State Expectations: contrasting left and right

At their extremes, what ‘left’ and ‘right’ designate can border on the indistinguishable. The authoritarians who want to rule without constraint in the name of the people, and the authoritarians who want absolute control for the sake of the nation, are as oppressive and unaccountable as each other.  On the other hand, the anarchist left and libertarian right both want to do away with being monitored and regulated by government.  Neither want to be told what to do by others – whatever the consequence.

So, are the labels of left and right redundant?  Well, for the majority of people who don’t subscribe to extreme views, what they generally think their government should do (or not) – their ‘State Expectations’, if you like, goes some way to characterise their political dispositions as Left or Right.

Let us look at five sets of issues and consider how those on the Left and Right are likely to respond to them in terms of the role they feel government institutions should play: 

 

People disadvantaged by particular conditions

The issues: people are disadvantaged by poverty, their isolated location, their disability or fragile health, or the discrimination they face as a result of their gender, ethnicity, sexual orientation, customs, or religion.

Left: The government should protect people from the consequences of being so disadvantaged, and help them secure equal respect and adequate support in overcoming the disadvantages in question as much as possible.

Right: The government should leave these people to sort out their own problem. It is down to them to make a living for themselves, and to fit in with how others are inclined to interact with them.

 

Threats posed by corporate practices

The issues: many corporations enhance our social and economic wellbeing, but some pose a threat in the way they mistreat employees and suppliers, promote and sell unsafe products, or harm the environment.

Left: The government should support the business sector to develop responsibly and bring in appropriate regulation to deal with those which might otherwise hurt others for their own gain.

Right: The government should leave businesses to make their own decisions and deal with the consequences themselves.  Government intervention will more often than not end up damaging the business sector.

 

Foreign relations

The issues: concerns are raised when the governments of other countries engage in activities that may be at odds with our country’s own interests; any increase in the number of immigrants and refugees may lead to tension in some areas; and foreign religious ideas may clash with our prevailing culture.

Left: The government should differentiate between what ought to be welcome and what needs to be guarded against, and act accordingly.  It should tackle real threats but also ensure that what are harmless or indeed beneficial should not be opposed.

Right: The government should be wary of foreign influences – be these commercial or military problems posed by those in another country, or instability fuelled by immigrants and refugees, and their alien customs and beliefs. The government should take a tough stance in curtailing any form of foreign intrusion into our way of life.

 

Standards in quality of life

The issues: People want access to decent health service, housing, transport, dependable utilities, protection from crime and pollution, and good education for their children. But these are not always readily available.

Left: The government should ensure sufficient resources are invested in providing and improving vital services so that everyone can have a minimally acceptable quality of life.

Right: The government should cut taxes so that businesses and individuals can thrive and look after themselves.  The less the government is involved in public services, the better it is for everyone.

 

Control over individual behaviour

The issues: No one can have the absolute freedom to behave irrespective of the impact on others.  From taking others’ property, injuring them physically, to causing emotional distress, or driving recklessly, there must be limits to individual behaviour.

Left: The government should identify unacceptable behaviour – based on the likely harm it would cause – and introduce policies that will be strictly enforced to minimise its occurrence.  The measures to be deployed – fines, incarceration, restitution, rehabilitation, treatment – are to be guided by what-works evidence.

Right: The government should do as little as possible about people smoking, drinking, spreading a dangerous virus (through not wearing a mask), speaking as they wish about minorities, or [in the US] buying guns. But the government should use as much force as possible to tackle thieves or drug users, do more to stop abortions, and [in the US] be prepared to sentence people with mental disability to death.

 

In conclusion

On the whole, people’s State Expectations point to their Left/Right orientation.  Those who would like to have a responsible government that will support people in attaining a better quality of life – especially those who are disadvantaged by factors beyond their personal control – lean left.  Those who would prefer to have a tough government that will on the one hand be inclined to use force in dealing with foreign powers and resort to severe punishment for criminals, and on the other, be resolute in not interfering with inequalities, business practices, or individual behaviour that is ‘traditional’ – lean right.

