'bring the whole person to work'. These are worthy aspirations that fly in the face of targetology. Target-hitters or free spirits? You can't have both.

A deeper shade of green

Sat, 1 Dec 2007 -1:00:00 GMT

Management Today - 1st December 2007

Many firms assume the garb of sustainability in order to attract and keep staff, but they have to look much more urgently at wasteful practices.

By 16 September this year, the area covered by Arctic ice had shrunk to 1.6 million square miles. The ice always contracts over the summer - but not this much: the previous low was 2.05 million square miles, recorded in 2005. Earlier in the year, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reported that sea levels are rising at 20 times the average rate over the past 3,000 years. In the history books of the future, 2007 will be recorded as the year that the threat posed by climate change became irrefutable, imminent and catastrophic. The question is whether 2008 will be written up as the year we did something about it.

At the moment, fewer than one in 20 of us have made significant changes in our lives to reduce our environmental impact. The fossil- fuelled juggernaut of the hyper-mobile consumerist economy has barely touched its brakes. At an individual level, many of us salve our consciences by recycling our newspapers and buying Ecover washing-up liquid, while continuing to drive to the airport for our flights to continental Europe and beyond.

At a political level, the prime minister (when he was chancellor) could declare 'a new ambition for Britain... to lead the world in creating a stable and sustainable economy founded on low carbon - a Britain that is both pro-growth and pro-green'. But then the Government can build new runways and widen motorways without even the appearance of any cognitive dissonance. Since Labour came to power in 1997, the cost of motoring has fallen by 6%, while train fares have jumped by 7% and bus fares by 16%.

If individuals and governments are failing, can businesses do any better? British firms exhale 66 million tonnes of carbon a year - but of this, almost a third is wasted through poor building design and energy inefficiencies. It has become important to many firms to demonstrate their green credentials - not only to customers but also to employees. (They have to tread carefully, though: a dozen companies were recently rapped by the Advertising Standards Agency for misleading environmental claims.)

But companies are becoming alert to the rise of 'ethical employees' who want their employers to be greener. A recent survey by Badenoch & Clark, the professional services recruiter, found that 41% of employees say that they would be more likely to accept a job offer from a firm with strong green credentials, and that half felt that their current employer did not take environmental issues seriously. It seems likely that in the near future, some firms might become toxic employer brands, in the same way that tobacco companies are today: examples might include fossil-fuel-reliant energy utility firms, oil and gas companies, and airlines.

It's difficult, though, for even the most diligent workers to know what being environmentally responsible amounts to. Declaring carbon neutrality has become a badge of pride: but many of the offsetting schemes used to achieve neutrality are of dubious quality and efficacy. One of the most common forms of offsetting is planting trees, but only fully grown trees absorb much carbon, and trees take a lot longer to grow than a 747 takes to fly to New York. Similarly, a company might invest in brightly coloured recycling bins but fail to switch to a green electricity supplier.

There's a great deal companies can do to make their buildings more energy-efficient, much of which would save them money, from wholesale switching to natural cooling systems and solar panels to fitting a £15 timer on a soft drinks machine to turn it off at night and weekends - which saves about £160 on the annual electricity bill.

But the biggest impact an employer can make is through changes in the culture of working. Even firms that claim to be carbon-neutral start the carbon clock only when an employee walks through the door: their journey to work does not feature. But in the UK, the average employee commutes 46 minutes a day - and seven out of 10 do so in a car. Many of the most impressive green offices are in out-of-town locations, easily accessible only by private car. If companies are serious, they should include employee commuting in their overall carbon foot- print, and work to dramatically reduce it. There are generous tax breaks for companies that encourage greener commuting, but take-up is dismally low, and the 'company car' has failed to become the anachronism it needs to be. Being able to work from home must become the norm.

Similarly, reliance on air travel must be dramatically reduced. In many firms, the number of zeroes on a frequent-flyer programme card is a symbol of status; but allowing staff to benefit in this way from environmentally damaging forms of travel is simply immoral. How can firms that hold meetings in locations that require everyone to fly justify this, if not to themselves, then to their children? Mea culpa - I speak at a number of conferences, and have often flown. But that is often the only way to get there.

The truth is that all conference organisers know that a warmer location is often one of the key attractions: Barbados catches the attention in a way Birmingham does not. But we all have to stop. So here's a deal. There are 100,000 readers of this magazine. If one hundred of you pledge not to fly for the next year - just let me know at the e-mail address below - so will I.

Cry, freedom

Tue, 20 Nov 2007 -1:00:00 GMT

The Guardian - 20th Novemeber 2007

'I love liberty by taste," wrote Alexis de Tocqueville to his new friend, John Stuart Mill, in 1836, "equality by instinct and reason." Mill had just put the liberal French aristocrat on the English-speaking map with a review of his De la Democratie en Amerique: but it was his own 1859 masterpiece, On Liberty, which gave Victorian liberals their call to arms - the Liberal Party was formed later the same year - and became the New Testament of liberalism.

Mill has recently been voted Britain's Greatest Liberal, and his book is frequently quoted by politicians seeking a dash of gravitas and a splash of liberalism for their speeches. Rhetorically, the cause of liberty is prospering. David Cameron insists on the label liberal conservative, David Miliband proudly declares himself a liberal socialist, and Gordon Brown recently gave a speech on liberty in which he mentioned the L-word 74 times.

For the whole article click here

Why Brits need not apply

Thu, 8 Nov 2007 -1:00:00 GMT

New Statesman - 8th November 2007

Why Brits need not apply

Richard Reeves examines the economic impact of immigration

Just weeks after Gordon Brown pledged "British jobs for British workers", figures were released showing that half of the 2.2 million jobs created since 1997 - and all of the half-million generated in the past two years - had gone to immigrants.

Although the figures on immigration are generally treated as "bad news" for the government, the data on migrant employment is in many ways cause for celebration. A standard case against immigration is that foreigners come to the UK to luxuriate on benefits, use the NHS and snag a council flat. But, on the contrary, it seems immigrants come to do an honest day's work.

Certainly, a significant inflow of people puts pressure on public services, especially when the level of immigration is much higher than expected. And some of the indigenous population may see their chances reduced of gaining cer tain goods such as social housing. These are real, political issues. Nonetheless, most economic analy ses show that immigration has a positive economic effect - the latest has estimated a £6bn boost to GDP and it seems certain that recent waves of immigration, dominated by eastern Europeans, especially Poles and Lithuanians, have been even more beneficial.

These arrivals are young: 83 per cent are aged between 18 and 34. They are mobile, demonstrating a much greater willingness to travel the UK in search of work than previous immigrants, who tended to cluster in ethnic conclaves in the large cities. Some of the most popular destinations are the north and west of England, Scotland and East Anglia. Boston in Lincolnshire now boasts 40 languages.

The vast majority of the new immigrants - 94 per cent - have no dependents. They are also white, which improves their chances of landing a job (a fact about the British labour market that should cause no pride). And they work hard. Major employers praise the "superior work ethic" of eastern Europeans.

The new immigrants believe, with good reason, that if they come to the UK and work hard, they will make good money - or, at least, money that looks good once it is converted back into zlotys or litas. Given that their countries of origin are much closer than those of earlier immigrants (from the Caribbean or Asia, for example), it seems likely that many of the eastern Europeans will work here for a few years and then make the reverse migratory journey.

A harder question is why so few of the jobs that have been created are being taken by any of the five million native Brits currently out of work. They do, after all, have a linguistic edge over the newcomers. It is not as if any of the jobs are advertised with signs saying "Brits Need Not Apply". One explanation is that much of the work, especially in agriculture and construction, is not appealing to the indigenous population. Another is that the new immigrants are making more use of effective "informal" job-search methods - personal contacts and the grapevine - than unemployed Brits, many of whom are cut off entirely from the world of work.

Out-of-work Brits are also, after a decade of economic expansion, increasingly in what policy wonks dub "hard to help" groups: the long-term unemployed; those with caring responsibilities, such as lone parents; and those on incapacity benefits. A single Lithuanian lad can easily pop up to Liverpool to take a job: it is a different matter for a single mother of four.

There are some harder truths. The British benefits system makes relatively few demands on recipients in terms of job search, certainly by comparison to the new "tough love" US welfare system - a gap that David Cameron looks set to exploit. You do not need to be on the far right to see that there is little incentive for indigenous welfare recipients to swap the stability of benefits for the uncertainty of the labour market.

But the link between immigration, welfare and employment cannot be ignored much longer, for there is certainly something tragic in the sight of a British economy creating jobs alongside a British welfare system discouraging British citizens from taking them.

Merv the Swerve skids

Thu, 1 Nov 2007 -1:00:00 GMT

Management Today - 1st November 2007

In propping up Northern Rock, the governor of the Bank of England is tacitly condoning casino capitalism - with public money as the stake.

A decade ago, I wrote a column calling for the installation of the Bank of England's chief economist as the governor. The piece was so positive - highlighting the candidate's intellectual rigour, financial experience and impregnable reputation in the City - that it embarrassed my editor. Now I'm the one blushing: his name was Mervyn King.

King has been badly - perhaps fatally - wounded by September's Northern Rock debacle. The damage resulted from a stunning, 180-degree about-turn. When the market for three-month debt seized up - a market on which Northern Rock's directors had been reliant - he at first insisted that it was not the job of the Bank of England to help. Northern Rock had taken some big risks, and risk, by definition, has a downside as well as an upside.

King was admired for his toughness. But then, as the queues of terrified depositors curled around the branches of Northern Rock, the Bank changed tack and pumped cheap money into the market and bailed out the flailing bank. At last count, Northern Rock had borrowed £8bn from Threadneedle Street.

To say King has egg on his face would be an understatement: he is entombed in omelette. Either he publicly changed his mind on an issue of strategic significance in a matter of days, or he bowed to public and/or political pressure and used public funds in a manner that he considers irresponsible. Neither explanation reflects well on a central banker, and it seems unlikely King will serve a second term.

The whole spectacle throws some light on our peculiar, hypocritical approach to risk and reward. Initially, King had invoked the danger of 'moral hazard' - a term well known to the insurance industry that means people who are insured against a particular risk are much more likely to take it. If your car is covered against theft, you might not bother locking it. Since the Northern Rock incident, banks know that they can borrow recklessly on the international money markets, or build huge debt portfolios on small asset bases, and that the Bank of England will step in to save them if things go pear-shaped. So where is the incentive to be cautious? King invoked moral hazard, then created it.

If he'd stuck to his guns, Northern Rock would have gone under. And rightly so, according to economic theory: the firm took the risks and must pay the price. The problem, of course, is that the real losers would not have been the bank's directors but its customers: the pensioner who would have seen her whole life savings wiped out because Northern Rock's board fancied themselves as latter-day Gordon Geckos. In King's world of 'rational economic men', this would have been the right outcome. But socially, politically and morally, it is hard to argue for.

In theory, Mrs Pensioner should have been exercising her power and discretion as a consumer to move out of Northern Rock. Having looked closely at the bank's accounts, studied the long-term trends in the London Interbank Offered Rate, read the analysts' reports and concluded that the bank was unacceptably vulnerable to a tightening in the short-term debt markets - which might indeed occur if American banks became concerned about the volume of sub-prime borrowers in their portfolios - she should have moved her money.

But for us punters, such exercises are a flight of fantasy. To most of us, 'securitisation' sounds like a safe thing, conjuring up images of locks and guarantees - rather than selling on debt in the unstable three-month money market. Given that neither the Bank nor the Financial Services Authority saw it coming for Northern Rock, what chance were customers supposed to have? Consumer sovereignty is simply a myth in a world of such financial complexity.

What this means, though, is that the taxpayer ends up as insurer of last resort. Already the Government is moving to increase the amount of savings that will be guaranteed by the state to £35,000. At the heart of this is a debate about the balance between the free market and the state's role.

Free-market capitalism, financial regulation and globalisation have created the conditions for phenomenal levels of innovation in the money markets: theoretical mathematicians can now make a fortune devising products that only they (and maybe two others) fully understand. Much of this innovation has been beneficial, allowing more sophisticated management of risk and giving institutions opportunities to grow quickly: how else could Northern Rock have gone from regional bank to global player?

When things are going well, we welcome these changes and the boost they often give to share prices and therefore our pension funds. But when things go wrong, we cling to the apron strings of the state. Capitalism thrives on risk - but it seems that although we all want the upside, we'd rather not have the downside. We want the gain without the pain.

The hard truth is that most of us have no idea what financial institutions are up to, and little prospect of finding out, and simply believe that banks are safe places for our money. But ambitious directors can now play the global financial field, as Northern Rock did, and reap huge commercial rewards if it goes well. At its most extreme, this is a kind of 'casino capitalism': the trouble is, it's our money they're playing with.

Richard Reeves is director of Intelligence Agency, an ideas consultancy.

Middle England. They're nicer than you think

Thu, 25 Oct 2007 -1:00:00 GMT

New Statesman - 25 October 2007

Middle Englanders are insular, selfish and intolerant. Not so, argues Richard Reeves. Plus Stephen Armstrong on the Accidental Middle Englanders

It is a place inhabited by "ordinary people with suburban dreams who worked hard to improve their homes and their lives; to get gradually better cars, washing machines and televisions; to go on holiday in Spain rather than Bournemouth", in the words of the new Labour strategist Philip Gould. It is where homes are anxiously owned, families are raised and crime is feared. The Daily Mail lies on the doorsteps. It is where contemporary British elections are won and lost. And it casts a powerful spell over marketeers, pollsters, journalists and - above all - politicians. It is, of course, "Middle England".

When Gordon Brown praises "hard-working families" or when David Cameron takes the axe to inheritance tax, they are assumed by headline-writers to have their eyes trained on this semi-mythical land. It represents, we are supposed to assume, the very heartland of the nation. As such, it acts as a kind of political bull's-eye: if parties can aim their policies directly at Middle England, the electoral match will be theirs.

Click here to read the full article...

Lift-off of the super-rich

Mon, 1 Oct 2007 -1:00:00 GMT

Management Today - 1st October 2007

The rise of an unfeasibly wealthy over-class could have a negative impact on the functioning of capitalism if a sense of unfairness takes hold.
George W Bush once addressed a group of wealthy Republican donors as 'the haves and the have-mores'. The quip revealed something about his grasp of his political constituency, but it also describes what is happening in both the American and British workplace.

The haves, those in the middle of the pack, financially speaking, have seen their incomes rise modestly over the past decade, while the have-mores have simply got more, and more, and more. Last year, the average pay for Britain's leading chief executives rose by 37% to £2.85m apiece. The pay of the typical boss is a hundred times greater than the average worker's; 10 years ago the ratio was closer to 50:1.

If the incomes of the top fifth of all households are compared to those of the bottom fifth, inequality has remained essentially unchanged since John Major came to power. Last year, the gap widened slightly. But the apparent stability of inequality disguises the true picture. It is not that the middle class are pulling away from the working poor; if anything, the gap between middle and bottom has narrowed. It is that the overclass is pulling away from the rest of society. All the action is in the top 1%, or even 0.1%, of the population.

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Ethical Evangelists in business�What do you get if you mix kids, toys, China and lead?

Fri, 28 Sep 2007 -1:00:00 GMT

Management Today - 28th September 2007

With the stark realities of global warming ever more evident, the public is fixated on finding sustainable ways of living and consuming.

The anxiety is being picked up by leaders keen to be seen to be Doing the Right Thing, their saintly fingers crossed in the hope that it won't hit profits. A new chapter opens in the CSR story.

What do you get if you mix kids, toys, China and lead? A worldwide news story, for one thing, as the US toy company Mattel discovered to its cost this August. More than 18 million toys, including 'Sarge' trucks and Thomas the Tank Engine models, were recalled after the discovery that lead paint had been applied to some of them by Mattel's Chinese supplier. In the process, a veil was lifted from the reality of the manufacturing process in the Pearl River delta, in southern China - now the heart of the world's toy-making industry, where hundreds of thousands of young people, mostly women, split their lives between cramped dormitories and choking factories, where they churn out the cheap toys in which most American homes are drowning. Cheap toys mean cheap labour.

The Mattel case also illuminates the dynamics at work in the current chapter of the story of corporate social responsibility (CSR). Companies increasingly rely on supply chains that stretch around the globe, and are being held to account for the whole chain, rather than just the few links that they directly manage.

At the same time, the issues that excite the attention of consumers are of an increasingly international nature. In the Mattel case, the trigger was, of course, the safety of the children playing with the toys rather than that of the adolescents making them - but the story has now developed its own momentum, and the working conditions in China now figure in the consciousness of Western consumers, if perhaps not yet their conscience. Lastly, the Mattel mix-up showed the global outlook of the media: on the face of it, only the US and China were involved, but in practice the story ran in every market where parents buy toys for their kids.

This triple connectivity - of companies, issues and media - is the backdrop against which corporations are now obliged to operate, and to demonstrate that they are doing so responsibly. The combined power of concerned consumers and scandal-hungry global media outlets makes the market a volatile place. 'This is the third chapter of the corporate social responsibility movement,' says Seb Beloe, vice-president of research and advocacy at SustainAbility, a UK think-tank specialising in CSR issues. 'The pressure is now coming from the market - from retailers, customers and investors. There is now real economic value at stake.'

The economics of CSR are, however, complex and uncertain. The evidence that consumers are buying ethically is mixed, at best. Certainly, most of us tell pollsters that we care about the social and environmental trail of the products we buy, but only a handful actually spend time checking out the records of a firm before buying their bread, petrol or toys. If acting more ethically than a competing company is likely to raise costs, it might be seen as foolish from a financial perspective.

A good deal of the business case for CSR rests, then, on the potential risks and benefits to 'reputational capital'. Given enough bad press, a company will start losing out, whereas being seen as a good corporate citizen should attract customers and staff. There is clearly some truth in these claims. The question is, how much?

The current emphasis on market forces is in contrast to the origins of the CSR movement, which were regulatory rather than economic. The first iteration in the 1970s and '80s was concerned with the environment and driven by laws intended to clean up the air and water. Beloe says this first phase was marked by a 'compliance agenda', and the regulations were seen by most firms as a pure cost, providing work for lawyers rather than activists or consultants.

In the 1980s - at least, in the UK - a philanthropic dimension was added: Business In The Community, celebrating its 25th anniversary (see the MT Interview, p38), can lay a good claim to be the pioneer of this field. Companies were cajoled into competing with each other to be good, with their successes and failures tracked by various indices and memberships of certain groups. BITC's 'Per Cent Club', consisting of firms that give at least 1% of profits to good causes, is a classic example of this approach.

By the '90s, firms also faced growing pressure from non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and the media to improve their record on the environment and social issues. Nike was hammered for the child labour in its supply chain in Cambodia and Pakistan; and, in an iconic moment for the movement, Greenpeace worsted Shell in 1995 over the firm's plan to sink the redundant Brent Spar oil platform in the North Sea. It was a period when a few scruffy, media-savvy activists terrified the executives of the world's corporate giants. 'Companies realised that complying with national regulations was not enough,' says Beloe. Firms established CSR departments and directors, and then began to report on their social and environmental performance.

This 'ranking and reporting' stage lasted well into the Noughties, and continues to dominate the mainstream CSR agenda. But CSR departments are usually not the places to which high-flyers beg to be promoted. Until now, it has remained a sideline of business activity. That may change. As MT contributing editor Stefan Stern has written in the Financial Times, if corporate responsibility means anything, it concerns not only what companies do with the money they make, but how they make it in the first place.

Needless to say, the movement retains its critics, now largely in the form of either ferociously free-market pundits or radical campaigning groups. Anti-corporate poet Claire Fauset, from the pressure group Corporate Watch, dismisses the CSR movement as 'Companies Spouting Rubbish' and 'Complete Sidelining of Reality', and as simply a way of avoiding the tough regulation required to bring about real change. According to her, 'a genuinely socially responsible company would look so different from today's corporations as to be unrecognisable'.

In fact, the attitude of some firms towards regulation is warming, because it provides a level playing field. In a recent survey by PricewaterhouseCoopers, most businesses admitted that regulation was the single most effective way to change corporate behaviour. Part of the appeal of CSR, though, is that it offers a classic 'third way' between rapacious capitalism and state regulation, providing, in the words of Nottingham University academic Dr Jem Bendell, a form of civil regulation, lying between self-regulation by business and hard regulation by governments.

But can even civil regulation bring about the extent of the changes advocated by CSR evangelists? There are some green shoots of hope. In its latest incarnation as 'sustainability', CSR is being mainstreamed in some businesses, according to industry experts. Rather than being a bolt-on, it is now being embedded in the business model of some firms. The UK exemplar of this new, deeper application of the principle of responsibility is Marks & Spencer, which last year implemented a 100-point 'Plan A' to make the firm carbon-neutral, reduce the proportion of its waste going into landfill to zero, switch over time to organic cotton and move towards fairly traded products. In its latest campaign, M&S donated 5% of the purchase price on all sales of school clothes to support a Save the Children campaign to create schools in Uganda.

'We're doing this because it's what you want us to do,' said CEO Stuart Rose. 'It's also the right thing to do. We're calling it Plan A because we believe it's now the only way to do business. There is no Plan B.' The dramatic move by M&S confirms that corporate responsibility is entering a new phase. But it also highlights three key elements of the current state of play: the re-emergence of environmental issues; the reshaping of markets by companies, rather than consumers; and the quiet triumph of the moral argument for change.

After years of gradual education, climate change has burst into public, commercial and political consciousness in the past 18 months. David Cameron's restyling of the Tory party - 'Vote blue, go green' - is one political consequence of a profound shift in mood. Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth, wild weather - from the real tragedy of hurricane Katrina to the surreal flooding of English towns - and reports of collapsing glaciers have signalled a new urgency on the global warming issue. 'Carbon' has assaulted the lexicon: carbon trading, carbon offsetting, carbon neutrality and carbon footprints trip off the tongue of all self-respecting executives. PR-conscious airline owners are keen to show their green apparel. 'We must rapidly wean ourselves off our dependence on coal and fossil fuels,' declares Richard Branson, chairman of Virgin.

'The focus is unquestionably shifting to the environment,' says Beloe. 'A few years ago we wrote a report titled Have We Forgotten the Environment?, which seems astonishing now.'

To the extent that a growing concern with climate change drives real change in corporations, this is good news. But there are dangers. In the rush to be green, companies might overlook other issues, such as health & safety, labour relations or local community impacts. It is pretty easy for a professional services firm to become carbon-neutral - which it could then parade as evidence of its angelic status, even if it treats women like rubbish, smashes unions, bullies employees and pays small suppliers late. Bad firms could greenwash their reputations clean. 'There is a real danger if climate change is seen as an isolated issue,' adds Beloe. 'In fact, it is a precursor of a whole range of environmental and natural resource issues.'

The M&S move also demonstrates that in many instances, companies are leading consumers, as much as the other way around. It's hard to prove that consumers are rewarding more responsible firms. But the fear that they will do so has forced other retailers to up their game. Tesco has announced plans to spend £600m on making its operations more sustainable and to introduce 'carbon labelling' on its products. Its boss Terry Leahy, sprinting to stay within hailing distance of Rose, has declared that 'the market is ready... we have to make sustainability a significant, mainstream driver of consumption.'

Once companies like Tesco in the UK and Wal-Mart in the US - working hard to reduce packaging waste and carbon emissions - start changing the way they do business, the market is, by definition, transformed, whether customers are actively demanding it or not. The OFT's August raid on Tesco and Asda in connection with allegations that they have been bullying their suppliers into lowering prices shows, however, that words and actions may not always agree.

In countless industries, standards have been raised almost unnoticed by the customer, and often because of the actions of one firm. Most DIY shoppers won't know that FSC timber is wood produced according to sustainability guidelines drawn up by the Forestry Stewardship Council, but because retailers - notably B&Q - insisted its suppliers meet the standard, the market is now dominated by FSC-approved wood.

The third dimension of the next phase of the movement is the readiness of some companies to act on ethical rather than economic grounds. Until now, the case for CSR has always been that responsible, sustainable businesses will be more profitable businesses. But in many instances the business case has been weak, subjective, or both. In a seminal book on the topic, Everybody's Business (2002) by David Grayson, one of the gurus of the movement, the chapter on 'Making a Business Case' doesn't appear until p218. The truth, often unspoken, is that when firms do change course, the decision is based as much on a moral sense as on any clear-cut link to higher profits. M&S insiders admit that Plan A was as much a matter of vision and instinct as quantifiable returns.

Rose's 'it's the right thing to do' tells most of the story. Says a senior consultant in the field: 'There are a number of chief executives who are really acting from a sense of moral responsibility and hoping the financial rewards will come. But they feel they have to dress up their actions in a business case.'

There are signs that this invisible integrity might break into the public domain. A report by a taskforce established by think-tank Tomorrow's Company to examine the future of global corporations, whose membership included representatives from BP, Ford, Alcan and McKinsey, suggested that a key next step was for tomorrow's global company to 'expand its view of success and redefine it in terms of lasting positive impacts for business, society and the environment'.

An explicitly ethical dimension is surely necessary for the deeper potential of the CSR movement to be realised. The competitive grounds for firms to radically alter their business model to measure, manage and improve social and environmental performance are, in many cases, pretty thin. CSR may not always be the 'win-win' that the movement has thus far insisted on (with fingers crossed behind its back). Perhaps we need businesses themselves to remind us that business profitability, economic growth and corporate competitiveness are not ends in themselves, but means to the more important end of a better life for us all. It's time, surely, for the movement to break out of the straitjacket of the 'business case' and recognise that real responsibility comes at a price.

PRICEWATERHOUSECOOPERS has the key to promulgating greenness

The middle-aged, well-dressed man threw his car keys on the table and challenged his neighbour: 'I will if you will.' But this was not a swingers' party. It was a meeting of the top partners from consultancy firm PricewaterhouseCoopers, gathered in Cambridge for a three-day course on sustainable development.

The car keys in question related to a Porsche 911, and the owner's dare was that he would trade in his boy's toy for something greener if his colleague would do the same with his Aston Martin. It was one example of the profound personal impact of the 'green-dip' session on attendees. The indulgent vehicles in which many proudly arrived became, for some, a badge of shame on the journey home.

More significant than these individual epiphanies is the shift within PwC towards more sustainable operations and greener service offerings. In July, the firm's frequent flyers received letters from management describing their carbon footprint. Every partner and employee is being advised on how to reduce their environmental impact. PwC has this year moved into one of the greenest office buildings in the capital.

Above all, the firm is integrating social, environmental and ethical issues into its whole range of auditing and advisory services and developing new lines to help its clients move further and faster towards sustainable development. 'There is a move from managing reputation to managing performance,' says Erica Hauver, head of the sustainability and climate change practice at PwC. 'It is increasingly being addressed in the core business model, and is therefore moving to the centre of our client services.'

This change is possible, at least in part, because the partners of the firm both run it and own it. There are no outside investors to keep sweet. If PwC decides to go green, it simply can. The partnership ethos also generates a culture that is receptive to long-term concerns. 'As partners of the firm, we are stewards of its future,' says Hauver, 'and that necessarily includes the future of the world it will operate in, and that our children will live in.'

If PwC is serious, not only about junking the Jags but transforming its business, the impact will be profound. If the world's biggest professional services firm, advising more companies than any other, goes green, who knows what the future might bring?

Andrew Saunders

Number of companies in the world publishing corporate responsibility
reports, 1996-2006

1996 267

1997 365

1998 463

1999 639

2000 823

2001 1,179

2002 1,482

2003 1,833

2004 1,936

2005 2,153

2006 2,235

A Handle on the future

Mon, 3 Sep 2007 -1:00:00 GMT

Management Today - 3rd September 2007

Long-term planning may have lost credibility in the boardroom, but there's a better alternative than nihilism: an open-minded optimism.

Baldrick has a 'cunning plan'. But is it, his master Blackadder asks, cunning enough to have been thought up by the 'Professor of Cunning at Oxford University'? Sadly it is not, but heroes and heroines - from Robin Hood to James Bond - who are imprisoned or trapped usually do come up with 'a plan', demonstrating that they are not only brave but clever too.

Last month, the Scout Movement celebrated its centenary, and one of the key lessons of Lord Baden-Powell, its founder, was to plan any operation meticulously, from the 1899 defence of Mafeking - which made his name - to a 1907 Scout camp in Dorset. At Mafeking, Baden-Powell planned a series of activities to fool his Boer opponents, including having his men mime the rolling out of non-existent barbed wire.

read more...

