• Peace of mind

Richard Murphy writes a combative blog called Funding the Future which mainly looks at where the worlds of politics, accountancy and public finance intersect. In the year or so before the July election he had some pretty choice things to say about the dog days of the Conservative administration. Since the regime change, his comments have not spared the new lot either. His main thesis in the last few months seem to be – and this is a very broad paraphrase – that Rachel Reeves doesn’t really know what she’s doing.

His post on 30 September covered the theme of “sorting out politics”. “We all know that politics is failing us right now,” the preamble reads, “and the explanation for that is easy to find. When most of the political arena is filled by people who hate public services and want to undermine them, then it’s hardly surprising that we aren’t getting the services we need and want and which people would be willing to pay for if only they were delivered.”

He goes on to make the point that, when he was running an accountancy practice, he identified that what they were selling wasn’t a specific service, but peace of mind, which was, he claims, “a winning formula”. He suggests that this is what governments are, or should, be offering – support in bad times, security all the time and education for their children as the basics. That is, he contends, the job of good government.

What we have instead is managers (aka politicians) “who hate the organisation they work for, and want to constrain its size whenever they are given the chance”, and staff (public employees) who are “demotivated, treated like idiots and taken for granted”. Oh, and the things that the system are meant to be delivering aren’t available anyway.

Many might feel this is a harsh judgement and that plenty of examples can be found to refute it. However, it seems a useful starting point to consider why one of the richest countries in the world seems incapable of providing or fixing its health service, its social-care system, its education system, its local democracy and its infrastructure; why there appears to be a shortage of virtually every kind of profession apart from lawyers and management consultants; and why the political system produces leaders of the sub-standard quality of Johnson and Truss and, by some opinions, Starmer.

Some of these matters may not be entirely the politicians’ fault. However, the big problem seems to be that politicians at all levels are obsessed by novelty and legacy. Something new and shiny is always preferable to the unglamorous task of repairing and re-purposing. All of them crave a tangible memento of their life’s work, though this is all too often a busted flush or a broken promise. They often over-reach themselves and so unleash a Pandora’s box of problems that they are then incapable of closing.

It wasn’t always like this. However, the more complicated the world gets, the less power governments actually have. Multinationals, IT giants and financial markets all have more: as in many ways do hackers, terrorists and drug barons. Much is made of the increasing power and sophistication of government. Nearly 1,000 years ago, William I got the Domesday Book researched and written up in little over a year. Such an exercise today would take the same time and more just agreeing the composition and terms of reference of the committee, and to decide what the finished work should be called.

HS2 is a wonderful example of this kind of over-arching and ineffective vanity. So too, here in West Berkshire, is the re-development of the London Road Industrial Estate (LRIE) in Newbury. Though on vastly different scales, both have been on the national or local agenda for about the same length of time. Both have failed, by any rational standard, to have produced any benefit of any kind. Both have, through external influences that might have been predicted, got hopelessly bogged down in problems ranging from questions of property ownership to legal challenges.

Above all, both started by making wrong decisions, often in the wrong order, and getting progressively dragged off course, so failing to deal with any of the problems that they intended to solve. Consultants and lawyers have done very well out of both, of course: but they always do, often in inverse proportion to the success of the matter they’re involved with.

To return to Richard Murphy’s point, neither of these schemes has provided any peace of mind either. Governments and councils have limited powers and it’s as well that we recognise this and demand that they concentrate on doing what they’re meant to do: keeping us secure in all the ways that we’ve long been told we’re paying for, and providing public services that work.

With this in mind, the Post Office Inquiry and, in West Berkshire, the resolution of the CIL issue, are exactly the kind of things that governments and councils should be doing. I salute those responsible for getting these in place. Knowing that wrongs, whether committed by the state or the wolves of the market economy, will be righted seems a good definition of peace of mind. Certainly this is a lot better than vanity projects, which are primarily designed only to satisfy their originators – and often, as events frequently prove, not even them.

• Strangers

“The untarred road wound away up the valley, innocent as yet of motor-cars, wound empty away to other villages, which lay empty too, the hot day long, waiting for the sight of a stranger.”

This sentence comes from Laurie Lee’s Cider with Rosie, the most beautifully written evocation of childhood I’ve ever encountered, which describes life in a Gloucestershire village in the 1920s. It’s particularly poignant as his young life happened to coincide with the last moments of a centuries-old way of life that was about to be swept away forever. One shouldn’t, of course, get too sentimental: illiteracy, incest and infectious diseases were also casualties of this change.

However, what most caught my eye when re-reading this passage the other day was the reference to strangers. For almost the whole of human existence up until this point, most people in the world very rarely met anyone who was not a relatives or neighbour. In Cider with Rosie, the various outsiders who visited the village were mainly familiar, returning like comets for a brief period with their ribbons or fish.