Abusivism: the politization of nastiness

In politics, ‘isms’ used to consist of doctrines setting out why and how society should be steered towards a better future.  People backed or opposed particular political parties because they broadly subscribed to those doctrines.  Sometimes, when circumstances change, people might come to lose confidence in a given doctrine (e.g., when it turns out that lowering taxes repeatedly do not lead to the creation of well-paid jobs; or extending prison sentences in general does not reduce crime rates).  But the clash of isms was on the whole based on disputes over ideas, which were subject to challenges from reasoned analysis and objective evidence.

One of the most disturbing development at the dawn of the 21^stcentury was the displacement of political ideas by the politization of nastiness.  Abusivist (to coin a term) politicians began to present their wild rants as ‘plain speaking’.  They style themselves as ‘ordinary folk’ who dare to talk back to ‘the establishment’. They despise reason, experts, evidence, compassion, empathy – for all they care about is what they ‘know’ to be the ‘truth’, and that ‘truth’ amounts to nothing but abusive attacks on any vulnerable group they feel like picking on.  

 

The targets of their groundless vitriol share one core characteristic – their plight stokes a twisted sense of self-righteous validation in people who, unsurprisingly, admire the ‘no nonsense’ aggressiveness of abusivist politicians. In general, anyone with a modicum of empathy wants to see help given to victims of domestic violence, immigrants desperate for a better life; refugees escaping from wars and chaos; people disadvantaged by their disability or poverty (or both); or individuals harassed and discriminated against as a result of their religion, race, gender or sexuality.  By contrast, followers of abusivist politicians get angry when they learn of these people getting help, and they want to retaliate – which their leaders promise to deliver for them in the form of laws and policies that not only cut any help provided, but would make vulnerable people’s lives even harder, especially through propaganda that misrepresents them as liars and threats.

 

Abusivism does not pretend to operate through reason, and it does not attempt to be civil. It labels as enemies those least able to defend themselves and proceed to attack them – both by promoting distrust and hatred against them, and by using the power of the state wherever possible to hurt them.  It dismisses people who care as ‘do-gooders’, ‘politically correct’, and despairingly ‘woke’. It rallies its supporters to obstruct and intimidate them in the name of some ‘culture war’.   

 

Theresa May once warned about the Conservatives becoming the Nasty Party, but when she had the power to chart a new course, she introduced the ‘Hostile Environment’ policy to drive immigrants away. In the end, she merely paved the way for Boris Johnson, whose casual abusivism has been a defining feature of his career.  In the US, Donald Trump has dedicated himself to reducing the Republican Party to nothing but the Nasty Party.  Not all conservative politicians go along with abusivist politics.  But if they want to save their party’s soul, they had better take action soon to pull it back from the brink.

Community Development & the Struggle Against Powerlessness

For people who have been extensively involved in community development, it is no doubt an approach that can empower communities to improve their lives.  However, for others who know little about it, it conjures up images of residents complaining about their areas and delaying projects that were meant to benefit them.  This knowledge gap, one might think, would have been closed by the impact community development work has achieved over time.  Unfortunately, the majority of policy makers and funders still seem to have a complete blind spot when it comes to the value of helping communities build their collective influence.

An underlying problem is that public bodies, which should be welcoming and supporting community development, often view it as merely an instrument in aid of getting top-down targets met.  When those targets end up being questioned, the processes for attaining them are challenged, and alternative plans are sought, those in charge of setting and meeting their own organisational targets are not happy.  What they don’t realise is that the central issue here is power – the power of people living and working in various communities to deal with the problems they face.  Targets, objectives, outputs, etc. need to relate to communities’ experience.  Problem-solving must connect with people’s understanding of possible options.  If solutions and programmes are imposed on people without their informed involvement in shaping them, it exacerbates their powerlessness, and leaves them more disillusioned than ever with how things are organised around them.

 

To appreciate the real importance of community development, one should see it in the historical context of collective struggles against powerlessness.  The driving force has always been the refusal to accept an unpalatable state of affairs as unalterable.  From racist practices, appalling housing conditions, neighbourhood crime and disorder, to widespread poverty, diminishing employment prospects, and environmental degradation, whenever communities are galvanised into working together to formulate and press for better outcomes, community development takes another step forward.