Time for the DTI to RIP

Mon, 25 Jun 2007 -1:00:00 GMT

Management Today - 25th June 2007

In the final episode of Yes, Prime Minister, the PM's political adviser Dorothy Wainwright explained the symbolic function of much of Whitehall. ‘Government departments are tombstones,' she said. ‘The Department of Industry marks the grave of industry. The Department of Employment marks the grave of employment. The Department of the Environment marks the grave of the environment. And the Department of Education marks where the corpse of British education is buried.'

As with most of the brilliant series, there was enough Orwellian truth to the statement to make it darkly funny. (No wonder the show was Mrs T's favourite.) Departments of State are often tackling the absence of whatever is in their departmental title: Health really means Illness; Work means Unemployment; and - now perhaps more than ever - Defence means Attack. But at least these Departments have something to do. It is much harder to see what the Department of Trade and Industry spends its time on.

Its mission is to ‘create the conditions for business success and help the UK respond to the challenge of globalisation', which is either absurdly ambitious or utterly vacuous. ‘In this world of rapid change and intense competition, the Department of Trade and Industry (DTI) plays a vital role,' continues the blurb. A case of protesting too much, methinks. At any rate, it is apparently Gordon Brown's view. By the time you read this, the DTI may be a corpse itself.

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That amiable arrogance

Fri, 1 Jun 2007 -1:00:00 GMT

Management Today - 1st June 2007

If faith in macho, charismatic bosses has waned, no-one will follow a self-scrutinising wimp. Leaders must believe they are best for the job.

By the time you read this, Gordon Brown should be close to completing his long, painful ascent of what Disraeli famously described as the 'greasy pole' of politics. Barring some unforeseen, seismic political event, Brown is a shoo-in for the top job. The only risk to his final success took the shape of David Miliband, and he shied away in April. I like and greatly admire Miliband, and am disappointed he chose not to run. But it seems that he did not, at the crucial moment, possess one of the most important ingredients of a leader - an unshakeable belief in his own superiority for the top job.

read more...

The storm over 'locusts'

Tue, 1 May 2007 -1:00:00 GMT

Management Today - 1st May 2007

It's easy to envy vast personal wealth garnered by private-equity practitioners - but unproductive. Being filthy rich doesn't make them filthy.

Private-equity firms have made the transition from invisibility to obloquy. Once the sector got big enough to gobble up household names like the AA and Birds Eye - and threaten high street regulars such as Boots and Sainsbury's - the world woke up to the fact that there was a new kid in the Square Mile. And that he was big, mean and ruthless. These companies are dubbed 'barbarians', 'asset-strippers' and 'locusts' by trade unions. The Treasury Select Committee is examining the way they are taxed, and the media herd is pursuing firms like Permira, Blackstone and KKR with something close to blood-lust. Private equity has gone, in the public imagination, from zero to villain.

A place for our emotions

Wed, 28 Mar 2007 -1:00:00 GMT

Management Today - 28th March 2007

Successful bosses must feel as well as think, for strategy stands a much better chance of success when managers' hearts are invested in the job. Feelings are not only a fact of life, but a factor in business; managers need to accommodate them.

Mr Brown, I'm sorry. (No, not the chancellor but Richard Brown, managing partner of Cognosis Consulting.) When you called, as arranged, my response lacked a degree of courtesy, a certain, shall we say, finesse. Oh, all right. I was downright bloody rude. The thing is, I was tired and emotional - not, I hasten to add, 'tired and emotional' (it was in the morning). I mean, my feelings outran my rational self.

But stuff like this does happen. Our emotional and professional lives cannot always sit in separate boxes. Feelings are not only a fact of life, but a factor in business. The irony of my terse exchange with Brown is that he knows this better than almost anyone. Cognosis has just completed some research demonstrating that the success or failure of a business strategy depends significantly on the emotional engagement of employees - and, above all, of front-line managers. A strategy that delivers has to win hearts as well as heads. And the trouble is that only one in 20 managers strongly agree that their company's strategy is 'exciting' or 'inspiring'.

read more...

Consuming conundrum

Mon, 26 Feb 2007 -1:00:00 GMT

Management Today - 26th February 2007

The greening of Wal-Mart, M&S and Tesco is good, but it's not enough. Saving the planet requires using less stuff - and that means you and me. The future of the environment depends on us...
Al Gore, presenting Prince Charles with a Harvard University award for raising environmental awareness, may have felt a little green himself - with envy. Not because of the award; after all, Al won it last year. Nor because of the attention. With the new, unbuttoned movie-star/guru-wonk/presidential-candidate-tease thing that Al's got going, his face is rarely off the front pages.

No, it was the motorcade. While Al probably got a cab, Charles' convoy - at least at one stage of his trip - comprised six limos, two SUVs and many police cars. And that's after he got off the plane (a transatlantic flight adds 1.5 tonnes of carbon per passenger to the atmosphere).

As part of his lecture-circuit patter, Gore tells a good joke about driving along the highway with his wife Tipper, and looking in the rear-view mirror to see... to see, well, nothing. 'You know how people who have lost an arm or a leg describe missing limb syndrome? Well, have you heard of missing motorcade syndrome?'

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New Statesman, We love capitalism

Mon, 19 Feb 2007 -1:00:00 GMT

New Statesman - 19th February 2007

Were trade unionists looking in the wrong place when they fought for better pay and shorter hours? The latest thinking, from left and right, is that having a stake in our work is the real key to human happiness.

Karl Marx famously predicted that capitalism would produce its own gravediggers. If so, they have been an awfully long time on the job. (Perhaps they knock off early.) In fact, there is no grave. Capitalism is alive and well, having triumphed on all fronts: economic, social and political. Like democracy, it has proved to be the worst way to run an economy - with the exception of all the others. Yet it seems unlikely that in a hundred years there will be any general need for the word capitalism at all. The only sixth-formers writing essays on "capitalism" or "socialism" in 2107 will be those studying history.

The right kind of person

Thu, 1 Feb 2007 -1:00:00 GMT

Management Today - 1st February 2007

A policy of hiring 'people like us' makes a firm sound snobbish and prejudiced. Wouldn't the old-fashioned notion of 'character' serve us better?

If you really want to shred someone's reputation, at least in the leafy Home Counties, all you need do is put it about that they are not 'PLU': People Like Us. This of course is ghastly, exclusive snobbery in which none of us right-thinking, MT-reading types would indulge. But it is now standard rhetoric in corporate circles to stress the importance of hiring 'the right kind of person' and the need for recruits to 'fit in with the company's culture'. At a recent event on service standards, one business leader said: 'You can provide people with the right skills, but you can't provide them with the right attitude and personality: they have to bring those with them.'

Brown's moral compass

Mon, 27 Nov 2006 -1:00:00 GMT

New Statesman - 27th November 2006

The man likely to be the next prime minister is as concerned with the "moralisation" of Britain as its modernisation. This is no empty soundbite. As a glance at his bookshelf would reveal, he is passionately and philosophically committed to a compassionate society

Gordon Brown hangs out with a dodgy crowd, bibliographically speaking. After his love-in with Jim Wallis, the pro-life evangelical Christian author of God's Politics, Brown has fallen for Gertrude Himmelfarb, Queen Bee of US conservative intellectuals and cheerleader for the Bush administration. She diagnoses the west as suffering from a "grievous moral disorder", for which "strenuous moral purgatives and rest oratives" are prescribed.

The Chancellor likes to parade both the depth and range of his reading: his speeches are littered with quotes from, or references to, Adam Smith, David Hume, T H Green, John F Kennedy, Milton, William Hazlitt, George Orwell and Voltaire - but also from an eclectic group of contemporary writers (mostly historians) including Linda Colley, Norman Davies, Roger Scruton and Ferdinand Mount. But his attraction to Himmelfarb's thesis in The Roads to Modernity: the British, French and American enlightenments is no fad.

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And now, the end is near

Wed, 25 Oct 2006 -1:00:00 GMT

Management Today - 25th October 2006

An orderly succession is hard to pull off. For Plcs, the short-term pain of a proper selection process must be endured
Nobody will be taking lessons in successful transition from this Government. For all the talk of a stable and orderly
handover of power from Tony Blair to Gordon Brown, the reality has been more like the run-up to a difficult wedding: strife-strewn, clannish, nervous and exhausting.

The people best placed to understand New Labour, according to the political theorist Peter Hennessy, are medievalists, with their know-ledge of court intrigue, tribal jealousies and baronial conflict. Certainly, that is how it has seemed so far. The Labour Party conference was a tinderbox. Cherie ‘Gordon is a liar' Blair simply dropped a match. read more...

The goblins that stalk us

Thu, 28 Sep 2006 -1:00:00 GMT

Management Today - 28th September 2006

We worry about losing our jobs when the risk is low, we fear crime even as the figures fall. But the costs of living in a scaredy-cat society are huge
I'm not afraid, insists the young apprentice. ‘You will be,' replies the wise mentor, ‘you will be.' Yes, it could be Alan Sugar. In fact (as the older, nerdier reader will have instantly spotted), the advice is proffered by an even more wizened survivor, Yoda, to earnest pupil Luke Skywalker in The Empire Strikes Back.

The exchange is a pithy summary of the British and American labour markets. Way back in the innocent, Keynesian, free-love, full- employment '60s we were not afraid. Now fear stalks the workplace. Since 9/11, it also hovers over every airport and Tube station. Parents are wracked with worry about paedophiles, speeding cars and playground bullies.

It is one of the greatest tragedies of our time. At a point in history when we are richer, healthier and safer than ever before, we tremble. We apply the force of reason to science, medicine and engineering but tremble before the gods of joblessness, disease and death. Jeremy Bentham, the ultra-rationalist philosopher, was so afraid of night-time goblins that his assistants were made to sleep by his door (an unenviable task, given Bentham's prodigious snoring). Today, we are all Benthams. By any sensible, rational yardstick, we should be luxuriating in our extraordinary fortune. But still the goblins stalk us.

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Could he just be Labour's future?

Mon, 25 Sep 2006 -1:00:00 GMT

New Statesman - 25th September 2006

The most important person at Labour's Manchester conference will be nowhere in sight. Like Thatcher and Blair before him, David Cameron is emerging as the politician most in tune with his time. Can Gordon Brown catch him?

"In contriving any system of government . . . every man ought to be supposed a knave, and to have no other end, in all his actions, than private interest." So wrote David Hume in 1742. He went on to admit that he was probably exaggerating, and that it was "strange, that a maxim should be true in politics which is false in fact". Surveying the wreckage from the recent power struggle at the apex of the government, it is hard not to think that, if anything, Hume understated his case. The leadership of the Labour Party - the ones who promised us that Things Can Only Get Better - has presided over an outbreak of knavery, name-calling and nastiness that has shaken even veteran Westminster players.

Raw, internecine battles are obviously bad for Labour. Women in particular are likely to be turned off by the sight of boys bickering. (It was striking that, at the height of the trouble, it was only women - Patricia Hewitt, Ruth Kelly and Harriet Harman - who tried to calm things down.)

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Richard Reeves - Our Imprint on the world

Thu, 3 Aug 2006 -1:00:00 GMT

Management Today - 3rd August 2006

We value work only if it has meaning and purpose – pay and perks come second. Being able to make a difference is the real reward for our endeavours

The lazy days of August are when we get the chance to read trashy novels, lie about on beaches or in parks and drink to the sunset. It is also, though, when we get the chance to think about our work. The rest of the year we just think about our jobs: the meetings, deadlines, projects and politics of the day-to-day. But on sun-kissed beaches, or after a jug or two of local vino, the submerged questions break the surface: What's it all for? Am I doing what I truly want? Where is the meaning in my work? September is the time of year when the highest proportion of people say they want to change their career direction. There is a growing research interest in ‘meaning at work', as it slowly dawns on professions and organisations that the motivational impact of pay and perks is eroding. According to research by US anthropologist Robert Wuthnow, a desire to find a job with more meaning is a more common cause for exit than the pursuit of a fatter pay packet. Four out of five say ‘making the world a better place' through their work was very important or absolutely essential to them. Seeing his opportunity, the leader of the Opposition, David Cameron, has called for a new focus on ‘ethical work'.

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Resilience - Weathering the storm

Mon, 24 Jul 2006 -1:00:00 GMT

New Statesman - 24th July 2006

Why are some people so much better than others at bouncing back?

Shit happens. Life throws emotional, physical and professional crises at all of us. Naturally, some lives are more insulated than others (no one would claim David Cameron had a tough start in life). But everyone can get knocked for six. What differentiates people is their ability to bounce back. Psychologists, social scientists and policy wonks are increasingly interested in the notion of resilience. This means, for people or communities, pretty much what it means for objects or substances, which, according to the OED, is being "able to recoil or spring back into shape after bending, stretching or being compressed".

The US psychologist Martin Seligman recently presented to the government's Strategy Unit a scheme designed to increase resilience among young people. The Penn Resiliency Programme gives adolescents the tools to cope with difficult circumstances by building optimism and enhancing longer-term thinking. It has proved highly effective as a protection against depression. But while resilience can be improved, a good chunk of it comes down to a variable that Seligman calls "grit". Similarly, studies of social mobility show that although there are a number of interventions that can improve life chances, there is always a substantial residual factor. Back in 1990, the British sociologist Doria Pilling turned the usual approaches on their head and studied not losers, but winners: people who had triumphed despite huge disadvantages. What she found was that these people simply had more drive, more self-belief and, above all, a greater capacity to withstand negative shocks. They were, in other words, highly resilient.

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A long look

Mon, 3 Jul 2006 -1:00:00 GMT

New Statesman - 3rd Jully 2006

The state must help people put money aside for the future

In the Asterix stories, Chief Vitalstatistix is afraid that the sky will fall on his head tomorrow. Fortunately for him, tomorrow never comes. But the reliable fact of tomorrow never coming is bad news when it comes to planning - and, in particular, to financial affairs. The Turner commission on pensions ranked the common inability to make "rational long-term savings decisions without encouragement" as the top barrier to better pensions provision. Turner drew on the growing field of behavioural economics to argue that people rank today's consumption irration ally highly, and so put off starting a pension until "tomorrow". This phenomenon is dubbed financial myopia, and it is the most important reason why the state has to intervene to encourage, or even compel, higher pensions savings.

Neuroscientists such as Colin Camerer and Brian Knutson have shown that when we make a decision relating to the immediate future, the "emotional" bits of our brain get fired up. When we make decisions with longer-term consequences, the "rational" parts are in the lead. Which pizza is a gut decision, which pension a cerebral one. The trouble is that few of us are the dessicated, calculating machines who populate economics textbooks: financial myopia is in part about the difficulty of controlling emotionally stirred desires for something right now, in favour of a conceptually constructed benefit in the future. There are other kinds of myopia at work, too: young people all over the country are deciding whether to revise for exams or go out partying. Exam revision is a test of the ability to rank the future ahead of the present. Click here to read the full article...

Neither here nor there

Sat, 1 Jul 2006 -1:00:00 GMT

Management Today - 1st July 2006

Kneejerk reactions to absenteeism just make it worse. What's needed is clear direction, a culture of trust, and the odd afternoon off to watch football.
Absence supposedly makes the heart grow fonder, but not at work.

Absenteeism is a perennial topic of conversation in HR circles (usually at three-day off-site conferences). So it was inevitable that 'absence manage- ment' would emerge as a new area of expertise - and that companies would pop up offering to take over this unappealing task for you, leaving the busy executive free to concentrate on what we should properly call 'presence management'.

These firms, whose names always include words such as 'health', 'assistance', 'active' or 'positive', are waging war against a great British tradition: the sickie. In the run-up to the World Cup, one company, Active Health Partners - the name itself makes you feel a bit nauseous - produced one of those estimates for the loss to UK Plc from England games. The firm's calculation was that £100 million would be lost for every day that England was in the tournament. Leave aside the ludicrous methodology of the 'research'. read more...

Our fetish for feedback

Thu, 1 Jun 2006 -1:00:00 GMT

Management Today - 1st June 2006

Is 360-degree assessment a triumph for democracy and transparency, or an opportunity for mutual back-scratching and sly rubbishing of your rivals?
How's my writing? Call MT and ask for Andy, my editor. He's the one who took out all the good bits. We live and work, after all, in an age of continuous commentary on our performance. Capitalism has passed from industrialisation through capitalisation to professionalisation.

We're in a new era - the feed-back phase.

In the old days, if anybody assessed our work, it was the boss - probably over a pint. As far as possible, British companies operated a 'don't ask, don't tell' policy with regard to performance. Some things were better left unsaid. read more...

'The New Intellectuals', RSA Journal, June 2006,

Thu, 1 Jun 2006 -1:00:00 GMT

RSA Journal - 1st June 2006

Try a word association exercise with the noun ‘intellectual’ and the chances are some of the following will pop up: coffee, philosophy, Sartre, black polo necks, pretention and perhaps some other, less family-friendly terms. Intellectuals have long enjoyed a love-hate relationship with their public, provoking admiration and antipathy in roughly equal measure. In this country there is also a strain of criticism that sees the idea of the intellectual as somehow unsound or ‘not cricket’. “No people,” wrote Anthony Hartley in his 1963 book A State of England, “has ever distrusted and despised the intellect and intellectuals more than the British.”

A similar lament is that “there are just no intellectuals any more” or that, if there are, they are “not taken as seriously as they used to be and/or ought to be”. These views are subjected to a magisterial dismissal by Stefan Collini in his new book Absent Minds: Intellectuals in Britain, the subject of his recent RSA lecture. Collini points out that the absence of intellectuals, or of proper respect for intellectuals, has been the subject of hand-wringing since the word entered the vocabulary a century ago. He also shows that those wringing the hardest are those who can themselves only be seen as intellectuals – TS Eliot, George Orwell and AJP Taylor, among others.

Collini accepts that there is some resistance to the label: “The very word irritates people,” he writes. “They sense pretentiousness, arrogance – on most of its outings, ‘so-called’ travels with it like a bodyguard, never far away even if not immediately in view.”

But we should not confuse linguistic distaste with real absence. Collini argues that reports of the death of the intellectual are much exaggerated and that each generation throws up a new cadre of the breed. But what he calls the “absence thesis” – that intellectuals are becoming extinct or impotent – keeps its salience, too. He is especially cutting about journalism, suggesting that the topic of intellectuals “seems to lend itself to 800 words of confident opinionatedness with fatal facility…Turning out a piece on the theme of ‘intellectuals’ (especially on their decline or disappearance) might almost seem the would-be columnist’s equivalent of passing the driving test.”

It is not only journalists, of course. Professor Russell Jacoby, in The Last Intellectuals, the theme of his own RSA lecture in 2002; Professor Richard Posner in Public Intellectuals: A Study in Decline; and Professor Andrew Gamble in his article ‘Public Intellectuals and the Public Domain’ (New Formations 53) have all offered their versions of the absence thesis. Again, all three must be defined as intellectuals if the term means anything. Collini himself, a Cambridge professor of intellectual history, a fellow of the British Academy and a regular voice in the Times Literary Supplement, the London Review of Books and the Guardian, fits his own label. Here, then, an intellectual is castigating other intellectuals for denying that intellectuals exist.

It may be that there are different levels of public engagement by different species of intellectual, with historians and scientists enjoying a much higher profile, for example, than philosophers. Adam Swift, an Oxford philosopher who does try to engage with a wider public agenda, has said: “The politicians think that the philosophers are only interested in talking to each other in arcane journals, which is mostly true. And the philosophers think that the politicians have no interest in real philosophical concepts, which is also mostly true.”

I think, therefore… what am I?
Where Collini broadly agrees with the absent-ists is in definition. For him, the role of an intellectual involves four key elements: a level of achievement in a certain field of creative, analytical or scholarly endeavour – a ‘qualifying activity’; the existence of media through which they can reach beyond a specialist audience; the expression by the individual concerned of ideas that “engage with some of the general concerns of those publics”; and finally the “establishment of a reputation for being likely to have important and interesting things to say”.

Similarly, Posner defines the public intellectual as one who “writes for the general public, or at least for a broader than merely academic or specialist audience, on ‘public affairs’ – on political matters in the broadest sense of that word, a sense that may include cultural matters when they are viewed under the aspect of ideology, ethics or politics”.

The recent addition of the prefix ‘public’ to the term ‘intellectual’ seems intended to relate the work of the individual to broader social, political and cultural issues but also, perhaps, to offer a starker contrast with the ‘private’ work undertaken within academia.

The dangers of departmentalising
The role of universities as incubators of intellectuals is contentious. Most of the absent-ists see the inter-related trends of deepening specialisation and increased accountability as crippling the capacity of the academy to generate intellectuals. Scholars faced with increasing levels of control and performance management, for example through the Research Assessment Exercise (RAE), are under pressure to publish in peer-reviewed journals and so have little incentive to reach out to a broader audience. “It will be harder in future,” writes Gamble, “for new generations of academics to choose to devote time to becoming public intellectuals and engage with the public domain, rather than concentrating on building their careers within the closed, self-referential networks of their professional discipline.”

Collini is unimpressed. He points out that specialisation anxieties have recurred with almost mundane regularity. In the 1930s and 1940s, the philosopher-intellectual AD Lindsay railed against the dangers of academic ‘departmentalism’ and helped establish both the Oxford PPE (Politics, Philosophy and Economics) degree and Keele University’s ‘foundation year’ initiative.

It is too early to say whether greater academic accountability will drive down levels of public engagement. And there can be little doubt that the RAE has increased both the quantity and quality of research in most disciplines. Academic life still offers more time and space for intellectual work than any other area, especially for those scholars who win a reputation for quality work. Take Collini himself as an example: his book was made possible by a year’s residence at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, a year’s sabbatical funded by the British Academy and a term’s leave funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Board. The production of such high-quality work requires a substantial investment of time and energy. And where, other than in academia, is such thinking space available?

But it may be that Collini, himself an admirably broad-minded scholar, understates the potential of the long-term trend to ever-greater specialisation to increase the distance between the skills and motivations required for professional, academic success and those driving intellectual endeavours. He does not discuss Theodore Zeldin, who left academia in order to become an intellectual (he has been named one of Le Monde’s top 100 thinkers), and who has worried convincingly about the narrowness of college life.

In his book Happiness, he parodies vividly what has happened in the academic world: “To remain sane, scholars had to become willing prisoners in a tiny cell, because here at least they could lay down the law about some tiny fragment of truth, like the habits of the earwig or the foreign policy of medieval Zanzibar. A few ambitious ones might grow dissatisfied with being master, or mistress, of only a small domain, and they might build up…grand theories…applicable to other domains, and their imperialism kept the academic world simmering in permanent nervous conflict.”

Making a mark on the media
Zeldin’s ‘imperialists’ will often use the general media for waging their campaigns; indeed an important defining characteristic of the intellectual is the ability to communicate via the op-ed pages or broadcast media. But one of the concerns of the absent-ists is that the short-termism and the celebrity obsession of the contemporary media leave little room for the considered fragment of intellectual wisdom. Collini points out, with some force, that the celebrity/intellectual distinction is false, given that successful intellectuals become celebrities in their own right – think Richard Dawkins, Germaine Greer, Martha Nussbaum or Stephen Hawking.

The real problem with the media, though, is not trivialisation but polemicisation. There is still plenty of space for intellectuals to opine; indeed, the increase in the size of publications and the expanding column inches of opinion have, if anything, made this market bigger. But the need to be provocative in order to secure a slot has increased. The desire for a ‘strong line’, controversy and easily understood standpoints, even in the serious media, militates against thoughtful discussion. “There is a real fear of being distorted,” says Swift. “So sometimes you just don’t bother.” The pressure to strike a pose is almost irresistible. Polemics, postures and soundbites are what the media wants, and so a person or institution that wants a media profile has to deliver. Meanwhile the culture of academia, based on slowly produced, carefully peer-reviewed journals, is going in the opposite direction.

Collini reminds us that being an intellectual has always meant having to shuttle between the ‘two poles’ of specialised scholarly work (“the sea-wall of scholarly reputation”) and public engagement (“confidently offloading opinions on those topics which the editors of features-pages deem to be the issues of the hour”). But with the former becoming more specialised and the latter more polemicised, the distance between them has become greater. Succeeding in both – necessary to fulfil the role of the intellectual – has therefore become harder.

The risk in these conditions is that barriers to entry are lowered, so that even if the prevalence and status of intellectuals remains unchanged, the quality of their product diminishes. Collini assumes that intellectuals engage in a ‘qualifying activity’ and have attained a “level of achievement in an activity which is esteemed for the non-instrumental, creative, analytical or scholarly capacities it involved”. But he also admits that prominent journalists can attract the label, “especially if they write books or are associated with general ideas”.

He mentions Polly Toynbee, the Guardian columnist, but there are dozens of other journalists who write books or associate with ideas (whether the ideas like it or not). There is a real question about whether this licenses them as intellectuals. And while Collini refrains from making his own judgements about when and where the label of intellectual is deserved, if we think the term a useful one, there is surely a case for examining the justice or otherwise of its attachment. Otherwise the danger is that ‘intellectual’ becomes a devalued currency – which wouldn’t matter except that, as Collini so convincingly shows, everyone’s still buying it.

But if we need to hold intellectuals to high standards, we should also lower our expectations – not about the quality of their work, but about the ability of any one person, however brilliant, to act as a one-stop solution for our problems. TS Eliot suggested that: “It is perhaps too much to expect of any man to possess both specialised scientific power and wisdom.” In fact, it is too much to expect anyone to possess wisdom at all, especially with regard to some of our most intractable public issues. Climate change is an area of public concern requiring specialist knowledge in international law, business, macroeconomics, microeconomics, anthropology, psychology, meteorology and oceanography. Similar lists can be drawn up for international migration, intellectual property and pension reform. Being wise in all these areas is beyond the power of mortal individuals.

The importance of collaboration
Public intellectual work must be seen as a collective, rather than merely individual, activity. This is partly because there are vast reservoirs of knowledge in one field of work that are entirely untapped by another. Don Swanson, a library scientist at the University of Chicago, argued 20 years ago that researchers too often ignore the work of their predecessors in their own field and their contemporaries in other fields – a resource he called “undiscovered public knowledge”. Swanson was referring to published work, but there is plenty of such undiscovered public knowledge in the heads of strangers from other disciplines or walks of life.

Bringing different, even conflicting, viewpoints together is also a vital intellectual activity, at least if truth-seeking is the goal. John Stuart Mill wrote in his famous On Liberty that, occasionally, one side of an argument is entirely right and the other entirely wrong. But he insisted that: “A commoner case [is] when conflicting doctrines, instead of being one true and the other false, share the truth between them.” The challenge is to create spaces and places where the sharing and generation of truth can take place, and to shape processes to ensure that the resulting insights are turned to progressive ends.

In theory, academic institutions are good places for such exchange. In practice, both specialisation and research competition make academia as individualistic an environment as many merchant banks. The media is even more of a sole-trader environment – just count the number of shared bylines in your newspaper. Think-tanks could (and sometimes do) offer an idea-sharing space. But they tend, in practice, to draw repeatedly on the same sources of information and inspiration, their seminars attracting the usual crowd of intellectually inclined MPs, broadsheet columnists, lobby groups and – sometimes – a sprinkling of academics. And the engagement is rarely sustained for much longer than the time required for a sandwich lunch.

An alternative approach is to establish a commission to examine a particular issue. These often succeed in getting a wide range of views and expertise, and can take some time over their deliberations. But commissions face a different problem. The need to find a final form of words to which all the members can publicly sign up leads to a successive watering down of proposals, often to a fairly low common denominator. This significantly reduces impact.

The secret to making a success of such commissions is two-fold: getting the right array of knowledge and skill together in the first place, and then ensuring that the whole is greater than the sum of the carefully assembled parts. Such success requires a high degree of institutional intelligence in the ‘host’ organisation, courageous leadership and a willingness to admit disagreements publicly.

Collini may be right to say that individual intellectuals remain plentiful. But this is only half the story. Public intellectual labour is now most effectively carried out not by solo scholars, but by smart groups. Rather than being too concerned about intellectual individuals, we should be focused on the creation and sustenance of public intellectual institutions, with the reach to bring the best minds together, the skills to extract from them a powerful version of the truth, and the capacity to put that truth to work in the service of human betterment.

Richard Reeves is a writer and co-founder of Intelligence Agency. His book, John Stuart Mill: A Life, is forthcoming from Atlantic Books

Further reading
Click on the links to read ‘In Defence of Politics’ (RSA Journal, April 2004, 18-21) or ‘The Sun Sets on the Enlightenment’ (RSA Journal, December 2002, 24-27) by Richard Reeves

To read the transcript or listen to the recording of Stefan Collini’s lecture at the RSA on ‘Absent Minds? The question of intellectuals in Britain’, please visit www.theRSA.org/events

New Statesman, In search of the good life

Mon, 22 May 2006 -1:00:00 GMT

New Statesman - 22nd May 2006

Books about happiness are pouring off the presses, but we still haven't cracked the secret of well-being. Is our culture of instant gratification the problem? Is it the job of the state to make us feel better? Richard Reeves ponders some suggestions

"Ask yourself if you are happy," John Stuart Mill wrote, "and you cease to be so." If Mill was right - and he was - bibliophiles are in trouble. Books about happiness are pouring off the presses. Happiness is being poked and prodded from every disciplinary direction: political scientists, economists, psychologists, philosophers and historians are all having a go. Soon bookshops will have to open separate "Happiness" sections.

