Ease or revive lockdown? What are we to do with this Covid-19 pandemic that has mired us in fear and uncertainties? Is there anything we can put in place to deal with this predicament?
There is an approach which can, not only solve many of the immediate problems we face, but also help us achieve a range of critical improvements that have for too long been held back. I call it the Home-centric Redevelopment Scheme. It has three components.
[1] Strategic Adaptation to make Home-Working the Norm
Technology has advanced to a point that there can be no excuse for not facilitating home-working in the most effective manner, and making it the norm. Being trusted, empowered, and safe, people will certainly not be any less productive than having to waste time travelling to work. Transport-related pollution is correspondingly reduced. Absenteeism from family life due to work-related time away from home is cut. And contact with colleagues can be made more extensively and rapidly across a computer network than having to go physically to different places. All this requires universal provision of high-quality internet connections, which is something every government should urgently secure.
[2] Conversion of City-centre Offices into Affordable & Sustainable Homes
What about all those empty office blocks, and all the local services that depend on the custom of office workers? The answer is in converting the office buildings that are no longer needed into decent accommodation that can be purchased or rented by people on all income levels. The new homes should meet the highest sustainability standards with low cost energy supplied from renewable sources. Their occupants will be within walking distance to local shops and other facilities, and with masks and other precautions they can keep numerous businesses in the area vibrant.
[3] Establish a Comprehensive Home Delivery Service
Beyond serving customers in their vicinity, businesses will need support in reaching people who live much further away and are disinclined to venture out. To help all businesses get their products to customers in a reliable and cost-effective way, there should be a comprehensive delivery service (e.g., an enhanced nationwide postal service) that enables businesses to send their goods (from furniture to food, clothes to computers) to any home in the country at a fast and economically viable rate. This national service will in turn guarantee its workers an income above the minimum wage, proper sick pay, and reliable health and safety conditions. It will also help many businesses compete with corporations that exploit their own large-scale/low-pay delivery service to dominate the market.
There may remain businesses where direct physical presence is unavoidable. But in parallel with the three components outlined above, it is worth paying much closer attention to how practices in these businesses can be changed as well. As automation increases, worker supervision of machine operation can more and more be done via remote monitoring. Face-to-face consultation and instruction giving can be done on screen. Technology is opening new ways for collaborative working for people who are in fact far apart. We must not, of course, ignore the need to make workplaces safer to carry out what genuinely cannot be done from home. But with the Home-centric Redevelopment Scheme, our safety, sustainability, and economic health can be greatly enhanced.
Sunday, 16 August 2020
Saturday, 1 August 2020
Reflections on China & PPE (Philosophy, Politics & Economics)
When I began my undergraduate course in PPE at the Queen’s College in 1978, I did not know that I was to be the first student of Chinese descent to read Philosophy, Politics & Economics at the University of Oxford.
Looking back, it was not that surprising. PPE has always been a subject associated with the development of critical and democratic governance. Prior to the reforms brought in by Deng Xiaoping in the 1980s, Communist China was unlikely to be sending any of its young people abroad to study PPE. Of the two Chinese-majority states outside the People’s Republic, Taiwan was ruled under martial law until 1987, and Singapore had been controlled by a single party (the PAP – People’s Action Party) since it gained independence in 1965. As for Hong Kong and Macao, they were British and Portuguese colonies respectively, and were governed with little input from the local Chinese population.
Against that backdrop, I was an odd exception who turned away from the common Chinese parental aspiration for their children to become a ‘professional’ (who’d leave politics to others), and headed instead towards a discipline which certainly at the time looked like the preserve of the white establishment. Guess being the odd one out fitted in with the inclination to question the powerful. What I went on to learn from my PPE experience has played an important part in my subsequent academic research, political writing, policy work in government, and collaboration with civic activists.
It therefore saddens me greatly that in 2020, the centenary year of the launch of PPE at Oxford, the prospects for critical and democratic governance in China and the former colonies now under China’s rule, have fallen under a long shadow. Authoritarian control is intensifying, and any expression of critical views is met with threats and punishment. And as relations between the UK and China become increasingly strained, could we be returning to a time when the likelihood of Chinese youths studying PPE is zero? It would be symptomatic of the widening gulf between an education in political criticism and a ruling ethos that cannot tolerate free political thinking.
I had at one time believed that from the 1980s on, the grip of authoritarian rule over most Chinese people’s lives – be it in its Communist, colonial, or military form – would loosen, and be replaced by a more open and democratic culture. But the trajectory is now clearly going in the opposite direction. Instead of ideas, historical lessons, objective analyses relating to the development and governance of society, being more widely shared and studied, opportunities for learning and open discussion of philosophy, politics and economics are fast dwindling.
Authoritarianism thrives on giving the impression that society cannot be governed in any other way. This impression must not be allowed to take hold. Educators, East and West, have a responsibility for opening minds to diverse ways of thinking. It is when each new generation are able to explore new possibilities and discover alternative paths, that they are most likely to herald the changes needed for a better future.
Looking back, it was not that surprising. PPE has always been a subject associated with the development of critical and democratic governance. Prior to the reforms brought in by Deng Xiaoping in the 1980s, Communist China was unlikely to be sending any of its young people abroad to study PPE. Of the two Chinese-majority states outside the People’s Republic, Taiwan was ruled under martial law until 1987, and Singapore had been controlled by a single party (the PAP – People’s Action Party) since it gained independence in 1965. As for Hong Kong and Macao, they were British and Portuguese colonies respectively, and were governed with little input from the local Chinese population.
Against that backdrop, I was an odd exception who turned away from the common Chinese parental aspiration for their children to become a ‘professional’ (who’d leave politics to others), and headed instead towards a discipline which certainly at the time looked like the preserve of the white establishment. Guess being the odd one out fitted in with the inclination to question the powerful. What I went on to learn from my PPE experience has played an important part in my subsequent academic research, political writing, policy work in government, and collaboration with civic activists.
It therefore saddens me greatly that in 2020, the centenary year of the launch of PPE at Oxford, the prospects for critical and democratic governance in China and the former colonies now under China’s rule, have fallen under a long shadow. Authoritarian control is intensifying, and any expression of critical views is met with threats and punishment. And as relations between the UK and China become increasingly strained, could we be returning to a time when the likelihood of Chinese youths studying PPE is zero? It would be symptomatic of the widening gulf between an education in political criticism and a ruling ethos that cannot tolerate free political thinking.
I had at one time believed that from the 1980s on, the grip of authoritarian rule over most Chinese people’s lives – be it in its Communist, colonial, or military form – would loosen, and be replaced by a more open and democratic culture. But the trajectory is now clearly going in the opposite direction. Instead of ideas, historical lessons, objective analyses relating to the development and governance of society, being more widely shared and studied, opportunities for learning and open discussion of philosophy, politics and economics are fast dwindling.
Authoritarianism thrives on giving the impression that society cannot be governed in any other way. This impression must not be allowed to take hold. Educators, East and West, have a responsibility for opening minds to diverse ways of thinking. It is when each new generation are able to explore new possibilities and discover alternative paths, that they are most likely to herald the changes needed for a better future.
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