 

Looking back, the closest community development came to be recognised by any government as a core discipline in empowering communities was when the Labour Government established the Civil Renewal Unit (CRU) in 2003 which went on to promote the community development ethos and the adoption of diverse engagement techniques across local and central government, in partnership with the community sector.  CRU established a network of Civic Pioneers to widen local authorities’ engagement with local people, a series of Take Part hubs to help people exert greater influence over public policies and services, and a group of Guide Neighbourhoods to facilitate peer-to-peer learning amongst communities in shaping local priorities and strategies.  It acted as the government sponsor of the Community Development Foundation, and ran national and regional ‘Together We Can’ awareness-raising campaigns to encourage collaborative working between community groups and statutory bodies.  It also invested in dissemination infrastructure to increase the take-up of practices such as participatory budgeting, neighbourhood plans, and community asset transfers.

 

Yet despite the impact of these activities in raising community confidence and satisfaction in a wide range of areas across the country, it was still all too easy for a different political regime to dismantle this structure when it took over from Labour in 2010.  Coordinated and long-term support for community development activities ceased, and the Community Development Foundation itself was closed down.  At one level, this might be regarded as myopic policy making – opting for short term cuts over more durable community improvement.  But at a deeper level, it reveals a callous disinterest in addressing the problem of powerlessness in society.  Shallow rhetoric about ‘Taking Back Control’ will not get us very far (or worse, it covers up even greater loss of power).  History tells a clear story – for the struggle to secure a fair share of power for all, we need sustained community development.

 

--

David Boyle has written an essay on the history of community development, which provides a decade-by-decade retracing of community development in the UK and US.

It can be accessed via Local Trust: https://localtrust.org.uk/insights/essays/a-history-of-community-development/

 

The Problem with History-Blind Judgements

Should individuals of an earlier era be criticised for holding certain views that in later times would come to be considered wrong?  There is a crucial difference between someone who believes in what the vast majority of people at that time routinely believe, and someone who refuses to question an idea when many have begun to cast doubt on its acceptability.

 

It’s understandable why someone living in the 10th century BC might assume the earth was flat, yet anyone holding such a view in the 21st century would arouse suspicion about their capacity for learning.  Similarly, we would not chastise a European cartographer whose 5th century map omitted the Americas, but we would not excuse a 19th century mapmaker who displayed a similar lack of knowledge.

 

Our judgement of people from the past ought to be based on how far ahead or behind they were in comparison with their contemporaries.  Furthermore, one could be ahead in many significant ways while lagging in some areas nonetheless.  Newton, for example, is rightly considered a great scientific thinker who led the world in advancing our understanding of many aspects of physics, even if he subscribed to a few spurious astrological ideas prevalent in the 17th century.

 

Unfortunately, when it comes to the social understanding of other people, it seems that the level of comprehension that has been attained here and now is used by many as the standard to judge the moral quality of people regardless of what historical period they actually lived in.

 

There were people who were cruel and callous by the prevailing standards of their times, and their attitudes and behaviour should be frowned upon. Instead of celebrating them as heroes, they should be seen as contemptible figures.  However, there were also many who had grown up with assumptions common in their times about others with a different ethnicity, nationality, gender, religion, or social status, and even though they might have gradually discarded some of those prejudices through critical reflections, they did not shake off every last one of them.  Should they be singled out as vile reprobates, or should we recognise that they had managed to move forward in some areas, and the direction of travel of their ethical thinking was towards the further elimination of prejudicial thought even if they had not got there completely?

 

In fact, can any of us say that we have got there ‘completely’ in terms of thinking appropriately about everything that matters in life?  As the 18th century Enlightenment taught us, the key is to keep learning, reviewing, discovering, so that we may move forward from mistaken assumptions of the past.  So long as we are making a real effort to improve, and encourage others to do likewise, we should not be faulted for not eradicating all errors in how we think – if indeed that is ever possible.