Click here to read the full article

When lying is acceptable

Fri, 5 May 2006 -1:00:00 GMT

Management Today - 5th May 2006

Honesty and openness are of course commendable in business, but leaders have to tread a fine line: to tell the whole truth can sometimes be unhelpful

If you've never told a lie, please move on to the next excellent article. This column is reserved for those of us who have, whether in a personal or professional capacity, told a porkie or two. Or indeed a whole pig-farm's worth. Still here? Thought so. We are all sinners in this regard. If anyone ever tells you they have always been truthful, don't believe a word of it.

Lying is part of the human condition. Many lies are compassionate. The right answer to 'does my bum look big in this?' when you have already arrived at the party is not yes, even if it is the truthful one. Others, in desperate circumstances, are acts of heroism. 'Do you know where the Frank family is?' in wartime Amsterdam is a possible example. We accept, then, that although truth is generally a good thing, it is not always so. This conditional relationship with truth is visible in politics, business and the media. Nobody seriously expects the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. Outright deceptions are generally not tolerated. So often in politics, from John Profumo to Bill Clinton, it is the lie about the event that deals the fatal blow, not the event itself. A failure to deliver the whole truth is not necessarily so damaging. read more...

A portrait of Mill in Prospect magazine to mark the bicentenary of his birth in May 2006.

Mon, 1 May 2006 -1:00:00 GMT

Prospect Magazine - May 2006

Mill left no systematic legacy— there is no "Millism." But 200 years after his birth, his liberalism is still relevant. And Britain's greatest ever public intellectual was often surprisingly contrarian

Richard Reeves

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Richard Reeves's book "John Stuart Mill: A Life" is forthcoming from Atlantic Books
In May 1873, the British establishment was shaken by a bitter row. It concerned the legacy of John Stuart Mill, who had just died. The Times had printed an obituary which was an exercise in posthumous character assassination. It was written by Abraham Hayward, a Tory lawyer and fierce critic of liberals, feminists and philosophers. Mill (who was guilty on all three counts) had been a target of Hayward's vitriol ever since the two had faced each other in the London Debating Society half a century earlier and Mill, in the words of one observer, had "gone over Hayward as a ploughshare goes over a mouse."

The Thunderer's obit caused a retaliatory strike by the liberal cleric Stopford Brooke, during his Sunday sermon at St James's. This provoked Hayward to print an even more savage attack, focusing on an incident from 1823, when the 17-year-old Mill had been arrested for the distribution of literature on contraception. More articles and pamphlets appeared, on both sides, and the controversy raged for weeks. One of the unfortunate by-products of the row was the decision by William Gladstone to withdraw his support from a committee to erect a monument to Mill's memory, an act of cowardice for which he has been condemned by even his most eulogistic biographers. It was Gladstone who called Mill "the saint of rationalism," which, though meant affectionately, contributed to the false picture of Mill handed down to us today: a boy crammed with facts who grew into an ascetic, dry, humourless, sexless, lofty intellectual.

The furious exchanges following Mill's death point to the inadequacy of this caricature. Mill's greatness does not in fact lie in the power of his intellectual endeavour: he is far from being Britain's greatest thinker. Nor does it lie in his political skills—by traditional criteria he was a political failure. The greatness of John Stuart Mill lies in his refusal to separate thought and action. He was a man who, like his godson Bertrand Russell, went to jail for his beliefs. He said that "ideas have consequences"—but was rarely content to limit himself to the former.

He wrote one of the definitive 19th-century works on political economy—and also worked tirelessly for Irish land reform. He produced a landmark argument for equal rights for women, and throughout his life pushed for legal and political reform on their behalf—Millicent Fawcett described him as the "principal originator" of the women's movement. Mill made, in his famous On Liberty, a timeless case for freedom of speech and action that has inspired generation after generation around the world. But as an elderly MP he also led the successful campaign against Disraeli's attempt to ban demonstrations in public parks, especially Hyde park—a corner of which remains a symbol of free speech to this day.

Mill was a man who saw little value in ideas unless they were tethered to human improvement, and was brilliantly successful at using his intellectual stature to influence the politics and culture of his age. He is the greatest public intellectual in British history. This fact—or claim—alone makes his life worthy of re-examination in the light of the current debate about the status of public thinkers, prompted by the Prospect league tables of public intellectuals and books such as Stefan Collini's Absent Minds. Moreover, this May marks the bicentenary of Mill's birth, allowing his admirers the world over to gather in conferences and seminars, including a three-day Mill-fest at University College London.

Mill occupies an iconic status in contemporary political discourse. Now that he is no longer seen as dangerously partisan, his name is dropped by politicians and commentators of all stripes. He was often quoted, for example, during the debate on the ban on smoking in public places—on both sides, which would have pleased him. Simon Jenkins, opposing the ban in the Guardian, quoted Mill's famous harm principle: "The only purpose for which power can rightfully be exercised over any member of a civilised community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others." Chris Huhne MP cited the same principle in favour of the ban. Mill's ghost has hovered over many such debates. The 1960s dispute between the Wolfenden committee and Lord Devlin about the legal status of homosexuality turned into an argument about the robustness of Mill's definition of liberty.

Another reason for Mill's appearance in 21st-century political speeches and op-ed pages was his ability to coin a telling phrase. He was an early master of the soundbite: "Better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied; better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied"; "There remain no legal slaves except the mistress of every house"; England is "the ballast of Europe, France its sail"; and, of course, "I never meant to say that the Conservatives are generally stupid. I meant to say that stupid people are generally Conservative."

But it was Mill's lifelong attempt to define and promote individual liberty which most powerfully calls us back to his work, not least because it represents his break for freedom from his own upbringing. His childhood was an experiment in rational utilitarianism conducted by his father, James Mill, and godfather Jeremy Bentham. Thanks to the intense, bullying attentions of his father he became an infant prodigy. He was steeped in classical language, history and culture, and an accomplished logician and political economist by his mid-teens. He also had no friends, no toys and little love. At 20 he suffered a "mental crisis," from which he eventually recovered with the help of Wordsworth's poetry. But the result of his breakdown was the beginning of a long, slow desertion from utilitarian ranks. Compare his views about Socrates, fools and pigs with this from Bentham: "Call them monks, call them soldiers, call them machines; so they were but happy ones, I should not care."

Mill wrote a famous essay called "Utilitarianism," but he ended up not as a proselytiser on behalf of the utilitarian principle of "the greatest happiness of the greatest number" but as the most eloquent advocate of human freedom ever to write in the English language. Mill was a second-rate utilitarian, but a first-rate liberal. He retained many of his father's and Bentham's views about psychology, especially that the avoidance of pain and seeking of pleasure were the primary human springs for action. But he never saw happiness as more important than freedom—an important consideration today, when a new science of happiness is being fashioned in university economics and psychology departments. He quoted Bentham's opinion that "pushpin was as good as poetry," but only as evidence of his godfather's short-sightedness.

Mill's philosophical vision derives both its power and its weakness from his various attempts to knit together a number of diverse threads. He certainly wanted to preserve a space for individual action which should be free from interference. But he also wanted to fill the idea of freedom with a rich conception of a good life. He was convinced that people should be masters and mistresses of their own lives—but also that some forms of life are better than others. The resulting zigzag trajectory of Mill's work destroys any attempt to construct a coherent system from his voluminous writings (the newly reissued Collected Works run to 33 volumes). But Mill would not have been too bothered. For all his francophilia, he had an English mistrust of philosophical systems claiming to provide, once and for all, the answers to all economic, social and political difficulties. He learned from the sensible bits of Comte and Fourier, but it is impossible to imagine him as grand pontiff of a new religion of humanity. He liked one of Marx's later speeches—on working-class attitudes towards the Franco- Prussian war—but would have abhorred Marxism. There is no "Millism."

But if he left no systematic legacy, he addressed a number of issues and in a fashion that remains topical—often startlingly so. When is freedom of speech trumped by national security? What is the place of religion in secular politics? When and on what basis can the state interfere in the behaviour of individuals? How should gambling, drinking and prostitution be licensed or regulated? Mill was asking and answering these questions 150 years ago.

Thinking politicians are aware of the attractions of Mill's liberal heritage. David Miliband calls himself a "liberal socialist"; David Cameron is a "liberal conservative." David Willetts has argued that the Conservatives need to regroup around a concept of human liberty drawn from Mill. The Liberal Democrats are trying to work out what it means to be liberal and several of their leading thinkers are dusting off their Mill. Roy Hattersley has been a long-standing Mill fan (although stretches him too far towards socialism). Gordon Brown, however, took a more critical view in his Hugo Young memorial lecture last December, rejecting Mill's "extreme view of liberty" as a "crude libertarianism" and accusing him of underestimating the importance of community, belonging and collective loyalties.

But Mill's intellectual life was spent in rebellion against the individualist philosophies of the 18th century. He said of his own father that "as Brutus was called the last of the Romans, so was he the last of the 18th century." It is true that libertarians often try to claim Mill as their own. Yet the briefest acquaintance with Mill's work shows that his version of human freedom went far beyond non-interference—what Isaiah Berlin called "negative liberty." Mill saw an important role for government, believing that people needed educational and economic resources to lead their lives along paths of their own construction.

Brown should add to his sizeable reading pile both On Liberty and "Centralisation," a little-read 1862 essay by Mill on the need to protect voluntary organisations and local initiative—vital incubators of liberty and diversity—from the power of the central state. Labour should not allow Mill's inspiring vision of human freedom to be stolen by the Tories. John Stuart Mill was an eclectic, open-minded thinker. But he was emphatically, irrefutably, of the left.

When Mill entered parliament in 1865, Disraeli exclaimed: "Ah, the finishing governess!" The barb captured something of Mill's moralistic tone. But the comment also reflects his position as the pre-eminent intellectual of the time, as the thinking man's (and woman's) writer. Walter Bagehot described his position with regard to 19th-century political economy as "monarchical." More recently, Stefan Collini has written that his "account of the nature and methods of 'science,' in the broadest sense, attained an authority in England that was positively papal." And Arthur Balfour—a harsh late 19th-century critic of Mill—complained that his authority in the universities "was comparable to that wielded 40 years earlier by Hegel in Germany and in the middle ages by Aristotle."

How did he come to acquire this status? Like most public intellectuals, he had one breakthrough book that brought him to wide attention. He did not expect his "scholastic" System of Logic, published in 1843, to sell very well. In fact, it sold out within a few weeks, becoming the standard text at both Oxford and Cambridge and retaining canonical status for most of the rest of the century. Mill's success rested on three factors. First, he wrote clearly and attractively. Second, he managed to attract liberal opinion without provoking too much opposition from the church, by simply putting to one side questions of supernatural power. Third, he appealed to the Romantics by giving poetry and art a vital role in establishing many of the goals for human improvement while remaining firmly on the side of reason and science against "intuitionism"—the idea that certain truths are known a priori without any need for experimental proof.

Mill used his new status as the brain of liberal Britain to beat away at the complacency of the ruling class in the face of the tragedy of the Irish famine. In 1846 he wrote 52 newspaper articles—39 of them headed "The Condition of Ireland." For Mill, the Irish situation was "the most unqualified instance of signal failure which the practical genius of the English people has exhibited." He tore into schemes to promote emigration, compensate landlords, or offer paltry amounts of poor relief to starving peasants. Redistribution of common land was the only solution to Ireland's problems. And he boiled over at Victoria's proclamation of a day of devout fasting as a "piece of empty mummery… on the occasion of a public calamity."

Mill's torrent of words and argument made not the slightest difference to policy towards Ireland. As he recognised in his autobiography (a classic work in its own right), here he "entirely failed." It was one of the many moments in Mill's life when he was made sharply aware of the limits of outside influence on the House of Commons and on government policy. Public intellectuals can help to shape the general climate of ideas, but are rarely able to effect specific changes in law: one of the reasons why Mill later became an MP.

The Irish debacle encouraged Mill to complete his Principles of Political Economy, published in 1848, which was a bestseller running to 32 editions. Most of the work is an eloquent restatement of Ricardo. But there are a couple of prophetic flashes. First, he spoke of the environmental dangers of economic growth and advocated a "stationary state" in the economy once sufficient affluence was secured. Second, Mill issued a sharp warning about the long-run risks of economic competition. Unlike many Victorian intellectuals, he was not opposed to factories and trains and real income growth. But he was concerned, like Keynes 80 years later, that the habits of competition might become entrenched: "I am not charmed with the ideal of life held out by those who think that the normal state of human beings is that of struggling to get on; that the trampling, crushing, elbowing, and treading on each other's heels… are the most desirable lot of human kind."

Mill himself was freed from the need for any trampling or elbowing thanks to a comfortable position as an "examiner" with the East India Company—a kind of civil servant governing the colony (which he never visited) by remote control. The dispatches from India House, as well as giving him a secure income and filling at most half of each working day, also gave him a daily lesson in the need for practicality. By his own reckoning, the Indian work was a defence against the debilitating perfectionism of so many intellectuals: "I became practically conversant with the difficulties of moving bodies of men, the necessities of compromise, the art of sacrificing the non-essential to preserve the essential. I learnt how to obtain the best I could, when I could not obtain everything."

But Indian affairs had little influence on Mill's thinking. He was certainly no supporter of Indian independence or democracy. For Mill, self-government and democracy had to be earned—and should only be granted to a nation or class that had reached the necessary level of social and intellectual maturity. So while he supported self-government for Canada, he felt differently about less developed nations: "I myself have always been for a good stout Despotism—for governing Ireland like India. But it cannot be done. The spirit of democracy has got too much head there, too prematurely." These "imperialist" views (expressed privately, it should be added) are foreign to the modern liberal mind. But if Mill was an imperialist, he was also deeply internationalist, with a particularly profound (and rare) knowledge of the history, culture and politics of France (he is buried in Avignon) and a fascination with the emerging democracy of the US. He constantly berated his own countrymen for their insularity and unwillingness to learn from other nations. The very conservatism which protected the nation from revolution also immunised it against innovation. "England has never had any general break-up of old associations," he complained. "Hence the extreme difficulty of getting any ideas into its stupid head."

But Mill was respectful of the thoughtful conservatives of his era. He admired Wordsworth. And although he fell out with Thomas Carlyle—over what Carlyle famously called the "Nigger question" in Jamaica—he drew on his ideas about individual character. The opium-raddled Coleridge provided Mill with several important insights: the need to understand what institutions stand for before simply sweeping them away; the potential for an intellectual elite—what the poet called a "clerisy"—to guide the nation; the importance of respecting what Goethe called the "many-sided" nature of most problems; and the unifying significance of national culture.

This last strain in his thinking has a particular resonance today, given the attempt to reconcile the collective idea of "Britishness" with a diverse and individualistic culture—and it is another reason why Gordon Brown should reconsider his view of Mill. Mill was an enemy of jingoism and the adulation of military heroes—he persistently attacked Wellington, a national hero. But he did see the need for a common national locus, whether provided by religions, secular political values or individuals: "In all political societies which have had a durable existence, there has been some fixed point; something which men agreed in holding sacred… We mean a feeling of common interest among those who live under the same government… that one part of the community do not consider themselves as foreigner with regard to another part… that they… feel that they are one people, that their lot is cast together."

Mill's willingness to take conservative ideas seriously lost him countless friends and allies. On topical political issues, Mill was still usually to be found on the radical side of the argument, being in favour of extending the suffrage, removing all aristocratic and ecclesiastical privileges, introducing compulsory national education and repealing the corn laws. In some areas, such as his insistence on equality for women, he was far ahead of even advanced liberal opinion. But Mill was also happy to disagree with the liberal consensus. He supported the secret ballot when the majority were against it—but become an opponent as it gained in popularity, to the fury of his old radical friends. His opposition to voting in secret was, nonetheless, consistent with his mature reflections on human liberty. The danger with voting in secret was that people would vote out of self-interest rather than the broader public interest. And as individuals, people should stand up for their beliefs rather than scribble them furtively in booths.

Mill relished his reputation as a contrarian, even before he become famous. His friend Henry Cole, the man behind the 1851 Great Exhibition—reported a conversation with Mill: "With utilitarians, said he, he was a mystic—with mystics a utilitarian—with logicians a sentimentalist and with the latter a logician."

These apparent contradictions in Mill's thinking also reflect the fact that he was often operating on two different timescales. On the one hand, he was concerned to bring about certain changes in the short term—wider suffrage, greater freedom of speech, the rationalisation of welfare and government, freer trade—and on the other was concerned about the longer-term consequences of the measures he was advocating: collective mediocrity, a tyranny of public opinion, an overweaning state and wasteful competitiveness. He supported the centralising poor law amendments, while writing about the dangers of state centralisation. He supported a wider electorate (not quite universal—he wanted a basic educational qualification), but worried that mass democracy might drive down standards in public life. He wanted the widest possible dissemination of ideas, but was concerned about how public opinion might hamper freedom just as effectively as despotic governments.

Mill's concern with the way today's solutions could be creating tomorrow's problems finds its fullest expression in his most famous and enduring work, On Liberty. Plenty of ground is covered, including a rich argument for freedom of speech and a meditation on the role of government. It is most famous, however, for the "simple" harm principle cited earlier, which guides the limits of interference in a person's actions. But the harm principle is a poor summary of the essay taken as a whole, and a small ingredient in Mill's liberalism. The principle is, to this day, a powerful counterpoint to paternalism. But for Mill, liberty consists of much more than being left alone. It requires choice-making by the individual. "He who lets the world… choose his plan of life for him, has no need of any other faculty than the ape-like one of imitation," he writes. "He who chooses his plan for himself employs all his faculties." For Mill, a good life must be a chosen life.

Mill's principal target was not state coercion. A potentially bigger threat to individual freedom was the constricting effects of public opinion, or what he variously called "the despotism of custom" and the "tyranny of public opinion." Mill had been greatly influenced by Tocqueville's assessment that American democracy and freedom were homogenising, rather than diversifying, opinions and lifestyles.

For some, the value of the essay was immediate. Charles Kingsley, the radical clergyman, wrote to Mill to say that reading On Liberty had made him "a clearer-headed, braver-minded man on the spot." But the general reception in 1859 was cooler (although not as cool as for The Origin of Species, published in the same year). Many agreed with Macaulay that Mill was overstating in On Liberty the dangers of conformism and the power of public opinion to hobble individuality. The Whig historian scribbled in his diary after reading the essay that "He is really crying 'Fire!' in Noah's flood." Mill knew this, arguing that On Liberty contained more lessons for the future and that the danger of an "oppressive yoke of uniformity in opinion and practice, might easily have looked chimerical to those who looked more at present facts than at tendencies." There may also be a biographical factor at work here: Mill spent most of his adult life in love with Harriet Taylor, who was inconveniently married to someone else. The prevailing social mores about divorce was probably the greatest barrier to their union; they were able to marry only in 1851, after her husband's death two years earlier.

Some modern critics—especially those hostile to the excesses of the 1960s—accuse Mill of undervaluing in On Liberty the importance of social custom and order as a source of security and even freedom. I think Mill would have conceded some of this argument—as we have seen, he argued elsewhere for a consensus around certain "fixed points." In On Liberty he writes of "moral disapprobation in the proper sense of the term" acting as a useful check against anti-social behaviour (such as a father squandering his wages on gambling). It is true that he stressed the tyrannical dangers of opinion and custom, rather than their positive aspects. But the point is that "whatever crushes individuality is despotism, by whatever name it may be called." The individual can be lost in the crowd as well as crushed by the state.

Mill's liberalism is also weakened, in some eyes, by his unrealistically optimistic view of human nature. He assumes that humans are conditioned to engage in a continuous search for personal development via "experiments in living," resulting in a great diversity of lifestyles, personalities and viewpoints. The 19th- century Mill certainly has a rosier view of humanity than most of his 21st-century readers, at least in part because of the events of the intervening century. It is this optimism which explains why so many thinkers—John Gray is a striking contemporary example—are initially inspired by Mill, only to turn against him later. His unquenchable optimism is attractive to the hopeful young but often fails to survive mature scepticism.

On Liberty also addresses freedom of thought and discussion in terms that remain instructive. His view is that progress depends on truth, that the truth is most likely to emerge from a constant collision of opinions, and that freedom of speech is necessary to generate such collisions. There are three essential components to his argument that free discussion is truth-generative. First, any opinion may be true, no matter how eccentric it seems at first, and so to suppress it is to slow the march of knowledge. Second, few opinions contain the whole truth, while many contain a "portion" of it—and only by bringing them into contact and conflict can any approximation of the whole truth be constructed. In an echo of Coleridge, he declares that usually "conflicting doctrines, instead being one true and the other false, share the truth between them." Third, even if a received doctrine happens to be true, it becomes less vitally so unless subjected to open critique: "both teachers and learners go to sleep at their post, as soon as there is no enemy in the field." (He certainly would have opposed the jailing of David Irving.)

Mill insists that religion should be subject to the same criticism as any other system of thought, regardless of the offence caused. I think we can be confident that Mill would be disappointed by the progress made on this issue in the last century and a half, and by the regress of the last half decade. He certainly anticipated those who wanted to turn only "intemperate" expressions of religious criticism into crimes. Mill gave no ground, pointing out that serious offence is taken "whenever the attack is telling and powerful." There is no doubt where he would stand on the current debates on religious hatred, or on publication of the cartoons of Muhammad.

There are weaknesses in Mill's free speech arguments, of course. It is not clear, as Bernard Williams pointed out in his last book, Truth and Truthfulness, that an absolutely free exchange of opinion is indeed the surest route to the production of truth, or its dissemination. But Mill's case has considerable force in the contemporary debates about speech crimes. And it is all the stronger for its reliance on instrumental outcomes rather than on "human rights" grounds. I am not at all sure that I have a "right" to freedom of speech, but I am absolutely clear that it is to the detriment of us all if I am denied it.

Mill's liberalism also made him a staunch advocate of local government and associations rather than central control. He saw the primary role of central government as "a central depository, and active circulator and diffuser, of the experience resulting from many trials." He thought parents should be obliged to educate their children, but was fiercely opposed to a central, state-run education system: a "national curriculum" would have appalled him.

Mill being Mill, setting out his intellectual stall so beautifully in On Liberty was not enough. Six years after the publication of his great book, he stood for the constituency of Westminster, which he represented for the next three years. Once in parliament, he introduced an amendment to the Reform bill, giving women equal voting rights—the first attempt to do so—and won, to everyone's surprise, 73 votes to the cause. He loudly denounced the suspension of habeas corpus in Ireland; saved Epping forest and the elm trees of Piccadilly; and introduced a bill to establish a corporation for London. He also relentlessly pursued Governor Edward Eyre, who had brutally suppressed an uprising in Jamaica—a struggle in which he was pitted against not only Carlyle but also Ruskin, an inspirer of the young Labour party (Mill did get him to change sides later). In many of these initiatives Mill was unsuccessful in the short term. But his reputation meant that he was able to use the Commons, as he had prophesied decades earlier, as "a teacher's chair for instructing and impelling the public mind."

He was not a natural politician; he lacked the clubability and ruthlessness of a political great. But by insisting on taking his ideas to their conclusions, he marked out a place for himself as one of the giants of the 19th century, and someone able to inspire as much by his living deeds as by his timeless words.

Religion - And the left - Should the state 'do god'?

Mon, 10 Apr 2006 -1:00:00 GMT

New Statesman - 10th April 2006

The relationship between religion and politics needs a radical rethink

"Since even quite common men have souls," wrote R H Tawney, "no increase in material wealth will compensate them for arrangements which insult their self-respect and impair their freedom." A large part of the history of the British left is one of religiously inspired campaigns against social injustice - in the workplace, on slave ships, and in the poorest neighbourhoods of Victorian cities. At the same time, the constitutional trajectory of the nation has been one of steady secularisation. The Church of England is still established - but the bishops are not really part of the establishment.

The existence of a secular state has made it possible for the left - and the right - to accommodate those inspired by religious conviction, as well as those whose political activism springs from godless ground. But the accommodation of the left and religion is under strain, for a mixture of personal, ideological and social reasons.

The personal problem lies in the character of Tony Blair. It may be that Downing Street didn't "do God", at least after 2003, but the PM certainly does. It really doesn't matter that he goes to church. Indeed, this is probably welcome. It doesn't matter if he prayed with George W Bush: if it happened, it was in private and they are both consenting adults. It does matter if Blair believes, as he appears to, that his ultimate responsibility for sending us to war is to his Maker. Blair's responsibility is on earth to the families of those injured and killed.

Click here to read the full article...

Our muscular heroes

Sat, 1 Apr 2006 -1:00:00 GMT

Management Today - 1st April 2006

High achievers in sport may be loved and admired by us ordinary toilers, but do the ingredients of their success transfer to mundane corporate life?

I lost a game of pool, many years ago, to a guy who was in the process of dropping out of medical school. He was going to focus instead on his running. Everyone thought he was crazy, of course. But a few years later he won an Olympic gold medal in the 4 x 400 metres, became the men's team captain and took an individual medal in the 1996 Olympics. (I still think, though, that if only I'd potted that ball over the centre pocket, I could have taken him.)

Now, of course, Roger Black MBE is a successful TV presenter, as well of one of the UK's leading motivational speakers. But does he, in the middle of the night, ever think that he could have been earning a fraction of what he does now, staying up all night trying to save drunken, ungrateful patients in Portsmouth General Hospital? Probably not. read more...

Dangerous lexicons

Wed, 1 Mar 2006 -1:00:00 GMT

Management Today - 1st March 2006

It's all very well having a tilt at the straw man that is political correctness, but in the world of work, language must be used with care for the everyone's sake.

The devil gets all the best tunes, but conservatives get all the best lines. In American politics, right-wingers have long realised that control of language is half the battle for control of ideas. 'Partial-birth abortion' and 'tax relief' are just a couple of their more successful inventions. In Britain the term 'nanny state' has been similarly successful.

But the greatest linguistic success of conservatives - in politics and business - is the re- invention of the term 'political correctness'. At a stroke, all attempts to improve the language, attitudes or behaviour of racist, sexist neanderthals can be swept together and brushed aside as 'political correctness gone mad'. read more...

'Why we should care a bit more' The Observer, 19 February 2006.

Sun, 19 Feb 2006 -1:00:00 GMT

The Observer - 19th February 2006

For society to work, we have to hold each other to account. If we don't, we can hardly complain when the powers that be take over

Richard Reeves

You know someone is in trouble when they start using capital letters. Once truth becomes Truth or essence becomes Essence - perhaps even god becomes God? - it is a short step to green ink. Tony Blair and his loyalist ministers have done it with their Respect agenda, hoping perhaps that by making it a proper noun, proper behaviour will magically result.

Blair is now obsessed with anti-social behaviour. Even his friends look at the floor when he gets into one of his rants. The only newsworthy message of his first press conference as a third-term Labour Prime Minister was the enthusiastic endorsement of the decision by Bluewater to ban youngsters wearing hoodies. Brave new dawn.

If the Prime Minister were merely ranting and raving about civil disorder, just as George III wailed over the loss of his colonies, his mania could be indulged. But his drive has led to a dramatic expansion in summary police powers and a dangerous erosion of the line between civil and criminal law. It is a supreme irony that a politician with such fiercely anti-state instincts in many areas, especially the economy, is so unashamedly interventionist in social behaviour. The government cannot protect your job from the forces of global competition; but it is going to protect your shoes from discarded chewing gum.

Anti-social behaviour is, it must be said, a problem. In his speech on respect - sorry Respect - Blair three times mentioned the hypothetical case of the old lady being spat at on her way to the shops. Because the police time and effort involved in bringing a case against the gobbing youth is too great, they don't bother. The Blairite solution is to give the police power to issue on-the-spot fines, police officers becoming investigator, prosecutor, judge and jury. Or we can slap on an Asbo.

These moves may be popular; indeed Labour is banking on their popularity in the upcoming London elections. They may, at the margins, have some impact, although troublemakers can see uniforms a mile off, and Asbos are becoming a source of pride among the tough kids. But, legally, turning a civil offence, such as wearing a hoodie, into a criminal one for which the perpetrator can be imprisoned is dangerous.