Real strangers, in Slad or elsewhere, were rare and were generally distrusted. People would generally only leave their own community if they had committed some terrible wrong and were therefore likely to be shunned elsewhere. Anyone who strayed too far could expect a hostile reception unless their credentials, their patrons or their swords were sufficiently powerful.

This made me reflect on how remarkable it is that we can deal with strangers as well as we can. Every fibre of our shared experience over millennia has been otherwise. I certainly don’t find groups of strangers in a social setting (professional is easier) at all simple to deal with. I don’t think they’re out to lynch me but there’s an unsettling sense, which neither age nor experience can shake off, that they all know each other and are having a much better time than me.

Perhaps the fact that I’m able to cope at all, and others far better than me, is proof of our extraordinary power to adapt and suppress our natural instincts in the face of new circumstances.

No development changed this antipathy towards unknown people quite like the growth of cities, in which people tended to be accepted with few questions asked. In Europe, which came late to this development, cities didn’t really get going until the late middle ages. In the 1180s, perhaps 1% of England’s two million or so people lived in London. Now it’s closer to 18%. The point at which urban and rural populations were about equal took place in Britain in the 1860s, in the USA in the 1920s, in France in the 1930s and in China in the 1990s. Globally, the point was only reached in 2007. The world’s most populous country, India, is only expected to reach this parity in about 2040.

This wide acceptance of the unknown is thus fairly recent. It seems probable that our acceptance is relative: if they look like us and talk like us then they’re probably OK. Racism is, therefore, perhaps less a grotesque affliction of personality than a strong tie to the past. After all, many of the opinions about people different from us that are now widely regarded as abhorrent were absolutely normal as recently as 60 years ago, and were even part of official government policy. In some countries they still are.

Strangers bring both wonderful treasures and terrible calamities; but above all, they bring change. If people feel that any change to their lives cannot be for the better, then it’s the strangers who’ll get the blame. Given our long history, only recently disrupted, of small, settled and fairly isolated communities, this won’t alter any time soon. In this, as in so many other respects, we’re prisoners of our past.

• And then there were four

This idea is exactly what the four contenders for the Conservative leadership are hoping to shake off.

On 2 October, Tom Tugendhat, James Cleverly, Robert Jenrick and Kemi Badenoch made their final pitches to the Tory faithful at the conference. After two further rounds of voting by MPs, the final two candidates will be submitted to the party’s membership for a final choice, with the new leader – the sixth in about eight years – being announced on 2 November. This article on the BBC website takes a look at the process and the credentials of the candidates.

Not being a member of the Conservative – or any other – party, I won’t have a say in the final decision. At least this time, unlike the others, it won’t also result in a new PM. All I can say is that Badenoch seems in a number of ways actively dangerous, while Jenrick has, as the Westferry planning issue showed, problems with issues of conflict of interest. However, who am I to intrude in such a sacred, if regular, process as the election of a new Conservative leader? Whoever it is, I hope they’ll be a powerful, fair and effective opponent to the government. All administrations need to be officially challenged and the role of those doing the challenging shouldn’t be downplayed.

 • And finally…

• There might be more depressing stories in the world that what’s currently going on in the Middle East, but I can’t think of any. Except for semi-acute ones like Ukraine and Afghanistan, or chronic ones like climate change and poverty. And all the others.

• The BBC reports that Labour peer Lord Alli is being investigated by the House of Lords’ standards watchdog over allegedly failing to register interests. Certainly his interests didn’t seem to include the PM and others to whom he’s been dishing out free clothes. Can’t they afford to get their own? What price a free dress or suit if it might involve a grovelling apology or a loss of reputation?

• The Local Government Chronicle reports that: “Local authorities face a £54bn funding shortfall over the next five years if the government does not tackle the underlying pressures facing the sector.” That’s a lot: building up to HS2 proportions.

• I haven’t followed the detailed pros and cons of the eligibility changes for the winter fuel allowance – after all, most people look only at the headlines – but I remain amazed that this should be the first big stand that the new government, and a Labour one, would make. Mind you, every penny counts if you’re about to announce that HS2 will be extended to Euston at the public expense, no private backers having come forward.

• I was chatting to a friend the other day and he suggested that the problem of taking decisions – which his partner often found herself incapable of doing effectively – could perhaps be likened to crossing a road. The main question is, first, if you need to cross the road at all. If you do, you next need to ask if you have to do it now, if you have to do it here and what level of risk is acceptable compared to the likely benefits (such as dodging a car to catch a bus).

This seems like an interesting way of looking at a problem that we all have to grapple with. He added that the only time when immediate action was needed was when you’d half made a decision and found yourself caught in the middle of the road with lorries bearing down in each direction: to go forward or go back? Doubtless those responsible for HS2 and for the LRIE in Newbury (see above) have experienced this sensation for themselves…