 

Ironically, many leading thinkers of the Enlightenment have been attacked for holding particular prejudiced views at some point in their lives even though overall they devoted themselves to combating bigotry and dogmas on numerous fronts.  The problem with history-blind judgements is that all too often they savage those who were seeking improvement, and divert attention from the incalcitrant reactionaries who genuinely deserve to be censured.

Lessons for Tomorrow’s Communities

We keep hearing that communities must become more collaborative and resilient in dealing with the problems they face.  Successive crises from the global credit crunch to the coronavirus pandemic have piled on the pressure, especially in areas where people are not accustomed to or supported in pulling together to respond to social and economic challenges.

Mere rhetoric won’t change anything.  No one should be under any illusion that political mantra about leaving ‘society’ to take responsibility for its own wellbeing while cutting back the state is little more than a code for letting people slide into greater insecurity and suffering.  

 

If communities are to take on a more influential role in the future, they need to be helped in their development, and that should be guided by informed views of what works and what does not in practice.  There are many important lessons to be learnt from the numerous cases of effective community-based transformation.  We can look at 12 key findings under three categories:

 

How to achieve transformation of socioeconomic relations in communities:

 

[1] Substantial improvements to economic health and social cohesion can be achieved by establishing the legal and financial framework for community-based organisations to develop their assets, facilities and services to respond to local concerns.

[2] Alternative mediums of exchange such as local currencies and time banking can promote an ethos of mutual support in otherwise fragmented communities, as well as increase the overall resources that are retained in the local economy.

[3] Raising the understanding and influence communities have in relation to regeneration initiatives that affect them, can help build an informed consensus on what to prioritise and how to maximise the impact of the available resources.

[4] The development of businesses that are owned and democratically controlled by local people who work in them can, with the help of platform technology, increase the quantity and quality of income-earning opportunities.

 

How to achieve transformation of collaborative behaviour with communities:

 

[5] The distrust and misunderstanding that undermine partnership working between government bodies and community groups can be significantly reduced through the use of inclusive dialogue techniques and shared objective-setting.

[6] Community learning, backed by trained facilitators, can help people explore the real causes of the problems they face, contribute to the formulation of viable solutions, and develop confidence in joint action.

[7] Structural changes to engagement practices that empower communities to get involved as equal partners can increase participation levels, and reduce the likelihood of delays and costly mistakes damaging public projects.

[8] Replacing rigid target-setting and inflexible monitoring by adaptive planning processes and responsive evaluation can help to avoid the wrong goals being pursued, and deliver outcomes that reflect changing needs and circumstances.

 

How to achieve transformation of policy outcomes by communities:

 

[9] The co-production of public services can be strengthened by incentivising service providers through a form of preventive infrastructure to seek input from communities to improve both the public satisfaction with and financial viability of their services.

[10] The adoption of the multi-stakeholder cooperative model can radically transform the health and social care sector to enable the people who provide care and those who need it to work out the optimal service provision.

[11] Tackling food insecurity and related social problems by integrating community interests and contributions into planning and management arrangements can secure more effective outcomes and enhanced dignity for the communities concerned.

[12] Environmental challenges can be better met when communities are actively involved in awareness raising, option evaluation and selection, and impact monitoring in matters such as neighbourhood designs, energy, transport and air quality.

 

Anyone interested in learning more will find detailed analyses and recommendations set out in the book, Tomorrow’s Communities: lessons for community-based transformation in the age of global crises: https://policy.bristoluniversitypress.co.uk/tomorrows-communities

Can Rights Go Wrong?

Invoking rights to champion a cause is a popular approach because it strikes a firm tone – declaring that the rights in question must be respected unconditionally.  To assert a right is to be like a judge banging the gavel – it is the end of discussion.  Case closed, except of course it isn’t.

 

Rights are not metaphysical entities that a few bright Platonic minds can grasp and anyone not recognising them have only got their intellectual limitations to blame.  They are signifiers of legal, political, and/or moral agreement that prevails in a given society.  Claims such as ‘no one in this country should be tortured’, or ‘every citizen should be supported in overcoming poor health’, may have varying degrees of moral backing amongst the general public, embedded in the political culture in some nation but not others, and translated into legal commitments with different specific implications.