In support of his crusade, Blair cites philosopher Thomas Hobbes, who believed that a strong state was necessary to stop a perpetual war of all against all; between people who were intrinsically 'nasty and brutish'. The deep problem with the Blair approach is that social behaviour comes to be seen as a problem to be tackled not by us as private citizens, but by government. And once the idea that a problem belongs with the state has been generally accepted, it is very hard to dislodge. Four out of five people still think it is the government's responsibility to provide a decent standard of living in old age: small wonder pension savings are so low. Most people now believe that tackling litter is a government problem, rather than a community responsibility. The Highway Code has been rewritten to make it mandatory to let a bus pull out. It is surely only a matter of time before the 'priority seats' on buses and trains acquire legal force. A concerted, doomed attempt is being made to legislate us into decent behaviour

Blair is clear why this is necessary: the 'self reinforcing bonds of traditional community life do not exist in the same way'. Since communities cannot police themselves, the state will have to do it for them, because 'no liberal democracy can countenance the tyranny of a minority in any of its communities'. Quite right. But liberal democracies have - or should have - other tools than state coercion at their disposal.

The responsibility for maintaining decent standards of public behaviour rests ultimately with the people. If someone drops litter, swears, creates mayhem on a train, or fails to offer their seat to someone who clearly needs it, it is not enough to mutter about lapsing manners and 'I-blame-the-parents', while waiting for the state's agent to restore order. When was the last time you confronted a person for dropping litter? There are many excuses: no time, fear, an each-to-themselves individualism. But we have to act.

Citizenship carries more responsibility than paying our taxes and casting our votes. To live well together, we have to hold each other to account. The alternative is to give up, call an anonymous state hotline and wait for the arrival not only of the police, but of the police state. Most of us are hypocrites when it comes to social rules. We hate littering - but most of us litter. According to Mori, the majority of us hate public swearing, loud mobile phone use and obscene gesturing on the road. The trouble is that even those of us who are guilty ourselves complain about the same behaviour in others. But we cry 'nanny state' if the powers are turned on us.

Certainly, some of the community ties and solidarities that made anti-social behaviour a community concern have weakened. Many of the institutions and organisations that acted to connect people and reinforce communal values are in decline. Few sit in church pews with their neighbours' children any more. Most of us want to live in a society with the support of such institutions. Voltaire famously refused to discuss atheism in front of the servants because he thought their faith would safeguard his belongings. Similarly, most of us probably want a society in which people go to church, and kids go to boy scouts or soccer practice. The trouble is that so few of us are prepared to support these sources of community life ourselves. Into this gap steps Tony Blair's determination that the state will sort it out.

But if he is right in his diagnosis of our diminishing capacity for self-government, his cure seems certain to make the disease worse. Asking the state to fill the gaps in community life is certain to make those gaps larger. There is, of course, plenty for the government to do, especially in providing plentiful activities for young people, and putting moral education at the heart of the national curriculum. But politicians must be wary of assuming that they have to be the ones to stitch the social fabric back together. As for the rest of us, we have to decide whether we are willing to do our share of the necessary work of social maintenance. In a criminal court, the plea of 'diminished responsibility' is cited to get the accused off the hook: we are in danger of making a similar collective claim.

We are foolishly diminishing our own responsibility. And the Prime Minister is foolishly attempting to nationalise responsibilities that properly lie with you and me.

Going nowehere slowly.

Thu, 2 Feb 2006 -1:00:00 GMT

Management Today - 2nd February 2006

Going nowehere slowly. Companies take pride in their high staff retention, but is it necessarily a good sign?
Retentiveness is not, typically, seen as a term of praise. It is shorthand for being boring, over-analytical, buttoned up, emotionally illiterate. British, in other words. But businesses are the exception to this rule. For most firms, 'retention' is seen as a good thing, and indeed as a key goal for human resources managers. These days, whole conferences are devoted to the Challenge of Retention.

Of course, we are talking about retaining staff here. Losing staff, along with the skills, networks and knowledge they have acquired, is seen as bad news. Large firms often have 'retention managers' to deal with the issue. read more...

The politics column - Richard Reeves

Mon, 9 Jan 2006 -1:00:00 GMT

New Statesman - 9th January 2006

Maybe an MP or two might cross the floor to Cameron. Could Shaun Woodward do it twice? (Churchill did, after all)

We are back, then, in the bracing climate of three-party politics. I don't mean the Liberal Democrats, of course: for that ragtag, plucky bunch the only way is down. The new triangle in British politics is the one formed by Tony Blair and his two heirs apparent. After years of a two-way struggle between the Prime Minister and his Chancellor - of the "TB-GBs" - the Conservatives are at last in the frame.

Bicycling David Cameron is repositioning the image of his party with a pace that makes the early Blair look pedestrian. He believes that only a "new Labour" Conservative Party can win. Blair's view is that Labour will lose only when it forgets to be "new" Labour. Brown's view is that his views will become clear once he is safely inside No 10, thank you very much.

Cameron's momentum has surprised even some of his supporters. That the Conservative Party website was changed within minutes of his victory being declared is passing into Westminster legend. In practical terms, it could have waited until the next morning. But this stage is all about symbols, and what the website story symbolises is: this guy is well-prepared, technologically savvy, forward-thinking and deadly serious. But it is on the policy side that Cameron's symbolic shifts matter most. He and his team are consciously aping Blair's 1990s strategy of grabbing Conservative land on crime, family and wealth creation.

Click here to read the full article...

Richard Reeves

Thu, 5 Jan 2006 -1:00:00 GMT

Management Today - 5th January 2006

The capacity to show consideration is being seen increasingly as a worktime asset
Nobody wants to be dubbed 'nice'. If your new boyfriend or girlfriend describes you as a nice person, the chances are you'll be crestfallen. Sexy, dangerous, fun, enigmatic, funny, passionate, yes – but please never, ever nice.

The word hasn't lost some of the sense found in its ancient root in the Latin nescius – which means ignorant. The only excuse for being nice is being clueless. Studies of how people judge film and book reviewers show that the more relentlessly negative they are, the more intelligent they are judged to be by readers. (Actually, the same is probably true of magazine columnists: the pressure and temptation to eviscerate is strong.)

Niceness is certainly not a characteristic generally lauded in the business world. Leaders become famous for their toughness, not their tenderness: think 'Neutron' Jack Welch, or 'Chainsaw' Al Dunlap. Somehow 'Sweetie' just doesn't do it as a prefix. Click here to read the full article...

Just a shot of ethicality

Fri, 2 Dec 2005 -1:00:00 GMT

Management Today - 2nd 12th 2005

Nestle has caused confusion among right-on activists with its new fair-trade coffee.
Words are just like people: as one dies, another is born. Newborn words are also as ugly as newborn babies (to all except their creators, of course). Soon enough, though, they grow until we can't imagine life without them. Where would we be without hot-desking, downsizing and offshoring?

And so, I suppose, we should be kind to the latest linguistic arrival, 'ethicality'.

The new addition to our word-hoard is certain to get a good run, because ethicality is a growing business issue. Ethics officers are popping up in many corporations. Ethical investment is an established niche in the capital markets. Corporate social responsibility is (supposedly) about sharpening a firm's ethical edge. And now Nestle has caused mass confusion among right-on activists by launching a fair-trade coffee.

For some, this move is downright dangerous, a simple case of a wolf sticking on a layer of sheep's clothing. Although the new line of fair coffee has the Fairtrade kitemark from the Fairtrade Foundation, the World Development Movement said that the launch 'is more likely to be an attempt to cash in on a growing market or a cynical marketing exercise than represent the beginning of a fundamental shift in Nestle's business model'. Click here to read the full article...

Here for the schmooze

Tue, 1 Nov 2005 -1:00:00 GMT

Management Today - 1st November 2005

Events organisers should recognise that guests turn up just to network and play.
The programme flyers said it all: flashes of colour everywhere announced: Longer coffee breaks! More time for networking! The conference organisers knew what they were doing (well, they were from the Association of Exhibition Organisers).

People don't go to conferences for the speakers. They go for a break from the office, a break from the kids, a chance to make some new connections, drink too much and flirt in the hotel bar at 3am.

Most corporate events are terrible. Rooms without windows, presenters without personalities, coffee without flavour. Yet still the conference business booms. Partly for the obvious personal reasons - but also because as social beings we are drawn to gatherings of our peers. Conferences, events and exhibitions are the modern equivalent of festivals in old market towns - an excuse to band together and play. read more...

Spare us corporate life

Thu, 29 Sep 2005 -1:00:00 GMT

Management Today - 25th September 2005

It is the modern call of the wild, bearing the promise of independence, freedom of spirit and open horizons. It is the new Wild West, full of opportunity, entrepreneurialism and courage. It is utopia, eschewing hierarchy, bureaucracy and control in favour of meritocracy, fluidity and creativity.

In other words, it is self-employment. The dream of the post-industrial worker is the nightmare of our pre-industrial ancestors: to be our own boss, reliant on our own skills, sinking or swimming by our merits in the marketplace. Above all, we want control over where and when we work. As Marx pointed out: 'What makes wage slaves? Wages!' (Groucho, that is, not Karl.)

The rhetoric of politicians and business leaders is full of exhortations to more entrepreneurialism, innovation and risk-taking. Charles Handy says the economy needs more 'fleas' to provoke the old, organisational 'elephants'. Of course, the '90s predictions that jobs were dead and that everyone was set to become a 'free agent' turned out to be premature – self-employment accounts for just one person in eight of the British workforce. But as so often with projections, the data has started moving just as the theories are being abandoned. Click here to read the full article...

Vote Brown: get Blair!

Mon, 26 Sep 2005 -1:00:00 GMT

New Statesman - 26th September 2005

The activists are waiting in vain: there is no left turn ahead. If Gordon Brown's record to date is any guide, his premiership could be more Blairite than Blair himself

Gordon Brown is an impatient man whom fate has condemned to wait. As a 16-year-old, he was made to lie still for months in a doomed attempt to save the retina of his left eye. He endured 14 long years of political opposition. And he has played second fiddle to Tony Blair for more than a decade.

Brown is not the only one waiting. Swathes of the Labour Party, the bulk of the union movement and most left-of-centre lobby groups and policy think-tanks are longing for the baton to pass to a true Labour politician, a man with socialism in his bones. Blair won the respect of his party because of his brilliance as a vote harvester; but Brown always had their hearts. Under Brown, the activists believe, Labour will be coming home.

Click here to read the full article...

Life in the melting pot

Thu, 25 Aug 2005 -1:00:00 GMT

New Statesman - 25th August 2005

We need an honest debate about the benefits and costs of a multicultural society
Britain prides itself on peaceful multiculturalism. By international standards, our race relations have long been harmonious, in spite of high levels of immigration and – at least in the cities – significant ethnic and linguistic diversity. Any success of the British National Party is seen by mainstream politicians and the media as a blow to the liberal body politic. Racism is simply not cricket.

The London terrorist bombing campaigns will put this tolerance to the test. When British Moslems blow themselves up – along with dozens of innocent fellow citizens – the only Brits rubbing their hands are the BNP. But if tolerance and understanding triumph over fear and loathing, it is certain that the case for a diverse, multi-ethnic society will have to be restated, and with more conviction.This means having an honest debate about the benefits and costs of living in an ethnically diverse society. The cause of multiculturalism is not served by woolly, liberal assumptions that everything about diversity is wonderful. The case for immigration and diversity is strong enough. It is only weakened by flaky embellishments that diverse societies are more creative or happier than homogenous ones.

Richard Florida, author of The Flight of the Creative Class, has made a compelling case that creativity is vital for economic success and that creative people are attracted to liberal, diverse societies. It is a wonderful thought that if only the world was more like San Francisco, creativity would be unleashed globally, but evidence for the second half of this proposition is weak. Click here to read the full article...

A lesser spotted breed

Thu, 11 Aug 2005 -1:00:00 GMT

Management Today - 11th August 2005

If females aren’t advancing to the boardroom, it’s because they don’t like the deal.

To celebrate its 40th anniversary, the Confederation of British Industry earlier this year sent senior members and friends a tasteful pair of earrings engraved with the organisation's logo. Responding to complaints from a humourless handful of men that the commemorative gift was sexist, the organisation pointed out that in the 21st century, men often wear earrings too – and that the gift was therefore gender-neutral.

No, of course they didn't. In fact the employers' body sent out customised cuff-links. (Look out for them at CBI seminars on 'equal opportunities for women in the workplace'.) A more reasonable explanation for this apparently trivial slight would have been that the overwhelming majority of recipients are in fact men – which is the real problem. Read more...

Striking a positive note

Thu, 30 Jun 2005 -1:00:00 GMT

Management Today - 30th June 2005

Industrial action is on the increase, thanks to a new wave of white-collar unrest

Middle-class militancy is in the air. Strike action turned the BBC news coverage back to the 1970s for one day at the end of May; public-service unions are threatening revolt; and even civil servants are restless and threatening to withdraw their labour.

Today's strikers wear collars in white, huddling not around the brazier but in the brasserie. For managers and leaders, especially in the public sector, the possibility of greater disruption is real, and rising. For users of these services, however, this could ironically be good news. While of course strikes bring short-term disruption, the evolving use of what is still quaintly called 'industrial' action means that public-service workers are sometimes battling to save the very notion of a public service. read more...

Politics - Richard Reeves tells the time unaided

Mon, 20 Jun 2005 -1:00:00 GMT

New Statesman - 20th June 2005

The arrival of more management consultants at Downing Street bodes ill. Rather than injecting real business experience into government, Blair is recruiting in his own image

A favoured definition of a management consultant is someone who borrows your watch, tells you the time, then charges you for the information. Dilbert, the cartoon character created by Scott Adams, says: "It takes more than a brilliant analytical mind to be a business consultant . . . You also need to be arrogant and socially dysfunctional."

Consultants are taken very seriously in Westminster and Whitehall. David Bennett, the new head of policy in Downing Street, is a former partner of McKinsey, the bluest of the blue-chip strategy consultancies, known because of its influence as the Brotherhood. He joins a cluster of former Brothers in No 10 - John Birt, Adair Turner and Nick Lovegrove. Their influence is rattling unions and rank-and-file MPs. (They may be worrying too much: remember that William Hague, too, is ex-McKinsey.)

The appeal of the Brothers to Blair has three dimensions: brainpower, an apparent knowledge of the business world, and lack of ideological conviction. McKinsey attracts the cream of graduates. When it comes to intellectual ability, they leave MPs and most special advisers in the dust.

Click here to read the full article...

NS Essay -'If Beethoven had been subject to the EU working hours limit he wouldn't have got further than the Fourth Symphony'

Mon, 30 May 2005 -1:00:00 GMT

New Statesman - 30th May 2005

Britons see work as more central to their lives than other Europeans - and this is assumed to be a bad thing. On the contrary, argues Richard Reeves, for huge numbers of us our well-being and happiness depend on the work we do

Work is getting a bad press. British workers, it seems, are stressed out, chained to their desks and made to work until they drop, just to scrape together a pension. Gordon Brown cracks the whip from one side, lauding "hard-working families" and refusing to sign up to a Brussels-drafted maximum working week. David Blunkett meanwhile wants to boot incapacity benefit claimants into the "dignity" of work. The modern labour market is a hard place.

Listening to some of the voices on the state of the poor British employee, it is easy to picture dark Satanic mills, manipulative employers and exhausted wage slaves trudging home from work in the dark. The TUC says that three out of five workers are suffering from "stress" at work. This is an amazing figure. It can only mean that the term itself has come to cover negative emotions from genuine psychological distress through to having to work late on a presentation or article now and then. If what we feel is stress, what on earth did our grandfathers in the steel mills and coal mines experience? Click here to read the full article...

Life in the orange-lit uplands

Mon, 9 May 2005 -1:00:00 GMT

New Statesman - 9th September 2005

Election: the night. It was a happy night for the Lib Dems, but this may prove to be as good as it gets for them

The Liberal Democrats have long memories. "We've been clawing our way uphill since 1988," said Lord Goodhart, a party grandee, above the cheers of activists. And well they might cheer, celebrating perhaps the best night for the party for half a century. The Lib Dem celebrations were certainly the liveliest of the evening: each win, and indeed each swing, was cheered to the rafters.

And the Lib Dem women sweeping into Westminster had the feel of a historic shift. The winner of Dumbarton East, Jo Swinson, beneficiary of a 7 per cent swing from Labour to take 42 per cent of the vote, prompted a series of sotto voce "who is she?" questions from watching activists: shades of Labour in 1997. And then, in short order, Birmingham Yardley, Manchester Withington, Rochdale, Hornsey and Wood Green - ejecting Barbara Roche - and Cardiff Central all dropped from the red to orange columns. The Liberal Democrats ended the night the second-biggest party in both Wales and Scotland, and the chief contender to Labour in many urban areas. "We are the second party across the country, and the only true national party," said an ebullient Sandy Walkington, the Lib Dem communications chief.

Heavyweight political pundits assembled at the ITN party (on an appropriately unstable boat on the Thames) were at various points flicking worriedly through their contact books. "Let's see," said one big hitter. "Liberal Democrats . . . no, no-body here. Oh shit!"

Click here to read the full article...

'Voters seem to prefer their leaders a tad dishonest'

Mon, 2 May 2005 -1:00:00 GMT

New Statesman - 2nd May 2005

Election: Issue of the week - It's no use the opposition parties raising trust as an issue. People think that all politicians are fibbers anyway

And so the election descends to the playground. Having lost on tax and spending, scored an own goal on immigration and failed to win over business, the Tories' last gasp is a "liar, liar, pants on fire" attack on Tony Blair. By turning the vote into a referendum on the question "Do you trust Blair to tell the truth?", both of the main opposition parties hope to prevent the landslide that threatens to bury them once more.

On the face of it, putting trust and truth front and centre looks a smart ploy. Blair does indeed poll badly on questions of trust. And surely, the British people want a man of his word in No 10? Some polls have shown a majority believing that the Prime Minister consistently lied over Iraq.

At the start of the campaign, ministers were admitting that trust was a big issue. Jack Straw - the invisible man of the election - said voters would have to decide which party "best deserves" their "future trust". And Gordon Brown's high trust levels were one reason for the re-emergence of the dual monarchy with Blair.

Click here to read the full article...

'If anything, the Conservatives are understating the rise in immigration'

Mon, 25 Apr 2005 -1:00:00 GMT

New Statesman - 25th April 2005

Election issue of the week - An inflow of young people is good for an economy that needs workers. Rupert Murdoch has explained why; Labour hasn't

Immigration has ignited two segments of the electorate: columnists and leader-writers. Across the spectrum of opinion, from the raw racism of the Daily Mail to the head-shaking liberalism of the centre-left broadsheets, views about the rights and wrongs of the issue have poured forth, at the prompting of the Conservatives. Yet there is little sign that immigration has altered voting intentions, or the likely outcome of 5 May. It has inspired rivers of ink, not rivers of blood.

On the face of it, the Tory attempt to play the race card has been a psephological blunder. It may have animated a core of right-wing voters, and protected the Tories' flank against the United Kingdom Independence Party, but it appears mostly to have succeeded in driving disenchanted liberals and Muslims back to the Labour fold.

"The right-wing press turns out to be new Labour's best friend," says the Observer columnist Will Hutton. "The British people are small 'p' progressive, and the press has consistently overestimated their degree of racism. But it has driven some supporters back into the new Labour coalition."

Click here to read the full article...

'To most, Brown is a triumphant success. But in his own terms, he has failed '

Mon, 18 Apr 2005 -1:00:00 GMT

New Statesman - 18th April 2005

The election issue of the week - Has Labour really done as well on the economy as its leaders boast? Richard Reeves finds that, despite the undoubted pluses, there is a downside

The day MG Rover finally imploded could have been even worse for Labour. The Bank of England's Monetary Policy Committee was meeting and, if it had raised interest rates, we would have had a rise in mortgages, too. Fortunately, the committee kept interest rates unchanged.

That's not all Labour has to thank it for. It is responsible for the government's most durable success: macroeconomic stability. Gordon Brown's claims to have abolished "boom and bust" are not just hype. The economy still cycles, but the ride has been much smoother over the past eight years. This is partly because Brown handed over to the Bank the power, previously held by the Treasury, to set interest rates, while also setting it a clear inflation target. It is partly because, at the same time, he committed to fairly demanding fiscal rules, including the "golden rule" that, over the economic cycle, the state can borrow only for investment.

The strategy has worked. Since Labour came to power, economic growth has averaged 2.4 per cent a year - with much less volatility than in the past. Even as unemployment has dropped to a 29-year low, prices have been so subdued that Brown lowered the target from 2.5 to 2 per cent during Labour's second term.

Click here to read the full article...

The family comes first. It is jolly decent of Gordon Brown to pay for my summer holiday in the South of France

Thu, 7 Apr 2005 -1:00:00 GMT

Management Today - 7th April 2005

The family comes first. It is jolly decent of Gordon Brown to pay for my summer holiday in the South of France
It is jolly decent of Gordon Brown to pay for my summer holiday in the South of France. And the cause of his St Tropez socialism? Childcare. The tax breaks now becoming available to parents paying for childcare mean that, between us, my partner and I can save two grand a year – coincidentally, the cost of our Mediterranean sojourn.

Children and parents are at the top of the Government's agenda. And forward-looking businesses are falling over each other to be family-friendly. The combination of tax breaks, tax credits, higher child benefit, free pre-school education, as well as expanded maternity, paternity and parental leave mean that parents have never had it so good. It is doubtful, however, that the same can be said for children. read more...

New Statesman, A national scandal

Mon, 28 Mar 2005 -1:00:00 GMT

New Statesman - 28th March 2005

If training the workforce is purely about economic gain, then we should target the young and write off unskilled adults to lousy jobs or benefits. Richard Reeves asks if we're prepared to pay for skills and social justice

On the face of it, we should be the most highly skilled nation in the world. Just look at the task forces, institutions and initiatives dedicated to skills. Skills have their very own alliance, passport, minister, new deal and strategy. Britain is blessed with a Skills for Business network, Sector Skills Councils (which have made Sector Skills Agreements), FRESAs (Frameworks for Regional Employment and Skills Action), Learndirect and the Learning and Skills Council, to name but a few.

The multiplication of agencies and schemes indicates, in fact, that the UK is failing - and has long been failing - to equip large swathes of the population with the skills necessary to thrive in the labour market. While 28 per cent of the UK workforce is qualified to an intermediate skill level (in other words, apprenticeship, skilled craft and technician level), the equivalent proportions in France and Germany are 51 per cent and 65 per cent. read more...

NS Essay - Does sex make us happy? Don't talk about it . . .

Mon, 28 Mar 2005 -1:00:00 GMT

New Statesman - 28th March 2005

Our satisfaction in bed is not rising in relation to the public obsession with open sexuality - in fact, quite the opposite

Ah, spring. The lark is in song, the daffodils are in bloom and "the most sexually explicit film ever" is on general release. Breaking what little ground remains unbroken by Baise-Moi and Intimacy, 9 Songs shows a couple engaged in an activity as commonplace as the weekly trip to the supermarket - but with better box office takings. And it indicates, apparently, our greater "openness" to sex, code for our greater openness to talking or writing endlessly about it. Gallons of ink are lavished on discussing films such as this, as well as Adam Thirlwell's archly titled book Politics, which is actually about sex. Sex is good copy.

Sales of erotic books and sexual manuals have quadrupled in the past decade; lap-dancing is a booming industry; sex shops are being stripped of their seediness; and the internet has become a vast reservoir of sexual images, as we all chill out, relax and enjoy. The line between erotica and pornography has all but disappeared (the best distinction, provided by a French publisher, is that erotica can be read with both hands). But there is a hollowness to the new hedonism. The louder we proclaim our sexual freedom, our casting off of repressive attitudes, our anything-goes morality, the less persuasive the claim becomes. We protest too much.

For, alongside the claimed sexual empowerment, fears are growing about sexually transmitted infections (STIs); the birth rate is falling; sexual maturation among adolescents is being compressed and distorted; and the structure of adult lives is such that we have less sex than is good for us - or at least for our happiness. The story of modern sex is too much noise in public, and not enough in private. The typical adult now probably spends more time listening to people talk about sex, reading about sex and filling in surveys about sex than on the activity itself. Click here to read the full article...

The trouble with trust

Tue, 1 Mar 2005 -1:00:00 GMT

Management Today - 1st March 2005

If mutual confidence among management and staff is lost, performance is affected
Trust me, I'm a journalist. Doesn't work, does it? And it is no better if the occupation is replaced with politician or company director. Across swathes of public life, levels of trust are in terminal decline. We don't trust companies, so we establish regulators and watchdogs. Then we don't trust the politicians not to fill them with their cronies. The media encourage us in our distrust - but then we don't trust the press either.

When Gordon Brown allegedly told Tony Blair that he could 'no longer believe a word he said', he was merely expressing the general sentiment of people, not just to Blair (although his trust scores have nosedived since Iraq) but to leaders in general. And the corrosion of trust has implications for political culture and for the structure and ethics of the media. read more...

Politics - Richard Reeves denounces Ruth Kelly's sell-out

Mon, 28 Feb 2005 -1:00:00 GMT

New Statesman - 28th February 2005

The end of A-levels was a flagship policy for Labour's young modernisers. But Ruth Kelly has caved in to Blair, and the new kids on the block have failed their first real test

It is a depressing, defining moment. The rejection by Ruth Kelly, the Education Secretary, of a diploma for all 14- to 19-year-olds - and her decision to keep GCSEs and A-levels - is the biggest domestic policy failure of Labour's second term. But it has a deeper significance. This was an opportunity for the next generation of Labour leaders, unscarred by opposition, to show that they could be more radical, more courageous and more modern than their bosses. In this, their first real test, Labour's new generation got an F grade.

The case for an integrated diploma system is overwhelming - which is why Sir Mike Tomlinson, the former chief inspector whose inquiry recommended it last year, received such widespread support. It would strengthen numeracy and literacy, broaden the subject areas studied - in place of the absurd narrowness of A-levels - and end the pernicious division between academic education and vocational learning.

Click here to read the full article...

After two terms of Labour, the nation still largely thinks Tory

Mon, 21 Feb 2005 -1:00:00 GMT

New Statesman - 21st February 2005

Ministers say they want to bring about a "progressive consensus". Since even the US neo-cons claim to be in favour of progress, they will need to be more precise, argues Richard Reeves

There has been a coup. The political artists formerly known as "new Labour" have been replaced at the highest echelons of government by a new group: the Progressives. And the leader of the "progressive" vanguard is none other than Gordon Brown - masquerading as the most Labour of the Labourites - who now calls at every opportunity for a "progressive consensus". The phrase featured 13 times in his 2004 conference speech and has recurred in every speech since. In competitive spirit, Alan Milburn, who has usurped Brown as the party's official election chief, managed a dozen mentions in his address to the Fabians last month.

The littering of "progressive" across every article and speech by the government's leading lights may simply mark the latest stage in the contorted attempts to find a label for Labour's philosophy, following on from "socialist", "social-ist", "social democratic" and the "Third Way". Indeed, some see "progressive consensus" as little more than the watery wine of the Third Way rebottled.

Click here to read the full article...

Richard Reeves

Thu, 27 Jan 2005 -1:00:00 GMT

Management Today - 27th January 2005

Fighting for the right to work the way we want to is the last liberal battleground
Freedom has a thousand charms to show, That slaves, howe'er contented, never know. William Cowper's couplet should be nailed above the desk of every boss in the land. It may be that organisations want productive workers, responsible workers and even (on a good day) happy ones. But the ultimate aspiration must be for free workers – and for work that liberates, rather than limits, the individual.

>There is a growing demand among workers for 'job autonomy' – for a greater say over how, where and when their job is done. And, perhaps above all, for expanded opportunities for learning.

None of this should come as a surprise. In the revolutionary year of 1848, John Stuart Mill wrote in his Principles of Political Economy: 'After the means of subsistence are assured, the next in strength of the personal wants of human beings is liberty; and (unlike the physical wants, which as civilization advances become more moderate and more amenable to control) it increases instead of diminishing in intensity as the intelligence and the moral faculties are more developed.' Click here to read the full article...

NS Essay -'Words matter in politics: the term

Mon, 24 Jan 2005 -1:00:00 GMT

New Statesman - 24th January 2005

What's in a word? In politics, everything, argues Richard Reeves. Get the language right and you can win arguments before they begin. US Republicans know this, but new Labour still has much to learn

Words get a bad press. On both sides of the principal divide in British politics - the one between the media and politicians - the use of language is a familiar target. Journalists accuse politicians of spouting mere "rhetoric"; MPs on the Today programme suggest that their interlocutor is playing at "semantics". Politicians are said to be all spin and no substance, hacks to be interested in the juiciest, rather than most apposite, quotations. Yet rhetoric and semantics are not the froth of politics, but its most important ingredients. There can be no politics without words. And the precise meaning of words - for example, in the phrase "a representative House of Lords" - is hardly a trivial matter. Labour - sorry, new Labour - is all too aware of the significance of words.

"Language," Aristotle wrote in the Politics, "serves to declare what is advantageous and what is the reverse . . . It is the peculiarity of man . . . that he alone possesses a perception of good and evil, of the just and unjust." In other words, what makes a political community ("a city", as Aristotle called it) is the shared concepts of good and evil, right and wrong - and only through language can this sharing take place. This insight is as valuable in the modern world as in antiquity. Those who worry about a United States of Europe can stop fretting: the absence of a common language prevents a commonly articulated vision of Europe. The gap extends even to musical pitch. The note "A" is different in France, Germany and Britain, so musicians squabble when they play together - a clear-cut case, surely, for EU harmonisation.

Click here to read the full article...

'Even in a truly liberal society, paternalism must sometimes prevail'

Sat, 1 Jan 2005 -1:00:00 GMT

New Statesman - 1st January 2005

2005: General election year - Should the state control private behaviour? It's the biggest argument of our times - think of smoking, gambling, hunting, smacking - but the divisions cut across party lines

Tessa Jowell's complaint spoke volumes. "I seem to have gone from 'the nation's nanny-in-chief' to a 'gambling gangster's moll' in a few weeks," she told the Observer. Labour ministers, including Tony Blair himself, are accused one day of gross invasions of privacy and liberty - in areas such as smoking, smacking and hunting - and the next of reckless deregulation and liberalisation, regarding licensing hours, soft drugs or gambling.

The tension between the Two Tessas reflects a tension that runs through the heart of politics. Many of the issues that will animate political debate in this general election year cross conventional dimensions of left and right and even of party-political allegiance. They seem to belong on a liberal v authoritarian (or paternalist) axis, not on a left v right one. Even apparently dry economic matters, such as pension reform, have at their heart the question of how far people should be compelled to act in their own best interests.

Labour has failed to produce a sound philosophical rationale for its policies. The best Jowell could manage (which is better than any other minister) was to point out that children need special protection; regulation must be case-sensitive; politicians should prefer dialogue to diktat. All true, but not very illuminating. Click here to read the full article...

Buried treasure

Mon, 6 Dec 2004 -1:00:00 GMT

New Statesman - 6th December 2004

New Labour's Old Roots: revisionist thinkers in Labour's history (1931-1997)
Edited by Patrick Diamond Imprint Academic, 263pp, £14.95
ISBN 0907845894

This book asks a question to which many of us would welcome an answer: "What are the philosophical roots of new Labour?" In the end, the search has to be declared unsuccessful - but the fascination of the journey is more than adequate compensation. Diamond, a former adviser to Tony Blair and now working for Alan Milburn, has assembled a collection of "revisionist" Labour writings - by authors from R H Tawney to Gordon Brown - which together tell a compelling story of the party's difficult 20th century.

The themes that animate the collection are the attitudes of the party towards Marxism, public ownership and the market. A crude summary is that the revisionists gradually weaned the party off class-based analysis, away from nationalisation, and towards a full-blooded embrace of the market. Diamond perhaps focuses a little too much on these themes, to the neglect of other revisionist agendas such as nuclear disarmament, Europe and women's rights, but the basic argument is sound.

Click here to read the full article...

Counsellors' con trick

Thu, 2 Dec 2004 -1:00:00 GMT

Management Today - 2nd December 2004

It's the fastest-growing training practice, but does coaching really help companies?

A current series of advertisements promotes the coaches of famous sports-people; rather than Tiger Woods or Pete Sampras, we see pictures of the powers behind the thrones, along with straplines such as 'It's my job to help Sportsperson X be all they can be.' It is a cute idea, but it also illustrates the growing interest in coaching, and coaches, in corporate life.

Coaching has become one of the fastest-growing sectors of the HR market, topping the billion-dollar mark worldwide. Part of the explanation for the boom is the growing recognition that too many senior executives are running around madly, with little or no clear purpose. And if coaching can bring some clarity and self-awareness, business stands a chance of winning over busyness. read more...

NS essay - The honours system, far from being abolished, should be hugely expanded

Mon, 8 Nov 2004 -1:00:00 GMT

New Statesman - 8th November 2004

In our society, high status depends too much on money. We need more diverse ways of sharing out esteem, so that all can have prizes, argues Richard Reeves

It is a question as old as time. Where do I stand? What does the pecking order look like? Who's up, who's down? Our desire for - and fascination with - status is insatiable. We want to be top dog, or at least to know who the top dog is. This is why our media are full of lists: the most fanciable, eligible or rich; the 100 most powerful women, politicians or corporate leaders. We are suffering from listitus. We place our own position under constant surveillance. Even if we don't make it on to the Rich List, we cannot help but compare ourselves to others, especially those close to us. And it often does not bring out the best in us. "Whenever a friend succeeds," lamented Gore Vidal, "a little something in me dies."

The seeking of status can seem, to idealistic minds, a regrettable and grubby habit. But it can't be wished away. It is hard-wired into our genes. There has never been a human society without status differentials. Revolutionary attempts to dissolve the desire for status never succeed. After the French revolution, all men were "Monsieur". The term then became meaningless and other symbols of status came to the fore. Click here to read the full article...

People in the Equation

Thu, 4 Nov 2004 -1:00:00 GMT

Management Today - 4th November 2004

For HR strategy to influence the bottom line, it has to intermesh with other changes.
There are three things that everyone who has not been living in a cave for the past three decades knows for certain. Flared trousers always come back into fashion eventually; socialism does not; and, of course, People are Our Most Important Asset.

The idea that organisational success depends in large part on the skills, attitude and evergy of its constituent people is not exactly in the E=mc class. It is closer to a truism than a truth. Nonetheless, the increasing economic importance of the 'people factor' is well proven, at both institutional and national levels.

Gordon Brown's much-derided admiration for 'post neo-classical endogenous growth theory' was based on the sound evidence that countries with higher levels of skills deliver better economic growth rates. This is a lesson most governments - not least in the Far East - took to heart in their education and training policies. Click here to read the full article...

Let's not panic about pensions

Mon, 18 Oct 2004 -1:00:00 GMT

New Statesman - 18th October 2004

There is no "longevity crisis", only decisions to be made about how we pay for retirement

Adair Turner is not an obviously scary person. Parents certainly do not threaten their children by saying that the softly spoken former McKinsey consultant will come and get them unless they eat their broccoli. But this bogeyman has been doing his Hallowe'en best over the past weeks to frighten the workers with the prospect of a long and impoverished old age.

The report by the government's Pensions Commission, chaired by Turner, is full of dire predictions, prompting newspaper headlines about "black holes", "time bombs" and "crises".

Pensions is an area politicians like to describe as "complex" - which is actually code for "politically difficult". In fact, as the commission demonstrates, the issue is utterly straightforward. People are living longer and not saving enough, which means they will either have to work for longer, live on less in retirement or be bailed out by the government.

Pensions is also an area in which political compasses swing wildly. Ten years ago, one of the two major parties was fiercely critical of means testing in old age and advocated a higher state pension for all. That party's opponents lauded a policy of directing limited funds to those in greatest need. The argument today is identical - but Tories and Labour have switched sides. Click here to read the full article...

NS Essay - 'Without ideology, the role of politicians is no longer to persuade, merely to sell'

Mon, 27 Sep 2004 -1:00:00 GMT

New Statesman - 27th September 2004

NS Labour conference 2004 - Because it governs without a clear set of principles, new Labour's policy-making is incoherent and its reforms are slow. Above all, it lacks the vocabulary to shift popular opinion. Blair tries to capture the centre ground, not shift it

As Labour bowls into Brighton, it is more powerful than at any time in its history and on the brink of a near-certain sweep to a third term in office. Yet the party is lost and rudderless. While victory in the next election is virtually assured, the manifesto is glued to the drawing board. The Third Way, it seems, offers nothing for a third term. Rarely in political history has a party with such accumulated might had so little clue what to do with it. The weakest link for new Labour has always been the absence of a coherent set of ideas, a guiding philosophy - and the weakness is becoming more apparent with the passage of time.

Click here to read the full article...

My right to over-work

Wed, 1 Sep 2004 -1:00:00 GMT

Management Today - 1st September 2004

A restriction on the number of hours we put in per week would infringe our liberties.
All things considered, we live in a liberal society. Of course, there is a justifiable and proper clamour over issues such as national identity cards and curbs on smoking cigarettes and smacking innocents. But so long as we don't harm others, we are mostly free to lead our lives as we see fit.

But there is one area where so-called progressives appear bent on radically limiting the rights of consenting adults to engage in an activity that is not only harmless to others but positively beneficial for society. The wicked deed in question is Work. It is bad enough that the Government has signed up to the European Directive stipulating a maximum 48-hour week; but there are now loud voices from unions and left-leaning politicians for the opt-out clause from the maximum - which the UK insisted on retaining - to be junked as well.

It looks as though Patricia Hewitt will hold the line and keep the opt-out. To do otherwise would be an unacceptable infringement of individual liberty. If I choose to work more than 48 hours a week, what right has the Government to instruct me otherwise? Maybe I'm getting the overtime to pay for a family holiday; perhaps I'm running a business during a critical period; perhaps - shock-horror thought - I am doing more than 48 hours of work a week because I like it. Click here to read more...

Men remain stuck in cages of their own creation

Mon, 16 Aug 2004 -1:00:00 GMT

New Statesman - 16th August 2004

Women's changing lives have been examined closely by academics, the media, and even the Pope. But, argues Richard Reeves, it is how men cope with these changes that will shape the future

Men, eh? One minute they are throwing flour-filled condoms at the Prime Minister; the next, they are being appointed equal opportunities commissioners. One day they are ascendant, dominating the commanding heights of society; on the next, they are redundant, with withering skills and withered chromosomes. They spend time with their children - but then more time helping to fuel a boom in lap-dancing clubs.

It is time to ask Freud's question again but, this time, of the less fair sex: "What does a man want?" The ambiguities, uncertainties and contradictions of the modern man occur because men are in a critical time of transition, one similar in depth and significance to the changes wrought and experienced by women in the latter half of the 20th century. The direction of society now rests, more than anything, on how men respond to the threats and opportunities presented by the changes in women's lives.

Click here to read the full article...

New Statesman, Men remain stuck in cages of their own creation

Mon, 16 Aug 2004 -1:00:00 GMT

New Statesman - 16th August 2004

Women's changing lives have been examined closely by academics, the media, and even the Pope. But, argues Richard Reeves, it is how men cope with these changes that will shape the future

Men, eh? One minute they are throwing flour-filled condoms at the Prime Minister; the next, they are being appointed equal opportunities commissioners. One day they are ascendant, dominating the commanding heights of society; on the next, they are redundant, with withering skills and withered chromosomes. They spend time with their children - but then more time helping to fuel a boom in lap-dancing clubs.

It is time to ask Freud's question again but, this time, of the less fair sex: "What does a man want?" The ambiguities, uncertainties and contradictions of the modern man occur because men are in a critical time of transition, one similar in depth and significance to the changes wrought and experienced by women in the latter half of the 20th century. The direction of society now rests, more than anything, on how men respond to the threats and opportunities presented by the changes in women's lives. Read more...

Let's all resign at once

Sun, 1 Aug 2004 -1:00:00 GMT

Management Today - 1st August 2004

Britain needs a National Resignation Day to encourage people to find satisfying jobs.
It's summertime and the living is easy. Well, a bit easier, anyway. August in the UK may not approach French levels of relaxation, but we might eat our sandwich in the park rather than at our desks. And at some point most of us will spend a couple of weeks with sand beneath our feet and sun on our skin. No e-mails, meetings, phones or commuting ... And then, with a juddering jolt, it's back to work again.

The combination of some precious time to reflect and the stark contrast between vacational and vocational life means that September is a busy month for the recruitment agencies. Pop surveys suggest that large numbers of us come back to the office determined to change careers, or at least to switch jobs. These resolutions often go hand in hand with fantasies about downshifting to Devon or the Dordogne, retraining as a windsurfing instructor (after learning to swim properly), and taking a daily siesta. Click here to read more...

Big ideas - The triumph of the 'I'

Mon, 26 Jul 2004 -1:00:00 GMT

New Statesman - 26th July 2004

Politics - The future lies with the individual, not with the collective. And we now understand more about what makes individuals tick than we do about society

Ideology is dead or, rather, the triumph of one ideology - liberal democracy - has left ideological struggle for dead. With communism bust, liberal capitalism has become less an idea than an orthodoxy.

In such a post-ideological world, what matters is, to use Tony Blair's phrase, "what works". Travelling without the baggage of fixed beliefs confers huge political advantage, permitting a fleet-footedness and businesslike pragmatism in the making of policy. Implementation is more important than ideas. Thus business leaders revolve in and out of Downing Street and assorted task forces, while philosophers are less in demand.

Yet although political battles of ideas no longer revolve around the macro-political questions of markets versus planning, or liberal democracy versus one-party state, that does not mean there are no new political ideas or political contests.

There is globalisation, for example - in particular the tensions created between national sovereignties and the freer movement of capital and commodities and the associated rise of what Philip Bobbitt and others have dubbed the "market state". However, the anti-globalisation movement appears to have run out of steam, not least because it failed to articulate a compelling alternative to the unquestioned dynamism of cross-border markets. Globalisation is a demo rather than the terrain of ideological struggle. Click here to read the full article...

Don't sell the NHS like shampoo

Mon, 5 Jul 2004 -1:00:00 GMT

New Statesman - 5th July 2004

The choice debate 1 - When it comes to public services, Britons are genuinely altruistic, valuing collective good over personal value. Why won't Labour believe this?

Parents of a gurgling baby born a few minutes before midnight on 4 July 1948 received, along with the congratulations, a bill for roughly £6. For those whose bundles of joy held on until after the stroke of 12, no charge was made: the National Health Service had arrived.

Amid the clamour of current, competing claims for the future of public services - especially healthcare - it is essential to recall a history lesson. In the NHS, the Attlee government created a new public good, removed immeasurable anxiety from millions of families and built the most important civic institution in British history. At the time, a popular joke ran: "What can a swan do easily, a duck not at all, but a doctor will have to do from 5 July?" Answer: "Stick his bill up his arse."

For those of us raised in a world where healthcare free at the point of delivery has simply been a fact of life, it is salutary to remember what a historic political achievement it was. And the hearts of Attlee and Aneurin Bevan would surely be warmed by the current spectacle of a Conservative Party desperately trying to persuade voters that it can do a better job than Labour of running public services, which historically the Tories by turns have opposed, grudgingly accepted, attacked and then allegedly embraced again.

Click here to read the full article...

Symptom of insecurity

Thu, 1 Jul 2004 -1:00:00 GMT

Management Today - 1st July 2004

The clampdown on 'sickie' absenteeism by some employers will harm staff relations.
Breaking news ... 'Millions of extra hours are being lost by UK organisations through the carrying out of "unwarranted" and unscientific studies on absence through sickness. Polling over 10 concerned mates, the LDLS - the voice of British Lies, Damned Lies and Statistics - has found that few organisations are even monitoring the growing problem of employees "pulling a survey" and wasting organisational resources.'

OK, apologies to the CBI. The real version is available on this august organisation's attractive and useful website, www.cbi.org.uk. Along with Axa - out to flog health insurance - the Confederation contacted 'over 500' of the UK's organisations and got headlines with figures suggesting that sickness absence had risen by 6% to 7.2 days per employee a year; that three out of four companies suspect employees of taking 'unwarranted' long weekends by calling in sick on Fridays or Mondays; and that 15% of sickness absence is thought - by the employers who completed the survey - to be non-genuine. read more...

New Statesman, The daily grind

Mon, 28 Jun 2004 -1:00:00 GMT

June 2004

Willing Slaves: how the overwork culture is ruling our lives

'Technology is producing less white heat than white noise, but broadband is like the jet engine'

Mon, 31 May 2004 -1:00:00 GMT

New Statesman - 31st May 2004

Just as some people fly to Nepal and the majority go to Ibiza, so some will use bigger bandwidth to research bilingualism in Patagonia and most will order their groceries. The impact it has will be up to us

Almost a century ago, Marcel Proust wrote that a certain technology was "a supernatural instrument, before whose miracle we used to stand amazed, and which we now employ without giving it a thought, to summon our tailor or order our ice cream". The instrument in question was the telephone. But the same progress from amazement to absorption into everyday life characterises our relationship with mobile phones, microwaves, e-mail, the internet - and now broadband, too. The first experience of downloading a document using broadband, for someone used to watching the slowly filling bar across the bottom of their computer screen using a dial-up connection, is inescapably thrilling. By the 100th time, the speed barely registers. We employ 512Kbps without giving it a thought.

For evangelical commentators, broadband none the less has near-miraculous qualities: it will boost productivity, enlarge leisure, revolutionise the media industry and put the internet at the centre of our lives. Broadband Britain must be the country of all our futures. Technology is producing less white heat than white noise. The trouble is, we have heard all this before. The new economy was going to sweep away the old rules, institutions, economic principles and politics. In the aftermath of the dot bomb, messages of a coming revolution driven by technology are treated with justifiable scepticism. Click here to read the full article...

NS Essay - The belief that more education will create more equal opportunities has been proved wrong

Mon, 24 May 2004 -1:00:00 GMT

New Statesman - 24th May 2004

Genuine meritocracy and greater social mobility are emerging as Labour's big ideas for the third term. But perfect equality of life chances, argues Richard Reeves, is impossible unless the state intends to stop parents reading bedtime stories to their children

According to a sizable cadre of the wonkerati, social mobility will be at the heart of Labour's next half-decade. If the first term was about economic stability and the second about public service reform, the third, we are told, will be about meritocracy or "life chances". And as nobody seems to know who the prime minister will be in the third term, it is worth noting that the ambition to create a meritocratic or "classless" society is one shared by both Tony Blair and Gordon Brown. Indeed, at least rhetorically, it is shared across the political spectrum. Michael Howard's recent "I believe" document also supports equality of opportunity, and states that "people must have every opportunity to fulfil their potential", an ambition so bland it is impossible to imagine anyone opposing it.

What do these warm words really mean? And are they achievable - or even desirable? Howard probably means that people should not be discriminated against. Those on the Labour side, however, will have more ambitious ideas in mind - for example, that every individual should have an equal prospect of success in life, regardless of social and economic background. This sounds an uncontroversial goal. Yet it faces insurmountable practical, political and ethical obstacles. That does not make it wrong to strive for wider opportunities. But progressive politics requires an equivalent or greater emphasis on other ambitions, too, including a more equal distribution of rewards. To put too many eggs into the basket of social mobility would be a profound political error. Click here to read the full article...

Cry freedom, cry wolf

Sat, 1 May 2004 -1:00:00 GMT

Management Today - 1st May 2004

Whistleblowers rightly enjoy legal shelter, but there are dangers in openness too.
A British train operating company has discovered a way to make its trains run on time: blow the whistle. Staff have been issued with ultra-loud and penetrating whistles, which hustle dilatory passengers onto the train in a throwback to the glorious days of steam.

Of course, 'whistleblower' has long since acquired an altogether different meaning. Nowadays they are the heroes - or more likely, heroines - of public life, the people who fearlessly expose wrongdoing in their organisations, putting public good ahead of private gain. read more...

The Future of Human Capital Management, presentation at the City HQ of Penna plc, 28 April 2004.

Wed, 28 Apr 2004 -1:00:00 GMT

Management Today - 28th April 2004

Richard Reeves

The Future of Human Capital Management

I am going to share with you some thoughts on the future direction of HR…

To say that the phrase “People are our most important asset” is a cliché, is to state something fairly obvious. It’s a cliché, not because it is not true. In fact by definition a cliché, in my mind at least, is something that is blindingly obvious, but at the same time utterly meaningless.

“People are our most important asset” is in danger of falling into that category. It’s blindingly obvious that for most companies at most stages of development, people are the difference between success and failure. That’s pretty obvious. I doubt that many people in this room would disagree with that and if they did we could have a long argument about what research shows and bring out some percentages to argue the toss, but basically that is the case.

What does it mean to say: “People are our greatest asset”? What’s the action that flows from that?
I gather from some of my friends who are City economists that an economist by the name of Karl Marx is currently in vogue again as an economist rather than a futurologist. One of the things that Karl Marx said is well worth repeating, even in the City. When asked if he was a philosopher, he said “No I am not a philosopher, and the reason for that is that philosophers only describe the world and my job is to change it.”

I love that phrase because it seems to me to summarise what a lot of people is this room are trying to do; not just to describe the world, but also to change it. To say that people are our most important asset is a description. It doesn’t lead to a necessary action. So the challenge for all of us is to take the description and turn it into something that we can do: in short, to change the world. That’s our ultimate ambition.

We talk a lot about Human Capital rather than people, and there are certain elements of rigour that enter into the equation when we talk about Human Capital. Nonetheless there is something intrinsically elusive, difficult, complex and episodic about Human Capital, because human beings are complex and difficult and episodic. And sometimes the harder you try to grasp the notion of Human Capital, the more it seems to slip through your fingers. It’s very difficult to find clear metrics for what constitutes Human Capital and that’s partly because what goes on in the space in our heads is so difficult to figure out.

One example that I like to use is that of Albert Einstein. Let’s say that you want to buy some Einstein. In the history of the twentieth century physics, Einstein was a buy rather than a sell. You want to buy twenty years of Einstein or one year of Einstein. I’ll buy a year. Ill take year 1905, the year that Einstein was working as a Patent Clerk and published 3 papers which changed the course of theoretical physics and world history. If you buy the last twenty years of Einstein then you’ll get twenty years of somebody who has had a fine time working as a tenured professor in an American University, surrounded by lots of adoring young women and produced no physics of any value what so ever…

Now, I’m not asking you which you would prefer to be (!)

I think that this is all very difficult because people are difficult and complex - and their motivations are difficult and complex too but I think we do know some things for certain. If you try and look at the literature that relates to investing in people, Human Capital and financial performance, I think there are a few things that we do know with a fair degree of certainty.

The first thing that we know is that if you bundle lots of different interventions together in a way that make sense, if you put all the pieces of the jigsaw together, it works much better than doing it piecemeal. So if your recruitment strategy aligns with your training strategy, then you’ll do better than if they’re just being done separately. All the evidence is that bundled HR solutions make much more sense than piecemeal ones. The whole then becomes greater than the sum of the parts.

The second thing that we know for certain is that action speaks much louder than words. The key is not the devising of great HR policies. There is great work to be had advising companies on the devising of wonderful best practice HR policies, and it is fine, well paid work - I’d hate to see it disappear. But, policies don’t make a blind bit of difference to the performance of those organisations if they remain policies. It is action and implementation that is key. It is getting ones’ hands dirty and actually making the change happen rather than just drafting nice policies.

One bank, that is actually represented here and so will remain nameless, quite generously introduced paternity leave in the US. The HR person that was responsible for the policy told me that they were going to use it to “weed out the losers.” Great policy…slight culture lag!

But of course if we can show that the words and actions go together, then the words carry more weight. If people sense that you are a person or an organisation of action, then the words carry more weight too.

The best example that I’ve come across of this is actually from American history. Anybody here who is a scholar of American political history, or an anorak, I should say, like myself who spends long evenings reading the biographies of Lyndon Johnson, will know that Lyndon Johnson fought somebody called Coke Stevenson in the Texas Senate race in 1948. Coke Stevenson was a “Texan’s Texan”. Whatever that means! One of the things about Stevenson, it seems to me, is that he didn’t say very much, but when he did, people listened.

The best example of this was when he was being taken out by a journalist, who was hoping to get some information out of him. In Texas, rather than taking you out for lunch, journalists take you out hunting in order to kill your lunch. So, they were driving out, the two of them, and before they went out the owner of the land on which they were going to be hunting asked Coke a favour. He said, “We have a horse that’s been in the family along time, down in one of the fields that you are going to pass. The horse is very sick and needs to be put down but because it has been in the family for a long time, no one wants to do it. We were wondering if you would mind doing it, as you are passing, and put our family friend out of its misery”.

Coke said “Fine, no problems”

It was a twenty-minute drive from the house to the field. The whole twenty minutes Coke said very little. The journalist tried to get him to speak and he replied in monosyllables… “Yes,” “aha”, “no”. Then he said, “Pull over by this field here”.

The journalist pulled over. Stevenson gets out of the car, goes over to a horse, gets his gun and shoots the horse in the head. The horse dies.

He gets back into the car and the journalist says to Stevenson, “Why did you just do that?” as he knew nothing of the favour. Stevenson said, “Well you know, we were just driving along and I thought, I wonder what it would feel like to shoot a horse.” Then he turned and looked at the journalist and said, “And now, I’m wondering what it would feel like to shoot a man”.

I suspect that the silence that preceded the action gave the words a little bit more potential than they would have done if he hadn’t just shot a horse. So when we think about words, let’s think about actions too. That’s one of the things that we know about HR and HR Policy: actions speak very much louder than words.

Another thing we know is that it’s very hard to show that if you invest directly in people that you get immediate financial pay offs. There is some evidence but it’s pretty difficult to prove because there are lots of intervening variables - there’s lots of noise around. But what we know for sure is that people are the key to unlocking other assets in the business. Two examples of this would be IT and M&A.
An MIT Professor estimates that for every £1 or $1 a company spends on IT, there is at least £1 or $1 of intangible assets within the people of the firm. Looking at productivity found that the firms that introduced new IT systems and didn’t change the way they worked saw, if anything, a drop in productivity. It was only those firms who, as they introduced new IT systems that worked differently, implemented a corresponding people action, saw productivity gains.

Investing in IT without changing the way people work is probably a worse thing to do with money than to take it straight out of cash point and burn it. Edward Heath once famously described yachting (he was a very good and keen yachtsman.) “Yachting essentially consists of the equivalent of standing in a cold shower and ripping up £50 notes.” That is a pretty good description of an IT investment strategy that doesn’t have a people strategy along side it.

The same is true for Mergers and Acquisitions activity. Unless the “people” bit of it goes right, it is probably a waste of money. The single most important factor in the success or failure of an M&A activity is whether the people part goes right too. And so if you think of people as not just an asset in themselves, but as the key asset to unlock other assets, than it seems to me that we’re really on to something. It’s the interaction effects that are just as important.

The penultimate point is that year one is critical. Getting talent on track quickly is critical. One of the things that we know for certain is that a high turnover of staff is bad for business. Hiring people and losing them or not putting them to work quickly is very bad for business. Those of you who’ve studied the American literature on this subject will have come across a wonderful phrase that Americans use “Executive Derailment”. What happens when things go wrong? They have this idea that you hire these “Executives” and they derail immediately.

What goes wrong is that some problems are in the recruitment first of all, but also that it’s the lack of support, lack of coaching, lack of mentoring in year one. So all this money and effort goes into hiring people and then we tend to leave them to it.

Now there is actually a quote from a piece of work from Robert Hogan, which describes what goes wrong when you hire people as managers. Many managers who are bright, hard working, ambitious and technically competent fail or are in danger of failing because they are perceived as, quote:
“… Arrogant, vindictive, untrustworthy, selfish, emotional, compulsive, over controlling, insensitive, abrasive, aloof, too ambitious and unable to delegate.”

And they were the good ones!

Year one is critical. What happens in that first year is critical. And retention is also critical. Recruiting the best, but not retaining them, is like filling your bathtub without putting the plug in.

One of the things that firms tend to forget is that people have long memories, and that there is some evidence that if firms treat people badly when the labour market is not on the employee side, they remember when it is again. So, when they can they leave, they remember how it was five years previously. As far as employees are concerned, vengeance is very often a dish served cold. So we have to worry about retention when the labour market is booming.

The very last point is the value of Network Capital. It is quite clear that it is not only people who are the asset, but also the people who your people know - the Networks that they use. So it’s not only “What is the value of your Human Capital?” that is an important question, but also “What is the value of your Network Capital? Who do your people know? How do they work with them and what benefit do they bring to the firm?

Which of course is an appropriate note for me to finish on, because this event, if nothing else, is a Networking event. So, we can all increase our Network Capital by 20% by the end of this evening. But we must never forget that the only difference between “Networking” and “Not Working” is one vowel.

Enjoy the evening.

NS Essay - Friendship is the invisible thread running through society

Mon, 19 Apr 2004 -1:00:00 GMT

New Statesman - 18th April 2004

Friends can give you longer life and better health. But they can also be the basis for hierarchy, social exclusion and hostility to strangers. Another word for friend is "crony". By Richard Reeves.