 

If the basis for determining rights is ignored, then the invocation if rights can easily become an arbitrary exercise.  Once we discard as irrelevant what legal, political, or moral consensus there actually is, then ‘rights’ cease to be anchored to social reality.  Different people can insist they have a right to this or that, and interpret what they can expect from having that right in any way they wish without reference to any process or arrangement that exists outside their own mind.

 

Many people who use the language of rights in aid of compassion, justice, or fairness are suspicious of demands to unpack the basis of the rights they claim.  They think their case might get diluted if they engage with what agreement there really is in terms of current legal, political, and moral expectations.  They want to block off any challenge by hoisting the banner of ‘rights’.  

 

But if that is the position they want to keep to, it also opens the door for other people (who care little for compassion, justice, or fairness) to invoke rights in a similarly absolutist way.  These people will firmly claim, for example, that they have a right to hire and fire workers without any intervention from anyone else; they have a right to say what they like even if others regard it as spreading lies and hatred; they have a right to do business in any way they wish irrespective of the concerns of ‘do-gooders’; they have a right to live in a neighbourhood of their own ‘kind’; or they have a right to treat their own children as they see fit no matter how vile or cruel others may consider that treatment.

 

Ultimately, rights are not absolute licences that can be plucked out of metaphysical thin air and deployed to secure whatever someone wants.  Rights have to be justified, their implications have to be assessed, and what is to be granted as entitlements needs to be formulated with care.  To differentiate rights that ought to be safeguarded from rights that are asserted without legitimate foundations, we have to go beyond the surface language of rights and consider the legal, political, and moral positions that exist in society.  Rather than holding up ‘rights’ as some immutable shield against critical discussions, we should recognise the reality in which we need to persuade, challenge, campaign for the changing of attitudes and arrangements to further what we can obtain wider agreement in advancing the values we share.

3 Types of Con Supporters

To understand why Con politics thrives and how it can be countered, we should take a closer look at what type of supporters are behind it.

First and foremost, we have the Con leaders – people whose political career rests on tricking people into helping them secure power even though it would actually be detrimental to the unwitting helpers.  They have no compunction about cheating and lying, and are prone to falsely accuse honest politicians of cheating and lying.  They just want power to advance their self-centred ambitions – to enrich themselves, to celebrate their prejudices, and/or to intimidate anyone they like to designate as ‘enemies’ at home or abroad.  Anyone with the expertise and tenacity to expose their scam would be condemned by them as biased members of the ‘liberal establishment’.

 

Secondly, we have the Con enthusiasts – people who are highly susceptible to embracing the ‘values’ espoused by Con leaders: for example, the freedom to make money regardless of any harmful consequences for others; the importance of adhering to ‘traditional’ attitudes and practices no matter how oppressive they may be; and the adoration of the use of force irrespective of its efficacy or justification.  They don’t mind how their Con leaders abuse and exploit others so long as that leadership validates any abusive and exploitative behaviour they may indulge in themselves.

 

Thirdly, we have the Con fodder – people who do not actually share the core outlook of the Con leaders, but without adequate support or protection, are just too easily conned into believing Con spiel about how life would be made safer and more prosperous for all under leaders who routinely act against the advice of experts and the warnings of impartial observers. They want to live in a kinder and fairer society, but all too often fall prey to Con tricks which disparage sound political positions and present highly damaging policies as essential for the ‘good’ of the country (when in truth, the only beneficiaries are the Con leaders and their associates).

 

One strategy for countering the spread of Con politics is to enable potential Con fodder to see through the skulduggery of Con leaders.  There is, after all, a clear pattern to the tactics of charlatans who over and over again will push something they want against the wishes and judgement of everyone else, and they will self-righteously declare the vast majority of scientists, businesses, analysts, reporters, community organisations, health and security experts, and anyone else with the relevant experience as all wrong-headed or untrustworthy.  

Expose them repeatedly and thoroughly, call them out as liars whenever they embark on another round of deception, and in time, enough support will drain from them to render them less of a threat to our common wellbeing.