It lifts hearts and lengthens lives. It has been hailed as the ultimate good by the greatest philosophers, promoted (at least in theory) by all the major religions and deified by revolutionaries. It even defeats the common cold. The wondrous good in question is friendship. Aristotle's highest goal for men and the third plank of the French revolution - liberty, equality, fraternity - friendship is as old as humanity and as im-portant as love or justice. But while the shelves in one part of the bookshop groan with self-help books on how to snag the perfect partner, and others (usually in the basement) are packed with economic treatises on income distribution and philosophical texts on the nature of freedom, friendship barely gets a mention. Friendship is the invisible thread running through society.

Friendship may receive miserly theoretical and political attention, but its significance in our lives is, if anything, increasing. While the claim that "friends are the new family" is an overstatement, it is certainly the case that friendships figure prominently in both the lives people actually lead and the ones to which they aspire. Television programmes such as Friends and Sex and the City portray a world in which close friendships define the contours of the participants' lives: parents and children are allowed, at best, walk-on parts. Perhaps even more than the glamour, the settings and the apartments, we envy the friendships. Click here to read the full article...

RSA Journal 'In Defence of Politics'

Mon, 5 Apr 2004 -1:00:00 GMT

RSA Journal - April 2004

Reeves decries the trivialities which form the basis of public debate in the UK today, claiming that political discourse has been overtaken by spin, small-mindedness and petty abuse.

Click here to read the full article...

The same old diversity

Thu, 1 Apr 2004 -1:00:00 GMT

Management Today - 1st April 2004

Corporations will employ all kinds - as long as they do business the American way

There must have been a time when 'equal opportunities' was a newly minted term, one that could inspire change, hope and passion. But it doesn't cut the mustard in corporate life today. It is oldspeak, now confined to the linguistic dustbin and replaced by 'diversity' - itself under threat from the new pretender to the PC throne, 'inclusiveness'.

So companies that were in favour of equal opps and then diversity are now committed to inclusiveness. One way to upset your HR director - and probably limit your own career - is to ask politely for their explanation of the difference between these terms: I have yet to hear a compelling distinction. Answers on a postcard... (Some firms, hedging their bets, are even developing 'Inclusiveness and Diversity' policies.) read more...

The nation wants a daddy, not a bud

Mon, 8 Mar 2004 -1:00:00 GMT

New Statesman - 8th March 2004

Observations on the US presidential elections

It is conventional electoral wisdom in the US that although people don't mind if their senators are aloof and distant, they want their president to be someone they like. The US Senate is constitutionally designed to be a place of cool heads and sober reflection, to be a defence against populism - a "cooling saucer" for legislation, as Washington described it to Jefferson. Not only does it not matter if senators are dull; dullness is part of the skills set. But voters are going to see their president on TV for the next four years and he embodies the nation's personality - he is supposed to be Mr America.

Presidents, according to this wisdom, are supposed to seem like the kind of guy you would want at your barbecue, or in your local bar. Bill Clinton was a natural in this role. And George W Bush learned the lesson that his father's stiffness was a vote-loser. He can fake "ordinary bloke" pretty well. During his 2000 campaign, he joked that while his opponent had written a book at university, he may himself have managed to read one. Clear message: Al Gore's a geek, I'm just a regular guy who'd rather be watching baseball than reading that Tocqueville. Even Bush's syntactical challenges - which so appal Europeans - positioned him, away from the snobbish coasts, as someone you could comfortably share a Bud with.

Click here to read the full article...

'The Tories will briefly return to power in 2010, but after that it will be Labour's century'

Mon, 8 Mar 2004 -1:00:00 GMT

New Statesman - 8th March 2004

The Blair-Brown style, with its notorious control-freakery, is the result of too long in opposition. If the next generation opts for liberal socialism, the party can expect years in office

It is not the best of times for Labour. With former cabinet colleagues exploding like cluster bombs, crucial votes being won with support from disloyal Conservatives, party membership falling and Labour polling only slightly ahead of Michael Howard's motley crew, the project looks endangered.

But the long-term prospects for the party are in fact better than at any point in its history. The 21st century could herald a reversal of the pattern of the 20th, in which Labour's principal role was to give the Conservatives the odd break from the rigours of government. Even if, as seems likely, the Tories get back into office fairly soon, Labour will remain the party of power. This should be the Labour century.

But such dominance is far from guaranteed. One of the oddities of the current political climate is that the UK has no natural party of government. The Conservatives lost the crown in the quagmire of the Major administration. But Labour has yet to inherit it. Tony Blair and Gordon Brown have performed extraordinarily well in government, especially at the helm of the least experienced cabinet in British history. But they remain insecure incumbents.

Such achievements as macroeconomic stability, a minimum wage, significant public sector investment, devolution, Bank of England independence, the New Deal and Sure Start are easy to understate or forget. These are real, and mostly irreversible, achievements. The Blair/Brown problem has not been lack of competence but lack of confidence. The key to understanding their psychology is not the absence of red boxes from their lives before 1997 - it is the long, lonely, enervating years of opposition and the trauma of 1992. Neal Lawson, head of Compass, a new Labour pressure group, says that the 1992 defeat "is hard-wired into their political make-up; it is impossible to understand Labour without understanding that".

Click here to read the full article...

Enough of the T-word

Mon, 1 Mar 2004 -1:00:00 GMT

Management Today - 1st March 2004

Enough of the T-word. The truth about teamwork is that individual members must be allowed to shine.

NATP is the ultimate contemporary workplace putdown: 'Not A Team Player'. All performance management systems contain a section on 'ability to work in a team'. Team days, team-building and bonding, team dynamics; the T-word is ubiquitous. I team, therefore I am.

Businesses are in the grip of a team tyranny. Not simply because work is organised around teams, but because the ethos of teamworking - in itself one of those words you feel the English language is not necessarily enriched by - is pervasive. Guff such as 'there's no "I" in team!' surrounds us. read more...

NS Essay - When it comes to family, sex, food and booze, people hate being told what to do

Mon, 2 Feb 2004 -1:00:00 GMT

New Statesman - 2nd February 2004

Ministers should ignore the "nanny state" taunts. They may face opposition at first but, as drink-driving shows, they can make us more responsible

In SW1, everyone is talking about responsibility. The Prime Minister peppers his speeches, especially those on health issues, with a call for greater individ- ual responsibility. Michael Howard declares that "there is no freedom without responsibility" and promises to protect the British people from being "nannied or over-governed". At Christmas, Malcolm Wicks, the minister for pensions, urged young people to spend less money on "alcohol, CDs and DVDs" in order to save responsibly for their retirement. Once we had a minister for fun; now we have one against it.

Drinking, eating, exercise, driving, sex: all in need, it seems, of a good dose of responsibility. Corporations proclaim it, ministers exhort it, and social commentators bewail its absence. In a few weeks, the government's Strategy Unit will issue a report on the topic. Derek Wanless's review of health spending will follow, pointing out that large swathes of the NHS are treating "lifestyle diseases" that result from smoking, poor diets and lack of exercise.

Labour triangulated the responsibility debate in employment and penal policy a decade ago. The New Deal, explicitly based on the marriage of rights and responsibilities, demands authentic efforts to seek work in return for assistance and benefits. David Blunkett's scheme to make offenders pay into a fund for the victims of crime is the direct descendant of "tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime". Click here to read the full article...

What does a firm care?

Thu, 1 Jan 2004 -1:00:00 GMT

Management Today - 1st January 2004

The root causes of sexual inequality in the workplace must be analysed and exposed.
When the Equal Opportunities Commission issues a report entitled 'Who Runs Britain?', the answer is a foregone conclusion. It is rather like Muhammad Ali asking: 'Who's the greatest?'

And sure enough, the answer to the EOC's question is - drumroll, drumroll - men. Across swathes of public and corporate life, the proportion of men in positions of power will sober up anyone high on the idea that we've reached equality. It is still a man's world.

'Britain is the 10% club,' says Julie Mellor, chair of the Commission. Read more...

NS Essay 5 - On a (leftish) wing and a prayer?

Mon, 15 Dec 2003 -1:00:00 GMT

New Statesman - 15th December 2003

Religion is a dirty word in British politics. But a faith system that emphasised social good might be better than today's uncritical worship of the market

The Prime Minister is not short of things to pray for this Christmas. The continuing morass of Iraq, rebellion over top-up fees and the looming publication of the Hutton report - not to mention his health - all add up to a strong case for divine assistance. But Blair takes his religion more seriously than most, and shopping lists are not likely to be his style. Not since Gladstone has Britain had such a religious premier. Far from seeing prayer as a short cut to getting what he wants politically, Tony Blair sees politics as the means for working towards goals inspired by his faith. In a foreword to a book about Labour Christians, he wrote: "Neither faith nor politics can be simply about believing - it must be about action. Religious beliefs and political beliefs will achieve nothing until people are prepared to act on those beliefs."

This year, the Prime Minister appointed a "faith tsar", John Battle MP, to act as a bridgehead into the religious communities; said that he will answer to "my Maker" for his actions in Iraq; was evasive about whether he had prayed with George Bush; and established a faith community steering group to look at closer links between government and religious groups.

He is reported to have wanted to end a broadcast on Iraq with the words "God bless you", until the secular views of his advisers - a godless lot, by his lights - prevailed. All of which worries some of Blair's friends (who fear comparisons with Bush) and provides ammunition to his left-wing enemies, who see his Christianity as a further indication of his essential conservatism.

Click here to read the full article...

PROUD TO BE VULNERABLE

Mon, 1 Dec 2003 -1:00:00 GMT

Management Today - 1st December 2003

Taking the development of emotional skills seriously is a challenge for society today
Feeling anxious? Phone a helpline. Struggling with the way your Dad left when you were 13? Find a therapist. Discovered that your new boyfriend is a cross-dressing cousin who has already fathered your mother's child? Call Jerry Springer.

We live in an age, it seems, in which the American exhortation to let it all hang out has supplanted - everywhere but in the Conservative party - the Stiff Upper Lip. Some people date the Era of Emotions from the mass, almost mandatory, public grieving following the death of Princess Diana. But the truth is that the trend towards greater openness is a long-term one.

Frank Furedi, one of the UK's more inflammatory social scientists, warns that we are turning the ordinary challenges of life, such as growing up, taking exams or doing a difficult job, into therapeutic concerns requiring expert intervention. In his latest polemic, Therapy Culture: Cultivating Vulnerability in an Anxious Age, he argues that 'therapy culture promotes the idea that we are far too vulnerable to deal with the pressures of life. It is a culture that continually cultivates a sense of vulnerability, power- lessness and dependence.' Click here to read the full article...

NS Essay - 'We are faced with a tyranny of small decisions; choices that turn out to be double- edged swords'

Mon, 24 Nov 2003 -1:00:00 GMT

New Statesman - 24th November 2003

What we buy, which school the kids go to - daily life presents a growing array of options. Would we be better off with fewer of them?

Choice is this political season's black. The newly crowned Michael Howard trumpets plans for education and health vouchers - giving parents and patients maximum choice. Tony Blair and Gordon Brown squabble about how hard to push the agenda for "consumer choice" in public services. Politicians are falling over each other to offer a smorgasbord of life decisions.

"Choice" is such an unquestioned good that the word itself is now an approving adjective. In all aspects of life, from pensions to life partners, from hospitals to handbags, the accepted wisdom is that More Choice is Better. In fact, the modern multiplication of options is at best a mixed blessing, at worst a curse.

In television, the explosion in channel choice has resulted, in the words of Roger Mosey, head of BBC Television news, in a "poisonous cocktail" of reality TV, smut and confessionals. And the vast array of financial products now available has done nothing to lift pension savings. Click here to read the full article...

Who carries the tune?

Sat, 1 Nov 2003 -1:00:00 GMT

Management Today - 1st November 2003

Firms are right to seek out the talented, but not to neglect the competent majority.

It is managed, nurtured, attracted and, yes, leveraged. Nothing less than a corporate war is raging over it. And small wonder: capital itself is said to 'dance' to its command. This elixir of enterprise is, of course, talent. Books, conferences and articles on the 'war for talent' and 'talent management' have proliferated in recent years. In senior HR circles the term is now used like confetti.

Much of this stuff is a new skin for some very old wine, with the core message being essentially as follows: It is Usually a Good Idea to Hire and Hold Onto People who are Good at their Jobs. (Of course, The War for Talent and Funky Business - Talent Makes Capital Dance are probably better book titles.) A small proportion of the outpouring is helpful, alerting companies to the fact that younger, highly skilled employees have much shallower roots than their elders and that basing a psychological contract on a pension is unlikely to be effective. read more...

NS Essay - "We are witnessing the death of the political personality"

Mon, 27 Oct 2003 -1:00:00 GMT

New Statesman - 27th October 2003

The great problem of our age is not too much presentation - Churchill did soundbites - but the loss of the conviction politician with energy and power"

The social historians of the future will describe our age as the "Period of Personality". A time when magazines dispensing banal and mostly bogus titbits about the lives of people known to us only as pixels on a screen sold by the truckload. When television stars out-earned titans of industry. And when a bodybuilder-turned-action hero became the elected leader of the world's fifth-largest economy. The personality cults may have gone the way of the Iron Curtain; personality culture is alive and well.

Arnold Schwarzenegger's triumph in California appears to be the ultimate triumph of the "politics of personality", in which policies, ideologies and programmes are replaced by a star rating system whereby a winning smile counts for more than a welfare plan. It is the final Pop Idolisation of politics.

Click here to read the full article...

The battle for childhood

Mon, 20 Oct 2003 -1:00:00 GMT

New Statesman - 20th October 2003

We all love children; even politicians do. Yet we are in danger of taking from them everything that is most precious: freedom, health and happiness

In the Blair v Brown war of words at last month's party conference, the main weapons were "Labour" and "new". And there were plenty more for commentators to chew on. But perhaps the most important word in both of their speeches was one that united the two men. The Prime Minister mentioned children 23 times, the Chancellor no fewer than 40.

Children are a staple of political speeches. Every party and every politician wants "the best for our children". But the emphasis this time was not merely rhetorical. Government policy has taken a decidedly childwards turn: increases in child benefit, child and childcare tax credits, Sure Start programmes for deprived pre-schoolers, "baby bonds" for every child, a minister - albeit a controversial one - for children, promises of a children's commissioner and plans for a children's centre in every town. Click here to read the full article...

REALITY BITES - Accepting that love and sex are part and parcel of office life does not mean, of course, that sexual harassment should be tolerated at any level.

Wed, 1 Oct 2003 -1:00:00 GMT

Management Today - 1st October 2003

REALITY BITES - Accepting that love and sex are part and parcel of office life does not mean, of course, that sexual harassment should be tolerated at any level.
Accepting that love and sex are part and parcel of office life does not mean, of course, that sexual harassment should be tolerated at any level.

Sigmund Freud believed that a well-balanced psyche was built on two pillars: work and love. Given a capacity to undertake useful activity and the ability to form deep emotional relationships, you're OK. (As the Institute of Directors would say, dead easy, this psychology stuff, eh?)

What Freud did not anticipate was a blurring of the line between the two spheres. In his day, the workplace was filled with whiskery-mustachioed, hyper-rational men, and any loving was confined to the warm, feminine home. Nowadays half the workforce is female, most couples are dual-earner ones, and at least half of us meet our spouse or long-term partner under the romantic fluorescent lights of an open-plan office. Read more...

Nepotism: is it back?

Mon, 29 Sep 2003 -1:00:00 GMT

New Statesman - 29th September 2003

The right family name, network of friends or marriage partner can still smooth your passage through life. Richard Reeves asks if it could ever be otherwise

The small world of insect behaviour experts was shaken earlier this year with the discovery by Finnish scientists that ants, long imagined to be the socialists of sociobiology, practise nepotism - favouring blood relatives with food and killing strangers. A similar spasm is currently gripping the intellectuals of the US east coast. A new book by Adam Bellow argues not only that nepotism is on the rise (a view shared by many) but that this is a cause for celebration rather than liberal hand-wringing. And Mr Bellow knows of what he speaks. His dad is Saul Bellow.

Far from being a scourge of modern democracies, the practice of helping offspring is an honourable parental instinct, he believes, while nepotism "links the generations in a chain of generosity and gratitude". Click here to read the full article...

'Brown's stealth socialism has backfired: public opinion is now more Tory than ever'

Mon, 15 Sep 2003 -1:00:00 GMT

New Statesman - 15th September 2003

Popular political wisdom tells us that the well-paid won't vote for higher taxes. But only by persuading the rich to be less greedy can we have a decent society

Which of the following countries is the most equal in terms of income: the UK, France, or the United States? You're going for France? Final answer? Sorry, the correct answer is the United States.

And the most unequal? According to new research, the UK tops the unfairness table. Naturally, there's a catch: the figures, compiled by the leading American economists Christopher Jencks and Gary Burtless, are based purely on money provided by the market - in other words, on people's incomes before the state has done any taxing or spending. Once government spending is factored in, the US returns to its usual place at the top of the inequality table (see graph, page 28).

"We were a bit surprised by these numbers," says Burtless. "People tend to look at the gap in wages, and we know that the US has higher wage inequality." He and Jencks speculate that the US economy does, however, have some powerfully equalising tendencies, too, in particular providing high employment levels and much more market income to pensioners - through private investments - than the economies of other nations.

Click here to read the full article...

REALITY BITES: People at work typically want what those above them have. This desire to move up the pecking order is what motivates people to do a good job

Mon, 1 Sep 2003 -1:00:00 GMT

Management Today - 1st September 2003

REALITY BITES: People at work typically want what those above them have. This desire to move up the pecking order is what motivates people to do a good job - Many of you will have visited the cinema this summer to watch a large green man tearing up buildings. Although the science of The Hulk largely went over my head, I'm pretty sure that the biggest question of all - why does Dr Banner turn green with anger? - was unanswered.
Many of you will have visited the cinema this summer to watch a large green man tearing up buildings. Although the science of The Hulk largely went over my head, I'm pretty sure that the biggest question of all - why does Dr Banner turn green with anger? - was unanswered.

After all, green is associated with an altogether subtler and more sinister emotion than anger - envy. Focusing on this feeling would have produced a darker, homelier movie, although I admit it would have made for less exciting special effects. For the green-eyed monster stalks all of our lives, even our workplaces. Click here to read the full article...

How fat became a political issue

Mon, 18 Aug 2003 -1:00:00 GMT

New Statesman - 18th August 2003

Obesity will soon be the biggest problem facing the National Health Service, costing us all billions of pounds a year. Shouldn't the government take action, asks Richard Reeves

The beds were creaking at the Los Angeles airport Marriott last week - and not just for the usual reasons. The hotel was hosting the annual convention of the NAAFA, the National Association to Advance Fat Acceptance, an organisation that self-consciously styles itself as a civil rights movement for fat people, just as the NAACP fights for the rights of African Americans. Fat is the new black. And they came to the city of the skinny to prove it.

But a thousand miles up the coast, the Seattle school board simultaneously took a decision that may come to be seen as a turning point in the struggle against obesity. The board renewed a contract with Coca-Cola to supply vending machines to its schools, but insisted that the machines selling soft drinks can be turned on only after school hours. Other boards are expected to follow suit; some are planning to ban soft drinks from their schools altogether. The food and drink corporates are starting to fret.

Click here to read the full article...

REALITY BITES:

Fri, 1 Aug 2003 -1:00:00 GMT

Management Today - August 2003

REALITY BITES: - We have a Trades Descriptions Act protecting consumers from being mis-sold a product. How about an Act that does the same for jobs?
We have a Trades Descriptions Act protecting consumers from being mis-sold a product. How about an Act that does the same for jobs?

Like all dysfunctional relationships, the one between British employers and employees is riddled with lies. Both sides are guilty - CVs can embellish the truth; but then 'your jobs are safe' often means a downsizing, restructuring or - my personal favourite - 'ventilation' is imminent.

The density of deceitfulness is highest at the beginning and end of an affair. Over the second candlelit dinner, we all pretend to be smarter, more cultured and better-connected than we are. And when romance turns to ruin, we'll say: 'It's not you. It's me. I'm just not ready/over the last lover/good enough for you (delete as appropriate).'

Likewise, there is never less honesty than at the points of hiring and firing. Companies spend a fortune convincing new recruits that if they commit to them, they will enjoy a fabulous, glittering career involving international travel, a perfect balance between work and life, and ethnic and gender diversity. It must be true: the brochures say so. The reality is one of Stakhanovite hours, months with a client in Leeds, and a senior management team and prevailing culture that is male, pale and stale. We have a Trades Description Act that protects consumers from being mis-sold a product: how about an Employment Description Act to do the same for jobs? Click here to read more...

Great thinkers of our time - Martha Nussbaum

Mon, 14 Jul 2003 -1:00:00 GMT

New Statesman - 14th July 2003

As a young academic, Martha Nussbaum received some important encouragement over a coffee in a scruffy burger bar from a fellow philosopher. He was John Rawls. "If you can influence people, you have a duty to do that," he said. No one could say she hasn't risen to the challenge. Called "philosophy's action woman" by Time magazine, Nussbaum, who is 56, has been justly described as "one of the polymaths of our age".

The intellectual range and volume of her work is remarkable; a friend of mine, who edits a philosophy magazine, said it was a full-time job simply reading all her output. At the University of Chicago, she holds appointments in the law, philosophy and divinity departments, as well as holding associate positions in the classics and political science departments. She is also an affiliate of the university's Committee on Southern Asian Studies and a board member of the Human Rights Programme. Oh yes, and the founder and co-ordinator of the Centre for Comparative Constitutionalism. She holds 22 honorary degrees. So what have you being doing with your time?

But Nussbaum is uncomfortable staying in the ivory tower (or in her case, several towers). Borrowing a phrase from Seneca, she sees herself as a "lawyer for humanity". Despite a privileged upbringing - she attended the elite Baldwin School in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania - her lifelong passion is to use her intelligence to help the powerless. Reading Dickens from the age of 12 onwards was one factor. "It was exhilarating to know that there was someone in the world for whom poor children mattered deeply," she has said.

Click here to read the full article...

NS Essay - There is a character missing from the cast of political life: the public intellectual

Mon, 7 Jul 2003 -1:00:00 GMT

New Statesman - 7th July 2003

Academics write in peculiar language for specialist peers; think-tanks are slaves to corporate funding. So will politics now remain an ideas-free zone? By Richard Reeves

'Both the Conservatives and Labour have lost confidence in the political creeds which they nominally profess, while neither side appears to have made any progress in providing itself with a better. Yet such a better doctrine must be possible; not by splitting the difference between the two, but something wider than either."

This summary of the political scene (I have changed one word, substituting Labour for Liberals) came from John Stuart Mill in 1861. It seems shockingly contemporary in 2003. Both big parties are looking for a new story; for a set of core ideas to animate their programmes. For - dare one suggest it? - an ideology.

For the past decade, what Mill disparages as "splitting the difference" - otherwise known as the Third Way - has served Labour well at the polls. Now it needs something more, a "wider doctrine" that can guide decision-making and connect with a bemused and confused electorate.

Click here to read the full article...

'It's time to cultivate the good life'

Mon, 7 Jul 2003 -1:00:00 GMT

The Guardian - 7th July 2003

John Maynard Keynes made four predictions in his essay Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, published in 1930.

First, within a century or so "the standard of life in progressive countries [would] be between four and eight times as high as it is today". Second, this would mean the "economic problem" would have effectively been solved - and more growth would be of marginal concern to well being.

Third, the transition from a growth-pursuing culture would be difficult: he regarded "with dread" the necessary readjustments of the "habits and instincts of the ordinary man, bred into him for countless generations. Must we not expect a general nervous breakdown?" Finally he argued "those peoples who can keep alive and cultivate the art of life will be able to enjoy the abundance when it comes".

In each case Keynes was prescient. His macroeconomic forecast was, if anything, a little conservative: GDP per head in Britain is already four times what it was in 1930 and it seems much more likely than not that growth will continue in similar vein for the next 27 years.

And there are clear signs the levels of affluence already reached represent a solving of the economic problem. There is plenty of empirical evidence, for example, that life satisfaction in more affluent nations is no longer correlated with economic growth, so progress, in terms of happiness, is no longer an economic but a social issue.

(Two caveats are important here: for most of the world's population in the developing world, wealth creation remains a vital engine of wellbeing. Even in richer nations, poor people can be made happier with modest amounts of extra money. And so the strict utilitarian case for redistribution is a no-brainer.)

We are now, then, in the difficult transitional phase which Keynes anticipated. And while a "general nervous breakdown" might be an overstatement, a quick survey of episodes of road rage, rising incivility, hurry sickness and poor mental health suggests that our affluence co-exists with considerable anxiety.

The population of the USA, where economic motivations are even more deep-seated, is becoming less happy over time, while most of social democratic Europe is doing better in the happiness stakes (the French and Belgians are an exception to the rule).

This lends some support to Keynes's fourth supposition about the importance of the arts of life as opposed to the science of economics. Some nations, it seems, are making better use of the "freedom from pressing economic cares to live wisely and agreeably and well".

A tick can be placed next to all four of the Keynesian prophecies. But there is little evidence of a general awareness that we have reached a new stage in our society's development. If anything, we seem to be more obsessed, both collectively and individually, with the pursuit of income, profits, productivity, competitiveness and growth. We know from the research literature that friendship, good family relations and learning are now more associated with life satisfaction than money.

But having failed thus far to wean ourselves of the accumulation habit, to throw away the success benchmarks calibrated with pound signs, we rush around competing for goods that offer little to our own life satisfaction - and then wonder why we're frustrated. Having reached our current level of affluence, further material gain is valuable only in as much as it lifts our position relative to others. But because everyone is engaged in the same game, the net result is no one feels better off.

Political leaders are further behind the curve than the rest of us. For an example of the wrong-headedness of current political priorities, look no further than Charles Clarke. At just the point in economic history when we need to be cultivating the arts of life, we have an education secretary who sees schools and universities as training camps for UK employers.

Last week's report showing the sluggish take-up of citizenship education shows even this modest attempt to broaden the curriculum is gaining little traction. Yet if any subjects should be compulsory until the age of sixteen, they are philosophy, music, politics, creative writing.

Both left and right have, for different reasons, recently steered clear of articulating the contours of a good life. And the notion of promoting happiness is still treated with disdain in most political circles. The view that the market provides the scope for people to decide their own version of a good life - the real meaning of "there is no such thing as society" - has now taken root in Labour soil.

But this each to their own view will no longer suffice. The dynamics of consumption, relative income comparisons and the seeking of status are condemning us all to run a race that has no winners. There is a clear role for public policy is helping to manage the transition from the pursuit of economic goals which have served us so well in the past to the arts of life which will do so in the future.

The abundance has come but we are not especially enjoying it. This is because we continue to worship the God of economic science, rather than cultivating the arts of life. And this is where the real politics of progress must now take place.

In Search of the Good Life by Richard Reeves is in the current issue of Renewal (www.renewal.org.uk)

REALITY BITES

Tue, 1 Jul 2003 -1:00:00 GMT

Management Today - July 2003

REALITY BITES - The researchers found that the most productive firms have higher proportions of skilled workers. But then they looked more closely at the causes ...
The researchers found that the most productive firms have higher proportions of skilled workers. But then they looked more closely at the causes ...

Everyone knows about Gordon Brown's infatuation with Prudence. But lately he seems just as keen on her more cerebral sister, Productivity.

Brown has thrown all manner of tax breaks, credits and initiatives at the so-called productivity gap between the UK and some of its competitors, to little apparent avail. For a long time, middle managers took the blame, but they have just been exonerated by no less a figure than Michael Porter.

But one of the elements of the high-productivity drive that continues to animate ministers is the need to move to a high-skill economy, the presumption being that high skills will bring high productivity along on their coat-tails. And although Charles Clarke, the education secretary, and Brown are not the closest of political allies, on this they are joined at the hip - witness Clarke's recent rant against the 'medieval' concept of universities as places pursuing learning for its own sake, and his renewed call for educational establishments to produce skills 'required by the economy'. Click here to read the full article...

'Labour's Rising Star', June 2003, Interview with David Miliband in the RSA Journal

Mon, 2 Jun 2003 -1:00:00 GMT

RSA Journal - June 2003

The Cinammon Club restaurant in Westminster is now notorious as the site of the Night of the Great Firefighter Splurge, when Andy Gilchrist spent £817.31 on Rajasthani roast venison and Chateau Chasse-Spleen. It is also a favourite haunt for David Miliband MP, the education department, where he is Minister of State for school standards, is just steps away. For David, though, the preferred meal is breakfast, and the preferred components are fruit, croissant and tea.

Miliband is a politician whose stock is rising faster than a dot com in the late 1990s. Tipped by Andrew Rawnsley in The Observer and others as the ‘heir to Blair’, he shot from the backbenches to a ministerial job one rung below cabinet in under a year. When Estelle Morris resigned just eights months later, Downing Street were forced to take the extraordinary step of briefing that 37 year-old Miliband would not be taking her place at the cabinet table, such was the expectation that his ascent was about to become stratospheric.

‘Ghastly,’ is how he describes the PM-in-waiting coverage, with a slight shudder. ‘Ghastly. The only silver lining is that you and I can now sleep easier in our beds knowing that, since it has been predicted...

Click here to read the RSA Journal Article on David Milliband

Richard Reeves is a writer. He worked with David Miliband at the IPPR between 1994 and 1996. rr@hauverreeves.com

Anthony Sampson on Government for the RSA Journal...

Sun, 1 Jun 2003 -1:00:00 GMT

RSA Journal - June 2003

In the corner of a tent – or to be more precise, in a side circle of a yurt – a scene of rich irony is unfolding. The anatomist of the Establishment, Anthony Sampson, is chatting amiably to Tony Benn, Establishment scion-turned-scourge. The irony lies in the original basis for their relationship: the two Anthonys were at school together, attending the exclusive St Pauls half a century ago.

Their conversation ranges knowledgably over oil prices, by-elections and speeding tickets. (Mr Benn has recently been nicked.) And then Benn goes to meet his audience. The encounter is a reminder that some of the sternest critics of privilege are not total strangers to it themselves: perhaps the Establishment even produces its own opposition.

Sampson is famous for his Anatomy of Britain, published forty years ago, and is at the Edinburgh book festival to promote his new version, Who Runs This Place? The Anatomy of Britain in the 21st Century. His RSA lecture the previous evening saw him playing to a packed house. But the contrast with his old school colleague is marked. While Benn will offer an opinion on almost every subject imaginable, and solutions to most problems, Sampson is ultra-cautious. In this sense, he is indeed an anatomist rather than a doctor...

Click here to read the RSA Journal Article on Anthony Sampson

Richard Reeves is a director of Intelligence Agency. richard@intelligenceagency.co.uk

REALITY BITES - Companies might do better to employ more women because, being both cheap and cheerful, they are better value than money-grabbing men

Sun, 1 Jun 2003 -1:00:00 GMT

Management Today - 1st June 2003

REALITY BITES - Companies might do better to employ more women because, being both cheap and cheerful, they are better value than money-grabbing men.
Companies might do better to employ more women because, being both cheap and cheerful, they are better value than money-grabbing men.

Like the poor, the pay gap between men and women seems always to be with us. After a period following the Equal Pay Act in which women's paypackets got heavier, progress towards a balancing of the wage scales has stalled. The hope that time would heal the divide is fading - even younger, well-educated women are earning less than their male peers. At the same time, there seems little appetite in the Government for radical action on this score. Read more...

REALITY BITES: All this busy-ness and stress is creating more heat than light. It is a sign not of work being too hard but too shallow, too undemanding

Thu, 1 May 2003 -1:00:00 GMT

Management Today - May 2003

REALITY BITES: All this busy-ness and stress is creating more heat than light. It is a sign not of work being too hard but too shallow, too undemanding - How hard is your job, really? (It's OK, I won't tell anyone, especially your boss.) Yes, I'm sure you work terribly hard at your job, but that's not the question. The issue at hand is how much your job stretches you, challenges you, teaches you, how much it helps (or forces) you to grow.
How hard is your job, really? (It's OK, I won't tell anyone, especially your boss.) Yes, I'm sure you work terribly hard at your job, but that's not the question. The issue at hand is how much your job stretches you, challenges you, teaches you, how much it helps (or forces) you to grow.

Maybe you are one of the lucky ones. Maybe your job is just right - stimulating without being too far beyond you. But there is growing evidence that more and more people are doing jobs that, in skill terms, are simply beneath them. And as our expectations of what we want from life - including from work - are rising, plenty more are discovering that being able to do a job with their eyes closed is a mixed blessing. Atrophy lies in wait. Click here to read the full article...

Report for The Royal Economic Society of its 2003 Annual Conference Report

Wed, 9 Apr 2003 -1:00:00 GMT

The Royal Economic Society - 9th April 2003

Every year the RES invites an independent journalist to attend the RES conference and write a report for the Newsletter. This year the RES asked Richard Reeves to do this and his personal view is printed below. Richard Reeves is a former research associate for the Work Foundation and columnist for Management Today and the New Statesman. He has also been the economics, and Washington, correspondent for the Guardian.

Bertrand Russell, perhaps not surprisingly, was not a sunny adolescent: ‘I hated life and was constantly on the verge of suicide,’ he admitted in his brilliant essay The Conquest of Happiness. What kept him from hurling himself off a cliff, he added, was ‘a desire to know more mathematics’.

Russell would have been happy for much of the three days of the RES 2003 Annual Conference. Each presentation contained hundreds if not thousands of numbers, and several plenty of equations, too. On the second night, after too much wine at the conference dinner, I dreamt that I was living in a kind of Matrix-world, with every object consisting of row after row of tiny, flickering numbers…..

This is not a complaint. Economics is necessarily a numbers game. (It may also have been Russell who said that the mark of civilized person was the ability to weep over a column of numbers.) And one of the distinguishing skills of an economist is the ability to look at a page of numbers and see a pattern — see quickly where the ‘action’ is. Just occasionally, though, it is good to remember that the numbers only matter in so much as they tell us something about the world. The numbers are a means, not an end.

How best to summarise a three-day numberfest? It is impossible to do justice to the mountain of work which was represented, tip-only, at the conference. Some presentations or sessions were important enough, or remarkable enough, to be worth summarizing here. And some overall impressions were strong. But so as not to bury the lead, my overwhelming sense was that despite some great research, some startling findings and some top-notch presentations, that the conference as a whole represented a significant missed opportunity for the economics community.

The annual conference is a chance to do a number of things which are difficult to manage on a day-to-day basis. First, to think about the broad state and role of economics in intellectual and public life, and get a sense of the key challenges lying ahead. Second, to hear and contribute to topical debates or controversies within the economics research community. Third, to allow researchers the opportunity to learn from others while their research is in progress. Fourth, to pick up emerging trends in areas of economics outside one’s own field. According to my non-representative sample of one, the conference only really manages the last of these.

OK. Let’s go for some good news. Alan Manning. He may look like a children’s TV presenter — I kept wondering where Bungle was — but he was undoubtedly the conference’s star performer. Giving the Review of Economic Studies lecture, which is for a distinguished young economist, he wins top prize not only for the best one-liner — ‘I now realise that being a young economist is not the same thing as being young’ — but also for providing a model for other presenters. He took a theoretical innovation, applied it to a live policy issue, explained his terminology and held his audience.

The innovation was to look at the labour market from a ‘search model’ perspective, a departure from the traditional approach inspired by Mincer, which looks at human capital development as the key factor explaining wage differentials in a presumed competitive labour market. Manning’s view is the monopsony is a better way of understanding labour market behaviour. As he put it: ‘What happens if an employer cuts everyone’s wages by one pence?’ Not, as the competitive Mincerian approach suggests, a mass stampede for the exit. ‘Stayer bias’ is a hugely important variable in employment behaviour — not one to simply be controlled for, but which has explanatory power. While traditional Mincerian approaches treat job ‘quits’ and ‘lay-offs’ as identical, Manning argued they needed to be treated as distinct — and that additional consideration needs to be given to returns to experience and job tenure; costs of job loss; returns to job mobility; and the evolution of wages within jobs. ‘Progress through life is like snakes and ladders,’ he said. ‘So we need to understand both the snakes and the ladders.’

Manning then turned his theory towards the issue of the gender pay gap, and in particular to the fact that younger women (eg those entering the labour market between 1975 and 1979) are doing no better than slightly older women (eg the 1968-72 cohort). The conclusion was that job mobility, differential promotion chances, training or career breaks for children have little to do with it — this last finding meaning that ‘there is not much action, to be got, from a gender pay gap perspective, from increases in family rights, maternity leave etc’. The principal cause of the pay gap in the early years of labour market experience turns out to be within-job wage growth, with no obviously observable cause.

Why then this difference? For someone who believes that social factors are now impacting economic ones more than the other way around, Manning’s suggested explanation was heartening. Having shown during the course of a theoretical and empirical tour de force, that the principal cause of the pay gap is not E(DW1|X,Z,Q=1)- E(DW0|X,Z,Q=1) but E(DW0|X,Z), he concluded that the reason for the difference may be the fact that there is an economic return to making a ‘song and dance’ about things, and that men are more ‘moaning’ and ‘bolshie’ than women.

One last point about Alan Manning, before we move onto some of the other couple of hundred presenters. He recognized that his audience were from different fields of economics and so took the trouble to explain his terms. At one point he quickly said that, for those who were not labour market economists, ‘years of experience’ meant simply the number of years in the labour market minus age. It was a nice touch: other presenters might take note.

That said, there did seem to be an awful lot of labour market economists about. Indeed, a crude summary of the two species of principal presenter on show would be i) terrifically laid-back, casually-dressed British labour market specialist, likely habitat the LSE or ii) earnest, tie-wearing and slightly anorak-ish American number-wizard, likely habitat MIT.

Of this latter genus, Joshua Angrist was the most perfect specimen. His Sargan lecture, on ‘Treatment Effect Heterogeneity in Theory and Practice’ was dazzling. It was like watching Mozart composing on speed, without being able to read a note of music yourself. I know that Angrist’s work is important and innovative. And I know that the Sargan lecture encourages world-class economists to stretch their theoretical muscles. But it wasn’t the easiest start to the conference — perhaps the Sargan lecture could be moved? One doctoral candidate, who is working herself with some of the techniques of instrumental variables, admitted to understanding ‘about 10 per cent’. One of the UK’s leaders in the field said they got ‘about 63 per cent’. (Only an economist could approximate to 63 per cent.) Was the lecture a success? Not in a conference of fairly young economists from a variety of research branches, if success is related to new understanding. But maybe in this case it isn’t. Anyway, the one thing I learned was that parents who decide to have a third child thereby reduce their chance of still being married some years later by a (significant) 5 per cent, a research finding I passed on unvarnished to my partner, with whom I have two children, aged two and one.

James Poterba (MIT), who spoke on ‘Portfolio Risk and Retirement Saving’ for his Frank Hahn lecture, touched on a huge policy issue here in the UK, the move from defined benefit to defined contribution pension plans. And he threw some light on the attractiveness of Employee Share Ownership Schemes (ESOPs), which Gordon Brown is keen on. In particular, he looked at the investment by workers in their own company’s stock and whether this represented a good risk strategy for individuals. He showed that over time, large-cap stocks and individual company stocks have the same real mean rates of return (9.4 per cent), but significantly different levels of variation (with annual standard deviations of 20.2 per cent and 40.4 per cent, respectively). Simulating the retirement incomes for 300,000 imaginary workers, he concluded that own-company investment could be worth half as much as a diversified holding. Poterba correctly stated that the real issue about investing for retirement is the classic liberal dilemma: should people be free to make bad choices? More specifically, should annuities be required?

A special session on income and wealth in old age added a different twist to the debate. IFS research showed that people are now, on average, more wealthy at the point of death than at the point of retirement. James Banks, one of the researchers, suggested that the UK may now be ‘over-annuitised’ — another fascinating viewpoint from the perspective of public policy. The problem with pension planning is that, as Tibetan writer Sogyal Rinpoche points out, the only two certainties in life are that you will die, but that you don’t know when.

Here, though, is an example of how the conference failed to meet its potential. The area of pension provision is highly topical, controversial and personal. Why not organize a debate between advocates of DC and DB? Or for and against annuities? The conference is instead built on a ‘download/upload’ model: people turn up, download their own research, upload other people’s, and then depart. It is not obvious how this differs, in outcome terms at least, from reading and writing for the right journals. What is surely needed is some debate, some conversation, some interaction. Even where sessions did contain time for Q&A, it was usually limited and limp. The best moments were when one person added some value to the work of another by offering their own insights or experience, or when a conversation led to new questions being posed. But these moments were rare.

This is partly the fault of the incentive structure underlying the conference, and the resulting structure. What seems to happen is that doctoral or post-doctoral researchers apply to present, knowing that if they are accepted, a) they will get funding to attend and b) they can put it on their cv. This means that the conference organizers have an incentive to accept lots of papers, in order to guarantee sufficient attendance (the vast majority of attendees were presenting a paper). The result is that most of the parallel sessions were sparsely attended, with researchers all too often presenting their research in order to get the funding to present their research and then to be able to say they had presented their research. To rub salt in the wounds, the organizers then run special sessions on sexy, topical issues, which seem specially designed to ensure that only the hardiest souls are ever tempted to one of the dozens of parallel sessions

Here, in an empirical spirit, are some numbers. In the last session of the conference, there were 23 people in the special session on Competition Policy and 24 in the special session on Productivity. There was, meanwhile, a mean of 5 people in each of the eight parallel sessions taking place at the same time — which, given that there was a mean of 3 presenters for each, means that the mean ‘audience’ was just two people. Now I’m not an economist, but this doesn’t look very efficient to me.

It is a shame that parallel sessions are so clearly the very poorest conference cousins, given that they can provide a good space for expert gatherings. I will not easily forget the warnings about ‘fat tails’ and ‘improper posteriors’ in the paper from Rodney Strachan on ‘Bayesian Analysis of Stochastic and Deterministic Processes in The Error Correction model’. To explain: ‘there is no more fatal result for a Bayesian analysis than an improper posterior’. In some of these sessions, the specialists did seem to be swapping notes and updating their knowledge. Usually though, the feel was more undergraduate lecture than lively intellectual endeavour (of course the rooms don’t help).

If you were to attend the conference as a policy-maker, or indeed a journalist, the best approach would be to seek out the papers based on government-funded research, which at the request of the relevant department have not been press-released and/or made available on the conference website. Two examples stand out. The work of Jonathan Haskel, Denise Hawkes and Sonia Pereira at the Centre for Research into Business Activity (CeRiBA) represented a significant empirical step forwards in productivity research. For the first time in the UK, two official data sets — the Employer Skills Survey and the Annual Business Inquiry — were matched together, allowing Haskel et al to test the relationship between individual-level skills and firm-level performance. They found that the most productive firms do indeed have significantly higher proportions of skilled labour; the top decile of firms, ranked by productivity, hire workers with, on average, two years more education compared to the bottom tenth. Now why would the DTI and Treasury not want to shout this from the rooftops?

Perhaps because of the next stage of the research. Digging deeper, the CeRiBA team probed the factors underlying Total Factor Productivity (TFP), and found that the difference in employee skill levels accounted for only 7-8 per cent of the TFP gap between firms at the top and those at the bottom. Haskel describes this as ‘puzzling’ — and it certainly flies in the face of the high-skill, high-productivity orthodoxy driving public policy.

The second ‘stealth’ research project, funded by the Department for Education and Skills, was the first assessment of Excellence in Cities, one of the Government’s flagship policies for raising school performance in depriving areas. The basic message of the research, conducted by Sandra McNally and colleagues at the LSE, is that EiC is working. One effect of the policy – which costs an average of £120 per pupil — is to lift 4 per cent of boys up a whole level in the Key Stage Three tests. EiC areas are also the only ones in which there has been a reduction in the number of unauthorized absences. The research also suggests that in EiC areas where more money was spent, results improved more dramatically. Why the DfES were so reluctant to share this knowledge (the researchers were not even allowed to post their paper on the website) is anyone’s guess.

I also got a kick out of the parallel session on central banks. This is probably because I need to get out more, but also because the moment when Gordon Brown announced independence for the Bank of England is one of my most treasured journalistic memories. Sitting between the economics editors of two national newspapers, I heard two simultaneous expletives when Brown dropped his bomb in 1997.

Two interesting papers at the session also provided evidence of the ever-present need to look beneath the surface of research. (Academics are sometimes the very antithesis of journalists, seeking to bury the really interesting stuff in the dense thicket of the paper) Maria Demertzis’s paper showed that central bank ‘transparency’ has no impact on the level of inflation but does reduce variability in inflation (by about 50 per cent), which has clear benefits. The most interesting finding, however, is that among the various elements which comprise transparency, constitutional independence and the presence of an inflation target has no impact at all. Other factors, such as the publication of data and forecasts, clarity about the central bank’s economic model, are more important than institutional arrangements. The top line: transparency is not synonymous with independence, and is more important.

James Talbot, from the Bank of England, wins top prize for research chutzpah. His research compared group decisions on interest rates to individual ones, using a series of simulations with undergraduate and postgraduate economists (and no, there was no difference in the performance of the two groups!). And he did find what he wanted: while the average individual rate-setting ‘score’ was 41, the average group score was 68. Hurrah! Committees are better than monetary dictatorships. But the performance of the best individuals within each group averaged 65 — statistically different from the group score at only the 10 per cent level, as James rather quietly admitted (0.10 being shorthand for ‘Desperately Seeking Correlation’). What this tells me is that an exceptional individual is likely to do at least as well as a normal group. So unless your committee is full of stars, just let Mervyn King set the rates (after all, a similar approach has worked in the US for years).

I feel I should try to resist the temptation to write about Andrew Oswald – it being difficult to imagine an economist in less need of extra publicity. But I can’t. In part, this is because his paper was so straightforwardly interesting, but also because he delivered it in a way that others should emulate. His opening line was, ‘it is very important to get married, especially if you are a man and especially if you are a smoker.’ Using BHPS data, he showed that being married adds 5-7 years to the life expectancy of a man, which is almost exactly the loss of life expectancy associated with being a smoker. Rather than giving up smoking after getting married, as so many of us do, this research suggests that opposite course would be more rational — enjoying a first, post-nuptial, fag.

Oswald’s session was far and away the most interactive, engaged and conversational of any that I saw over three days. Rather than going laboriously through each stage of his methodology, he cut to the chase and then encouraged people to ask questions — some of which were to clarify methodological issues, others to suggest alternative explanations or argue about consequences. One questioner suggested that presence of grandchildren might have an effect, someone else confirmed that the BHPS collects data on this, and Oswald said he would look at it. These few minutes felt like a community of scholars sharing findings, ideas and suggestions, adding value to each other’s work. The lesson — which was also demonstrated by the excellent Chiara Criscuolo in the productivity session — was to cut to the chase at the beginning of the presentation, encourage interruptions and enjoy the conversation.

And now for a delicate issue. How, in a report on the RES Annual Conference, being written for the RES, to say that the address given by the RES President was a disappointment? Steve Nickell is a man whose academic reputation precedes him, and his current status as a member of the Monetary Policy Committee is formidable. The Presidential Address takes place in front of the assembled conference at the end of two long days of papers, numbers and overheads and just before the conference dinner. It is the moment for some broader thinking, some vision, some passion, and maybe even some philosophy.

Prof Nickell admitted up front that he had supplied the title for his talk — ‘Poverty and Worklessness in Britain’ before giving any thought to what he was going to say. I am afraid it showed. At the beginning he described the two central problems of the UK economy as being productivity and poverty, and for an instant it looked like we were in for an interesting overview. It was not to be. (PS to conference organizers: get some roving mikes. No one could hear the questions.) There was little new to be found; the narrative line was shaky and the concluding policy recommendation — ‘bribe’ good teachers into poor areas — was neither original nor fleshed out with any modeling, projections or theory.

The RES Annual Conference could be so much more than it is. Great stuff happens — but, as in so many institutional contexts, this happens despite the structures and incentive systems rather than because of them. Rethink the parallel sessions; rehearse the main speakers; run debates, question times and panels; give more time and better spaces for networking. Otherwise the conference risks becoming one of those events that takes place because it has always taken place. And given the importance of economics not only to intellectual but also to public life, this would be a great shame.

REALITY BITES - We are awash with moderates today.

Tue, 1 Apr 2003 -1:00:00 GMT

Management Today - 1st April 2003

REALITY BITES - We are awash with moderates today. Even the environment movement talks about sustainable growth rather than questioning the growth ethic.
We are awash with moderates today. Even the environment movement talks about sustainable growth rather than questioning the growth ethic.

One of the myths of modern life is that orthodoxy has been banished. That we live plural, diverse, self-determined lives free from the shackles of an imposed worldview.

But this freedom - the main gift from the Enlightenment - has been lost. The religious and ecclesiastical conventions of the 17th century have been replaced by the economic and business conventions of today. As Robert H Nelson argues in Economics as Religion: 'The most vital religion of the modern age has been economic progress.' And in the absence of significant challenge, this has hardened into an unquestioned way of life. Welcome to a new Age of Orthodoxy.

Click here to read the full article...

NS Essay - 'Envy was the midwife of social justice; now, it reduces the happiness of those who have little to complain about'

Mon, 31 Mar 2003 -1:00:00 GMT

New Statesman - 31st March 2003

Richard Reeves argues that, if we really want people to be more contented, we should think of how we can stop those who are already comfortably off from aspiring to become richer and richer

In his introduction to the 1997 Labour manifesto, Tony Blair wrote that he had "no time for the politics of envy". This was an important piece of new Labour positioning. What it meant was: "Labour is not a tax-and-spend party. We have no interest in taking money off people simply because they are rich. There is nothing wrong with being successful or wealthy." Blair's subsequent statements about the UK needing more millionaires reinforced the message. No pips were to be squeaking under his administration. And, apart from the odd raid by his chancellor on the pensions of the rich, he has been as good as his word.

Though Gucci can still sell perfume under its name, envy has been falling out of political and philosophical fashion for several decades. Politicians and policy-makers have followed Kant. He thought it was natural for people to compare themselves with others, "generally with those who are socially not too remote". But he added: "the vice that threatens personal relations, and hence society as a whole, becomes manifest only when the envious man proceeds to act".

Click here to read the full article...

REALITY BITES: Richard Reeves

Sat, 1 Mar 2003 -1:00:00 GMT

Management Today - March 2003

In French and Spanish offices, it takes the first hour to kiss everyone, the second to discuss the latest gossip and the third to pop out for coffee.
In French and Spanish offices, it takes the first hour to kiss everyone, the second to discuss the latest gossip and the third to pop out for coffee.

In wartime, careless talk costs lives. Nowadays, it is seen as costing profits. For all the de-layering, empowering and cafe-building, there is still a prevailing view that chat is idle, that shooting the breeze is antithetical to getting a job done.

The Protestant version of the work ethic prevails, implying heads-down work, focused agendas, punctuality, efficiency. In French and Spanish offices, it takes the first hour to kiss everyone, the second to discuss the latest gossip and the third to pop out for a coffee and croissant.

Click here to read the full article...

REALITY BITES - The best learning is not done in a Hilton meeting room.

Sat, 1 Feb 2003 -1:00:00 GMT

Management Today - 1st February 2003

REALITY BITES - The best learning is not done in a Hilton meeting room. It's done at work. The best teachers are talented people doing the job you're learning.

The best learning is not done in a Hilton meeting room. It's done at work. The best teachers are talented people doing the job you're learning.

Long before he conquered the English-reading world with The Corrections, Jonathan Franzen lamented the decline of the serious novel. It wasn't that novels weren't written, or published, or bought. It was simply that few of them were read. A seminal moment in his disenchantment came when he asked a friend, a graduate in literature, which book she had read most recently. 'You mean linear reading? Like when you read a book from start to finish?'

Reality bites

Wed, 1 Jan 2003 -1:00:00 GMT

Management Today - January 2003

Reality bites - Research has found that job satisfaction scores differ depending on whether the questionnaire was completed by employees on a Monday or a Friday.
Research has found that job satisfaction scores differ depending on whether the questionnaire was completed by employees on a Monday or a Friday.

Please circle the statement that most closely reflects your own view: i) I love my mum; ii) I like my mum; iii) I neither like nor dislike my mum; iv) I dislike my mum; v) I hate my mum. And now the following: i) My favourite activity is filling out surveys; ii) Surveys are a painful necessity; iii) If I am asked to fill out another sodding survey, I will personally travel to the office of the sender and suffocate them with their own questionnaire.

Surveys are now part of everyday business life. Most of you probably have at least one uncompleted survey lurking in your inbox about which you feel vaguely guilty but for which you never quite have the time. We now have a small industry in surveys. Never before in the field of human endeavour has so much been asked of so many by so few. Click here to read the full article...

December 2002, RSA Journal, 'The Sun Sets on the Enlightenment'

Mon, 2 Dec 2002 -1:00:00 GMT

Royal Society - 2nd December 2002

Reeves claims that, measuring our progress in terms of an evaluation of our own well-being, we have not advanced for half a century. Ancient questions about the nature of the "good life", questions to which the Enlightenment seemed to have the answers, need to be asked all over again.

We need to rejuvenate the spirit, or be condemned to managerial politics bleached of idealism and vision, corporate short-sightedness and disillusionment.

Click here to read the full article...

Reality bites

Sun, 1 Dec 2002 -1:00:00 GMT

Management Today - December 2002

Reality bites - Far from being liberating, IT feels enslaving. E-mail becomes a daily tyranny, the mobile phone a corporate electronic tagging device.
Far from being liberating, IT feels enslaving. E-mail becomes a daily tyranny, the mobile phone a corporate electronic tagging device.

Our relationship with technology has always had an on-off quality about it. Even the Romans - who have done plenty for us, technologically speaking - were sometimes ambiguous. Emperor Vespasian, rebuilding Rome after Nero's tumultuous reign, rejected plans for a new lifting machine that would cut the numbers of workmen employed lifting stones on the grounds that 'I must feed my poor'.

The Luddites who smashed the machines that threatened their livelihood were heroes of their day. But once we'd got used to the idea of machines doing work, the upsides of science and technology became more apparent: trains, medicine, sewers, telephones. Technology and progress have largely gone hand-in-hand for at least a couple of centuries - so much so that 'Luddite' has been a shorthand term of abuse for those few unenlightened souls standing against the onrush.

Click here to read the full article...

REALITY BITES: It's time to call the bluff of the small business lobby. It is outrageous to argue that the employees of small firms are less entitled to rights than others

Fri, 1 Nov 2002 -1:00:00 GMT

Management Today - 1st November 2002

REALITY BITES: It's time to call the bluff of the small business lobby. It is outrageous to argue that the employees of small firms are less entitled to rights than others .

Tony Blair has a message for his ministers: Think small. This may sound odd coming from a PM who excels at grandiose rhetoric and who is not shy of spelling out a new moral order for the entire world. But in this instance he is pushing one of the hot buttons of political discourse, using a preface to a report by the Small Business Council to demonstrate his small-is-beautiful credentials to the business community.

It's not a new trick, of course: politicians of all political stripes have long been required to heap praise, encouragement and all too often favours on the men and women running the UK's smallest firms. The governments of the grocer's daughter were required to worship at the shop doors of the small retailer. read more...

Work-life balance: Do the right thing, People Management, 03 October 2002

Thu, 3 Oct 2002 -1:00:00 GMT

Management Today - October 2002

Do the right thing

Organisations should purse work-life balance because it is the right thing to do, and this may turn out to be the most powerful business case of all, says Richard Reeves

Issue date: 03 October 2002
Source: PM Online

Work-life Balance Week has breezed by again. A slew of timed surveys on the UK’s long-hours culture were released, digs made in the FT, seminars attended, and canapés eaten. We came, we saw, we panelled.

Work-life balance events follow a reassuringly predictable pattern. Someone from a think-tank talks about the social impact of working too much. Then a representative of a working parents or carers group talks passionately about the challenges faced by those "juggling" work and home. A consultant, in a thinly-disguised plug for their services, talks about how certain interventions can help firms. Finally, an enlightened businessperson talks about how their company introduced work-life balance policies with dazzling results. Lots of preaching to lots of converted.

During question time, the following points will be made.
• It is as important to change culture as to change policies.
• We need to get more men involved in the issue.
• More of a lead is required from government.
• We must never forget about the children.
• Small businesses are missing from this debate.
• Middle managers are the problem.

(Middle managers, come to think of it, take the rap for most business problems - from work-life balance through diversity to performance management. Perhaps that’s why they never seem to attend these functions. If I were a middle manager, I think I’d be tempted to start bringing discrimination cases.)

After a good deal of agreeing on the main themes, mourning the intransigence of Britain’s firms (except the ones represented) and calling for more research, everyone heads for the salmon and Sancerre. And business, by and large, carries on as usual.

This is a shame. The campaign for work-life balance raises some huge issues for our society – but then ducks them. As a movement, its potential is limited by the poverty of its aspirations.

Nowhere is this more apparent than in the cult of the business case. In order to push for any change in organisational culture or legislative priorities, it is wearyingly necessary to prove first of all that there is a "business case" for such changes. Of course, there often is a clear financial motivation. There is nothing wrong with the business case; it may even be necessary. But it certainly is not sufficient.

For a start, the case is less clear cut than the simplicities of the average seminar suggest. There are many instances in business where there may be a good case for ignoring such issues; twenty-somethings in consulting firms working 100-hour weeks, for instance.

Here’s the rub. If it is so evidently in companies’ interests, they’d be doing it. After all, no one feels the need to have an Advertise Your Products Week, in which businesses are urged to let consumers know that they have a product to sell.

Second, the business case provides insecure footing for change. What if, particularly in an economic downturn, it can be shown conclusively that pursuing work-life balance policies has zero, or even negative, associations with business performance? At this point the campaign disappears in a puff of smoke.

Third, sticking within the parameters of the business case inhibits campaigners from making other claims - from stating that the freedom to work when we want is an issue of basic human autonomy, that the needs of children come before the needs of corporations, that the measure of our success is not limited to productivity or profits. In short, that work-life balance, if it means anything at all, is to be pursued simply because it is the right thing to do. Which, ironically, may turn out to be the most powerful business case of all.

Richard Reeves (rr@hauverreeves.com) is a consultant and business writer

REALITY BITES - Everyone, it seems, wants or needs more energy.

Tue, 1 Oct 2002 -1:00:00 GMT

Management Today - 1st October 2002

REALITY BITES - Everyone, it seems, wants or needs more energy. Look around a restaurant at lunchtime - few wine glasses but plenty of double espressos.
Everyone, it seems, wants or needs more energy. Look around a restaurant at lunchtime - few wine glasses but plenty of double espressos.

Feeling a bit low? Burnt-out? Lacking vim and vigour? Not to worry - Joel Sutton will get you sorted. Operating out of a nondescript building in the traffic-choked Spitalfields area of east London, Joel knows how to make you feel good.

His client base is broad. 'They range from presidents of investment banks looking to recharge their batteries to out-of-work actors looking to improve their career prospects,' he says. They know that after a visit to him 'anything is possible'.

Click here to read the full article...

REALITY BITES - How the mighty have fallen

Sun, 1 Sep 2002 -1:00:00 GMT

Management Today - 1st September 2002

REALITY BITES - How the mighty have fallen. Like a deck of dominos, business heavyweights have toppled, one by one. Faces that once beamed from glossy mags now wear hunted looks on the front of financial newspapers. Dennis Kozslowski (Tyco), Jean-Marie Me

How the mighty have fallen. Like a deck of dominos, business heavyweights have toppled, one by one. Faces that once beamed from glossy mags now wear hunted looks on the front of financial newspapers. Dennis Kozslowski (Tyco), Jean-Marie Messier (Vivendi), Kenneth Lay (Enron), Bernie Ebbers (WorldCom), Ron Sommer (Deutsche Telekom). Jack Welch's fling with the editor of Harvard Business Review helped to tarnish even his previously shiny reputation.

In the Shelley poem that every schoolchild knows, the pedestal of a ruined statue reads: 'My name is Ozymandias, king of kings: Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!' This is a pretty good summary of the cult of the heroic CEO, just as the next lines capture something of the current mood: 'Nothing beside remains. Round the decay/Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,/The lone and level sands stretch far away.' read more...

REALITY BITES

Thu, 1 Aug 2002 -1:00:00 GMT

Management Today - 1st August 2002

REALITY BITES: Expected to be New Men at home but Real Men at work, young fathers are finding it difficult to come out in the office as time-pressed dads - The family has always had a mixed press. Strindberg denounced it as a 'retirement home for women wa
The family has always had a mixed press. Strindberg denounced it as a 'retirement home for women wanting an easy life, a prison for men and hell for children', which makes you wonder about poor August's upbringing. More recently and famously, Philip Larkin warned: 'They f**k you up, your mum and dad./They may not mean to, but they do.'

Today, the family tends to be bathed in a much rosier light, perhaps because it is seen to be under siege: from higher divorce rates, reduced fertility, the erosion of extended family ties, chosen childlessness, lone parenthood, latchkey kids. The Government is urging everyone to do their bit, penalising parents who don't force their children to school, running parenting classes, setting up childcare facilities and calling on employers to play their part.

read more... and see BBC news coverage on Thursday, 30 May, 2002 - Women face 'work or child' dilemma

REALITY BITES: Rather than attend an in-house workshop...

Mon, 1 Jul 2002 -1:00:00 GMT

Management Today - 1st July 2002

REALITY BITES: Rather than attend an in-house workshop on 'How Picasso's Painting Can Inspire Us', executives should go and look at a Picasso for themselves.

Delegates at the brilliant London Business Forum began their day with a rare treat: sitting among the members of the Sarajevo Philharmonic Orchestra as they played one of the 19th century's most sublime pieces of music, the Brahms Violin Concerto in D.

And then the soloist, Miha Pogacnik, ruined it. Not through his playing, which was wonderful. But every few minutes, just as the music was beginning to weave its spell, he would yell at the orchestra to stop, swap his bow for a marker pen and try to show how the cadences of the last section could help business people to reinvent their organisations.

read more...

REALITY BITES: The point is that because work is so central to our wellbeing, we should be happy at it regardless of whether or not it improves the bottom line

Sat, 1 Jun 2002 -1:00:00 GMT

Management Today - June 2002

REALITY BITES: The point is that because work is so central to our wellbeing, we should be happy at it regardless of whether or not it improves the bottom line - The wife of French president Charles de Gaulle was asked, at a London diplomatic dinner marki

The wife of French president Charles de Gaulle was asked, at a London diplomatic dinner marking her husband's retirement, what she now most wanted from life. She considered for a moment then replied: 'A penis.' Overhearing the exchange and seeing the consternation on the questioner's face, another guest lent across and translated her strong French accent. 'Mme De Gaulle is saying she wants happiness, sir, happiness.'

Which was, of course, a much more conventional answer. Who, after all, doesn't want happiness? From Aristotle onwards, philosophers have argued that the search for happiness is the central quest of humanity. The trouble is that views vary wildly about the components of a happy life - money or generosity, free love or strict monogamy, hedonistic atheism or daily mass? Click here to read the full article...

Life's good. Why do we feel bad?

Sun, 19 May 2002 -1:00:00 GMT

The Observer - 19th May 2002

Life's good. Why do we feel bad?

We've tried shopping and New Age cures, making money and spending it. What's missing from our lives.

Did you notice an outbreak of joviality and generosity last week? People beaming at you as they let you go ahead in the bus queue, grinning as they shared your morning traffic jam, smirking through the quarterly budget planning meeting?

No? The organisers of National Smile Week will be down in the mouth. All their efforts to perk us up for at least seven days have run, then, into the sand of our collective scepticism.

We are a miserable lot. Four out of 10 of us think life has become worse in the past five years, more than double the number who reckon things have improved, according to the latest ICM poll. Twelve million of us are on anti-depressants; only a minority of us think 'people can be trusted most of the time'; a £2 million Lottery winner, Phil Kitchen, has drunk himself to death.

'At best, people's satisfaction with life is stable, but most of the data suggests it is actually going down,' says Professor Andrew Oswald of Warwick University, the UK's leading expert on happiness trends. 'We seems to be feeling more miserable as time passes.'

Mix in some road/air/office/phone rage, a rise in reported incivility and a good dose of political apathy and the misery malaise looks even starker. We live in an Eeyore England.

All this when average house prices have just blasted through the £100,000 mark, when life expectancy continues to lengthen, mortality rates are dropping and more than a third of young people enjoy what was once the elite privilege of higher education. We are healthy, wealthy and wise. Wages are up, unemployment is down. In material terms, we've never had it so good. Yet we've never felt so bad.

If we seem like a nation of ingrates it may be because all the goodies that are supposed to make us happy don't do it for us any more - even if we have yet to wake up to the fact. So, your house is worth half a million. All you do then is worry about insurance and inheritance tax, and fester with resentment about the one up the road that's worth twice as much because of its south-facing garden.

Karl Marx, who for all his faults knew a bit about capitalism, captured the keeping-up-with-the-Joneses dynamic of market economies perfectly: 'A house may be large or small; as long as the neighbouring houses are likewise small, it satisfies all the social requirements of a residence. But let there arise next to the little house a palace and the little house shrinks to a hut.'

With mass media, the palace doesn't have to be next door - it can be beamed into our living rooms. And the competition doesn't stop with the three-bed semi; it applies to our car, our children's clothes, even our bodies. You might feel OK about your bum until you see Kylie's version plastered everywhere (a commoditisation even Marx didn't predict.)

Money doesn't make most of us happy any more. Poor people, understandably, see their life satisfaction rise with income but for most of the population in a country as affluent as ours, any jump-start to wellbeing from a pay rise or new conservatory quickly wears off.

'I was window-shopping in the South of France recently and I saw a diamond-studded G-string,' Oswald says. 'When we get to that stage we should realise that more money isn't getting us much more in terms of happiness.' Harrods is currently carrying a pair of shoes priced at a cool million - imagine if you stepped in dog shit.

Not that we've stopped trying to buy a better life. Rates of consumption continue to rise - trapping us on what psychologists have dubbed a 'hedonic treadmill', hoping the next cycle, the next purchase, will finally get us to the promised land.

Nic Marks, who runs the wellbeing project at the New Economics Foundation, says: 'That's the real evil of advertising. Collectively, the adverts send a message that if only you could find and buy the right product, you'd be happy. But it doesn't take much for people to see the futility of this in the end.'

But what about health? Surely the virtual elimination in our society of most fatal diseases, rising life-expectancy and falling mortality should be cheering us up? Not a bit of it. All that happens, according to Marks, is that our expectations rise just as or even more quickly.

'Objectively, our health is better on almost every count,' he says. 'But this doesn't translate into people feeling any healthier. People are more aware of their health, so they get more anxious about it. And they also expect the system - the NHS - to take responsibility for it.' Health-conscious means health-anxious.

Medicine has become a victim of its own success: having massively reduced the chances of death in childbirth, for example, people are now shocked if a life is lost - and reach for a lawyer. Obstetrics and gynaecology have arguably done more than any other branch of medicine to improve life chances. Death was unavoidable - now it is unacceptable. We seek financial compensation if things go wrong.

Oswald and others point to two aspects of modern life that may help to explain some of the ennui: commuting and relationship breakdown. People who spend a long time commuting are statistically less satisfied than others: so Stephen Byers can now also take the blame for our foul mood.

The rise in 'relationship risk' is linked to unhappiness, says Oswald. 'Divorce, or relationship breakdown, has a profound negative impact on most people. Of course, there are good things about a high divorce rate - greater freedom and so on, especially for women - but there is a downside, too.'

With the accepted routes to happiness - marriage, mortgage, money - either blocked or leading nowhere, people are looking for an alternative. The hedonist option is growing in popularity: cocaine at the weekend, as much sex with as many strangers as possible and last-minute holidays to exotic locations.

Evangelical Christianity gives people a similar boost - it is the smiliness of those in a 'state of grace' that so annoys others. The psychological downer after coming off God, however, is worse than that of coming off most drugs. On the other hand, there are those looking for inner calm rather than wild Saturday nights or ecstatic Sunday mornings. One in 20 people now hits the yoga mat - a five-fold increase over 15 years. One in five uses natural medicines, a three-fold rise. And the number of books published on non-Christian spirituality has just surpassed the Christian portfolio.

'The increases in these sorts of activities are indicators of people looking for something different, of feeling restless,' says Marks. 'But you have to set against them the data suggesting television-watching is on the rise: there are as many people sinking into apathy and passivity as there are searching out new solutions.'

We are unlikely to find a magic bullet for happiness - after all, some of the world's greatest minds have been pondering these questions for millennia. The answer to the question of happiness may be more prosaic: once countries and households are free of material need (if not of material 'want'), the biggest contributor to life satisfaction seems to be a healthy set of personal relationships.

'There is a lot of nostalgia for the perceived "good old days",' Melanie Howard, co-director of the Future Foundation, says. 'But what we do know is that social networks, plus the time to enjoy them, are hugely important. People with lots of money may not feel any better, in part because they spend all their time making their money or commuting to and from the place where they make it.'

We want more out of life, but the number of hours in the day remains fixed. The relative happiness of late teenagers and those passing middle age may relate to their spending more time on friendships. The thirtysomethings, fighting on the two fronts of work and children, are the most fed up. Howard warns that those between full-time education and retirement may be spending more time on the activities they think will make them happy - earning and spending - than on those that actually will: spending time with friends and family.

This friend-shaped gap explains the American paradox - why the residents of the richest nation in the world are so glum - according to Professor Robert E. Lane at Yale University. 'There is a kind of famine of warm interpersonal relations, of easy-to-reach neighbours, of encircling, inclusive memberships, and of solid family life,' he says.

The secret of happiness? Not money. So leave the lawn, forget your investments and call in sick tomorrow. Do yourself a favour. Phone a friend.

Fathers don't get to have it all either

Sun, 28 Apr 2002 -1:00:00 GMT

The Observer - 28th April 2002

Fathers don't get to have it all either

For men, work is a duty, not an option. But many long for more time with their kids

The mythical woman who could 'have it all' - great job, great kids, great sex - if only she bucked up a bit is finally being laid to rest. It turns out that women who are successful on the professional front have all too often forgone satisfaction on the home front, in particular by sacrificing their hopes of children.

Sylvia Ann Hewlett's Baby Hunger, currently stoking debate on both sides of the Atlantic, paints a vivid picture of high-flying women torn between public success and private grief.

The death of Superwoman is good news. The notion that better time management and a perkier attitude could smooth away the hard choices faced by women was briefly uplifting, but ultimately regressive. It wrongly suggested that it was women, rather than the world, which needed to change. Ordinary woman ended up thinking it was her fault if life seemed hard.

But a new myth is in danger of being created in Superwoman's place: the myth that men are now the ones having it all. That while women confront trade-offs between baby and the boardroom success, men are comfortably managing to be both dads and directors.

Look at the fictional male counterpart - Superman. All he has to do is wear his underpants outside his trousers and effortlessly save the world every now and then. No juggling. No dirty nappies. Not a frozen lasagne in sight.

But men are not having it all. Yes, most successful men have children, while Hewlett's research shows that just one in two women with high earnings are also mothers - a pattern which is repeated, albeit less starkly, in the UK. Most wanted children, but many left it too late. The biological clock doesn't have an alarm.

But men are experiencing pangs of their own. It has been said that the tragedy of the world is that men love women, women love children and children love hamsters. In fact, men love children every bit as much as women do. But our outdated working practices, Victorian gender stereotypes and antique legislation are all conspiring to drive a wedge between them.

Making babies is easy. (For men, that is.) The difficult and wonderful part is being a father, building a relationship with your children. And fathers are increasingly having to work hard for it. Divorce rates mean that each year 60,000 men join the ranks of those fathers whose children have suddenly become visitors to their home. Maintaining a connection with a child who lives somewhere else is exhausting. And unmarried fathers have no legal rights at all.

Even men who share a home with their children may not share their lives. British men work the longest hours in Europe and while women's working hours drop dramatically once they have children, fathers put in more hours - 48, on average - than their childless peers. Most women say they have the option of working part-time; most men say they do not.

While employers are becoming better at offering a wider range of working patterns to women, it is a brave father who asks for it. Adrienne Burgess, author of Fatherhood Reclaimed, quotes a headhunter as saying it would be a 'kiss of death' for a man to insist on flexible working hours for child care. Men resort to underhand tactics to see their children, omitting to tell their boss that the last off-site meeting of the day is actually with their toddler. Small wonder that seven out of 10 male managers say their relationships with their children are 'badly' affected by their working lives.

Of course, some men would rather hang around at work or in that 'strategy meeting' in the nearby pub. But for most fathers, increased working hours reflect a heightened sense of breadwinner pressure. In most households, men retain the principal responsibility for income.

While most women have some degree of choice over whether to remain in employment or to raise the children, men usually have little choice but to keep bringing home the bacon. This may explain why women have dramatically higher levels of job satisfaction than men, despite all the disadvantages they face. For men work is an inescapable duty, rather than a positive choice.

The fact that women now make up half the workforce should be a boon for men, springing them out of the breadwinner trap and allowing them to invest more time in their children. No such luck. Women have a crucial role here. They need to keep holding their menfolk to account for their home-grown duties. But they also need to relinquish control of the domestic domain and allow men to be an equal parenting partner.

For men's attitudes to children have changed; most now believe that a father should be closely involved with his children from the beginning. But the opportunities for men to act on their paternal instincts remain pitifully limited. Most men can't afford to take the paternity leave now nominally available.

And woe betide a man who thinks he might close the gap by working with children. Recent scares about paedophilia have made men scared to even touch a child who is not their own (or in some cases, even one who is). The number of men entering the child care professions or early years teaching, already tiny, is in decline. Men who want to work with children have to endure the kind of suspicion, low-level harassment and prejudice once reserved for women in the City. The message is clear: men and babies don't mix.

This distance between men and children is the central theme of About a Boy. The main characters initially regard each other as aliens, and the best of the humour in the story is distilled from their gradual, faltering success at closing this gap. It is wonderful to see high-profile men, from David Beckham to Tony Blair, at least occasionally holding the baby. But the lives of these fathers are as far removed from the daily struggles of ordinary men as Nicola Horlick's is from the lives of most women.

Male baby hunger is not as great as women's - few have to make such a stark choice between reproduction and professional success. Baby peckishness, perhaps. But it is real nonetheless. It is not socially acceptable for them to say so, but men do ache for children - their own, all too often - and they do want to spend more time being dad. 'Spending more time with the family' is still seen as code for professional failure for men, rather than a real desire.

The entry of women into the workforce should be freeing men. It should mean that breadwinning and caring can be shared. What is actually happening is that successful women are being forced either to ape male working patterns and forgo children or pay a mummy career penalty, while men remain as firmly caught in the breadwinner trap as ever.

In real life there is no Superwoman or Superman. There are ordinary people trying to make the best of things. And right now, both men and women are living shallower lives because of our collective failure to abandon our moribund models of masculinity, motherhood and success. Men want children to feature more strongly in their lives, but are stuck at the office. Women want to use their talents in the labour market, but get stuck with the kids - or end up without them.

If men and women begin to see that their struggles are two sides of the same coin; if together they demand real changes in working cultures and legislation; if 'working father' becomes a meaningful term - then we might all live better and more balanced lives. Right now we are all hungry.

It's not the economy, stupid

Wed, 17 Apr 2002 -1:00:00 GMT

The Guardian - 17th April 2002

It's not the economy, stupid

Politicians haven't twigged, but the Budget doesn't matter much

Today is nirvana for number-crunchers. Powerful computers at organisations like the Institute for Fiscal Studies and Goldman Sachs are humming in anticipation, ready to spew out charts and analysis the minute Gordon Brown sits down. Productivity, the successor to prudence in the chancellor's lexicon, will be discussed at length. Predictions for economic growth and inflation will be dissected. Newspapers will swell with tables of numbers.

It will all feel terribly important - yet most of it doesn't really matter very much. The vital signs of the economy are easy to monitor, and so we mistakenly elevate their importance; what is counted is what counts. No one questions the desirability of economic growth, except a handful of deep greens who seem to want us all to live on nuts and berries again.

But the truth is that economic growth is now vastly overrated. It probably doesn't do too much harm, but it doesn't really do much good either. Not to Joe Public, anyway. The state of the nation no longer rests upon the state of the economy. In the past six years alone, the economy has grown by 15%. Over the same period, average life satisfaction, according to the Future Foundation, has changed not one jot. We got richer, but we don't feel any better.

It wasn't always like this. At an earlier stage of economic development, growth did promote happiness, and for poorer nations it still does. But at a certain point, the correlation between GDP increases and well-being breaks down. That point seems to be a GDP of $10,000 per head, roughly where Portugal is now.

So in all nations as rich or richer than this - post-Portugal societies - a bigger economy does not make for happier citizens. If further proof is needed, look at the US, where blistering rates of wealth creation seem to be making people more miserable, justifying Thoreau's claim that Americans know more about how to make a living than how to live.

It is a commonplace to argue that the legacy of Thatcherism was to shift the political centre of gravity to the right. But the real impact of Mrs T was the cementing of economics into the centre of the political arena. The solutions to the country's problems were to be found in economics: in her case, of course, brutal monetarist deregulatory economics.

Her famous dismissal - "there is no such thing as society" - has been skilfully exploited by her political opponents, but none has seriously argued for an expansion of politics beyond the largely economic frontiers she drew. Labour has now won its laurels for economic competence, ironically just at the point that David Willetts, the shadow work and pensions secretary, declares that "there is more to life - and to politics - than economics". It may be that the Conservatives will wake up first to post-economic politics.

Ordinary people are looking for new ways to measure success, for alternatives to the orthodox religion of economics. The turn towards new forms of spirituality, downshifting at work, opposition to globalisation are all signs of a growing restlessness, of dissatisfaction with our apparent lack of progress. Smart corporations are tapping into this unease and associating their products with serenity, wisdom and inner calm. There are supermarket aisles devoted to "well-being", drinks promising energy and agencies providing romance. But it is slowly dawning on people that these are goods which cannot be bought and sold, that the rewards from consumption are lessening.

Our political culture, meanwhile, lags decades behind. People are asking questions to which economics does not have any answers. Most politicians still think of economics as the real stuff, and the economics ministries as the ladders to the top. The chancellor is the unassailable number two in government.

Not that the economy can be ignored: if economic growth is failing to make us happier, this does not mean that economic collapse would be greeted by a national shrug of the shoulders. We need a stable economy; we may even need growth to retain that stability. But this is a necessary rather than sufficient national goal. The chancellor should probably enjoy the same status as the defence minister.

There have been glimmers of a new politics focused on the social, rather than economic, aspects of life. Tony Blair endorsed a "quality of life" agenda for politics, but, like many of his enthusiasms, it was short-lived. But by and large, politics is stuck on the economics record.

The reason people are not bothering to vote any more is that the arguments between politicians are increasingly remote from the arguments being conducted across kitchen tables and in the pub. For politics to reconnect with the concerns of ordinary citizens, it has to shake off the dead hand of economics. But it probably won't happen this week.

Richard Reeves is a research associate of the Work Foundation (formerly the Industrial Society) and former special adviser at the social security department

We bowl alone, but work together

Mon, 2 Apr 2001 -1:00:00 GMT

New Statesman - 2nd April 2001

Richard Reeves argues that Blair's latest US guru is wrong: community is alive and well; it has simply moved from the neighbourhood to the office

Robert Putnam is a rare creature: a respected academic who is also a superb communicator, equally comfortable in the radio studio and a Harvard seminar room.

This week, Putnam received the red-carpet treatment from the British chattering classes: a Downing Street seminar, op-ed pieces, Start the Week with Jeremy Paxman, a lecture at the London School of Economics, an IPPR think-in.

The reason for all the excitement is that Putnam's book, Bowling Alone: the collapse and revival of American community, has recently been published over here. His thesis is that social connectedness is on the decline, that communities are suffering from a new absence of civic-mindedness and that the wellsprings of the ties that bind Americans together, or "social capital", are drying up.

Click here to read the full story...

The bureaucracy: Battling the dreaded B-word

Wed, 21 Mar 2001 -1:00:00 GMT

Society Guardian - 21st March 2001

'My in-tray is ridiculous,' says Spokey Wheeler. "I could spend all my time on it. I feel as if I am being asked to stick my finger in a dyke and wiggle it in the most imaginative way possible. I love my job - but the deck feels stacked against me."

As head teacher of the Wavell School in Farnborough, Wheeler laments the energy and time he devotes to paperwork. Red tape, regulation, administration - these are the most pejorative terms in the 21st-century public sector. And worst of all is the B-word: bureaucracy. Britain's public servants feel as if they are drowning in a sea of directives, regulations, rules and guidance. Head teachers are leaving the profession in a top-level "brain drain", with additional administrative burdens cited as one of the key sources of discontent.

The plight of the paper-logged principal has at least been spotted; the Government's Better Regulation Taskforce has highlighted the load faced by the women and men leading our schools - and Tony Blair has pledged to halve the flow of directives out of the Department for Education and Employment.

Setting standards

Government initiatives, such as the National Curriculum and performance-related pay, are often blamed for the rise in bureaucracy but Wheeler says that most of the problems lie elsewhere. "Yes, there are ways the Government could slim down the flow of initiatives. But by and large when bureaucracy is about setting standards, ensuring children's education it is impossible to oppose," he says.

"The real problem is this: I spend hours dealing with staffing problems caused by a shortage of suitably qualified teachers."

Similarly, health care professionals expend a huge amount of time and effort organising cover for short-staffed wards and surgeries. Doctors spend hours chasing beds for patients. It is not the bureau cracy causing the problem - it is the problem, in this case inadequate resources, causing the bureaucracy. It is the symptom, not the disease.

Nonetheless there has been a step-change in perceptions of bureaucracy - driven by two critical factors: first, the importing of a pro-business, market-know-best philosophy and second, the separation of bureaucracy from the values it is supposed to uphold, in particular accountability and responsibility.

Large organisations - and in particular public sector agencies - are increasingly seen as sclerotic, encased in rules and incapable of radical action. Management guru Tom Peters sets the tone when he says: "I beg each and every one of you to develop a passionate and public hatred of bureaucracy."

But Stephen Martin, head of Reed Executive, says a more sophisticated view of bureaucracy is required in both the public and private sector. "We need to distinguish between good bureaucracy - which establishes a clear system of checks and evaluations and bad bureaucracy, where the form-filling is more important than the doing, where every action has to generate a piece of relevant paper."

Choked on paper

The paper trail that Martin identifies chokes initiatives such as the New Deal, where "the emphasis is about getting pieces of information on pieces of paper". The Employment Service produces 49 pieces of paper for each New Dealer, according the Wise Group, a Scottish training and work-placement agency.

And while public-private partnerships (PPPs) are vaunted by the Government as a mechanism for bringing private sector "efficiency" into the state sector, in practice the influence has been at least as much in the opposite direction. Companies who are working with the public sector end up adopting similar procedures, according to Martin, whose company works with the New Deal and Employment Zones. Rather than PPP marketising the public sector, they are bureaucratising the private sector.

At the same time, firms are complaining that the weight of administering the Working Families Tax Credit, minimum wage, stakeholder pensions, Working Time Directive and so on is becoming unbearable. The tendrils of the bureaucratic state are spreading, the business lobby complains. Farmers spend four hours a week filling forms rather than tilling fields. But in truth, the introduction of progressive workplace regulations is a cross that firms ought to bear if they want to trade in a civilised society.

Bureaucracy, as Wheeler points out, "is only ever what other people do." So the fact that middle managers in blue-chip companies spend hours, according to one survey, looking for a lost file, is not "bureaucracy" - but maternity leave extensions are. Hugely complex internal change management and evaluation systems are not bureaucracy - but the minimum wage is.

In the public sector, the challenge is less to abolish or attack bureaucracy than to root out bad bureaucracy and strengthen good bureaucracy. Recent crises in the public sector, such as the North Wales care homes, Hackney Social Services, Railtrack and MAFF on the BSE epidemic have highlighted the lack of accountability in many areas of the public sector.

Reinvention required

This is why Paul Du Gay, author of In Praise of Bureaucracy, argues for a reinvention of bureaucracy rather than its abandonment in favour of a free-wheeling entrepreneurial culture. Otherwise we risk losing "fairness, probity and reliability in the treatment of cases and other forms of conduct that were taken somewhat for granted under traditional arrangements".

Effective bureaucracy provides systems for ensuring that the right person is held accountable for the right action. Bad bureaucracy, the kind which has flourished in recent years, dilutes accountability through the creation of lengthy paper trails: e-mail, of course, simply fuelling this cover-my-back tendency. Bureaucracy has become a hiding place for poor management in public sector - the wall behind which some public servants can hide.

This then is the paradox of bureaucracy in Britain's once proudly-bureaucratic public services: front-line staff are overwhelmed with the "bureaucratic" pressures caused by insufficient resources and poor management while Whitehall mandarins have become adept at using bureaucracy to defuse the very fibre of public service - accountability.

Spokey Wheeler is not opposed to good bureaucracy. "I am passionate about raising standards, and that means systems of evaluation and monitoring," he says.

"We all want to be stretched, to reach for that goal which is just beyond our fingertips. But right now, because of the time spent on administering to unnecessary issues, you have to be Magic Johnson to get anywhere close. I'm just not sure how long we can keep trying."

Richard Reeves is director of Futures at the Industrial Society and John Knell is deputy director