This is a Good Public Service Broadcast
Government doesn't work if it is too heavy handed. We need to centre people in the demand and delivery side of the state.
Last weekend, I went on holiday to Rome. My trip there was incredible. I walked more than ten miles a day just drinking in the culture, the architecture, the atmosphere. I put on half a stone eating the food (so OK, not quite a starving playwright) and I didn’t care a jot. I was deeply happy and deeply content.
On Monday, I go into rehearsals for my next play, Triggered. I am a bundle of nervous excitement, artistic hope and vision. That I get to do this all over again is a genuine honour that makes me incredibly happy and content.
I have been thinking a lot about the good life and government’s role in it. Not least because a good life is getting harder and harder for so many to achieve. But even as we need the government to step up and step in, we need their doing so to make more, not less, sense to citizens.
When flying out to Rome, I tried to take a half-used tube of toothpaste with me. The tube originally contained 125ml but was visibly more than half used. It was taken away from me under the “no liquids over 100ml” rule. My attempt to be at once frugal and green was thwarted as the security guard told me it was not his job to “guess” how much “liquid” was in the tube.
This was five minutes of annoyance for me of course. All it meant was a an extra trip to the Boots in duty free to buy some more toothpaste. But in the five minutes it took for me to look agog at the guard, there were four sepereate people around me who were also caught off guard by the pointless and arbitrary rules.
I could go into a rant here about the difference between a liquid and a paste. I could go into the rant I ran in my head about how obvious it was that there was less than 100ml of toothpaste in my tube.
But none of these are interesting in particular to you my readers or in my attempts to think about Labour policy, how it should be made and how it should be managed.
The 100ml rule is bad law implemented badly. As such, my most interesting response was a nearly overwhelming desire (not thankfully totally overwhelming) to say to the guard “look mate, just between you and me, and for the sake of my sanity, tell me please that you know in your heart there isn’t 100ml of toothpaste there”. I desperately wanted to at least know that he and I were colluding in a fantasy - even if our collusion was unequal - not experiencing completely different realities.
As a socialist, I believe fundamentally in the collective power of the state and the need for it to hold up society as a whole. A well managed, actively interactive state can help us all to live the good lives we deserve.
Afterall, that is - in part - what I saw in Rome. Art and culture that had been sponsored by one type of state and preserved by many others for years to come, whatever the other failings of those states (this is very much not an argument for returning to any form of Roman-style society, more a case for a well-run and well-funded Arts Council).
Many of us will rely on state support at some time in our lives. All of us will interact with it, with the human beings who front its processes and with those processes themselves. Whether that be minimally or maximally we all deserve a state that centres our and their humanity. That was - I think - what so frustrated me about my interaction with that security guard. It was an interaction that could have been deliberately designed to minimise any sense of our shared truth and as such our shared humanity.
This doesn’t matter much when it comes to minor irritations to middle class wankers flying off on a weekend jolly to Rome (although I am going to argue later that it does a little bit…). It matters a great deal more when people are more reliant on state run services. When the state is part of your daily life a sense that your view of its actions, management and the behaviour of those whose job it is to serve you don’t matter matters. It matters a lot.
The Tories don’t believe in the state. So when in power they do two things to run it down. Firstly, they underfund it in order to cut taxes - usually in favour of those least likely to use state services. It’s a direct transfer of wealth to the wealthier and services away from those in need. We know the arguments about this and we can all make them in our sleep.
But they also do something more insidious, something that too often, the left colludes in. They don’t just underfund services - they make them deeply unattractive to be a part of. They design and redesign them in such a way as to make them seem unappealing to those attracted to working in public service. They put in systems that they call efficient but are anything but instead of actually being efficient, they are simply systematically bad. They take any human element out of either the delivery side or the service side.
The result of this is a loss of a shared sense of humanity. And again, while that can be frustrating for those of us just touching on the edges of the state, it has a real and lastingly dehumanising and frustrating effect on those who rely on state-run services. those who need disability or out of work benefits or those whose basics are provided by state-run or state commissioned providers like social housing tenants.
I saw a play this week that was all written through documents surrounding the Grenfell fire tragedy. These were emails and internal reports that were about the repairs and so-called upgrades that contributed to the apalling conditions of residents and blogs, petitions and letters from those residents outlining the disgusting way they had been treated in the years preceding the fire. Years in which they were seen not as residents to be serviced with rights and to whom the council had a responsibility. Instead they were seen as a hindrance to progress, to gentrification and to the profit the council thought it should be making to better service other, less burdensome, less troublesome residents. Once again, it became clear that the human relationships between those working for the (in this case local) state and those on the reciving end had been completely and deliberately designed out as an oldfashioned concept.
Of course this matters far more to those whose lives were and are endangered than it does to those who are simply inconvenienced at an airport. But it is the same instinct and driver that is causing both. That move away not just from people-centred public services, but even more so from people-delivered ones. And if we want buy in to go back to a place where Labour can centre a sense of public service for all users and in all areas it will need to show all voters how a responsive and pleasant state looks and feels. That’s why it matters a little but that middle class wankers like me get to go through airport security feeling like we’ve dealt with humans and not automatons. That’s why that security guard should have been empowered to be and behave like a human. Becuase the ethos of the coalface has to change everywhere to be changed for those at the sharpest end.
Labour are often accused of not having enough policies. This is a nonsense. Labour have, if anything, too many policies. What they don’t have is a proper vision. One that tells the country simply what will be diffeent when they are in charge. Not just in terms of retail politics, but in ethos. I think a narrative about restoring humanity to the state can and should be at the heart of the Labour offer. It’s not about how much something costs - but about how much we are all worth. To the state and to each other.
But in making this argument, both sides of Labour will have to accept a shift in their thinking. the right will have to move away from their beloved sense that state services should be paid for through taxiation but provided - efficiently - by anyone but the state. That experiment in distancing government from citizens should have been over the day after Grenfell when we saw quite how disasterously that lack of responsibilty and clarity can end.
The left, on the other hand, will also have to get over their own anti-establishment fears. For their to be someone responsible there has to be someone in charge. This doesn’t mean dismantling the establishment - it means co-opting it into doing what it is meant to.
If Labour can offer a vision of life where government is not about people unable to stop the system getting in your way, but instead about facilitating mutually supportive relationships we can go a long way to overturning the false-economy-driven neoliberalism that has fuelled state thinking for 40 years. Doing this well should not necessarily cost more. However, with this government in power, the argument will for the first time in a long time not be about who will spend less, but who will spend better. The Tories have not got a coherent argument on this. Labour can and should. And it would be the backbone of both a winning electoral strategy and a quiet revolution in people’s lives.
I run a political and communications consultancy called Political Human. Please get in touch if you are looking for political or media consultancy advice, strategic communication and campaign planning, ghostwriting, copywriting, editing, training or coaching.
You can read some lovely things that some of my clients have said here.
I am also a playwright and director. Tickets for my next play, Triggered, which runs at the Lion and Unicorn in Kentish Town from June 20-22 are on sale here and there are literally only 5 left so get in fast!
My debut piece No Cure For Love can be seen here. There’s some interesting news on this coming so watch this space…!
What I’ve been up to
I appeared on the Wright on the Nail podcast talking about Northern Ireland , Tories woes and Wagatha Christie.
I was also a guest as part of a series of ‘In Conversation’ events with former Birkbeck students. It’s a long conversation largely focused on my theatre work, but also covering my political work and my time in as a Birkbeck student. Listen here.
I saw a play called Hoxton Street, that was styled as the omnibus edition of a real-life soap. It had some definite promise but didn’t quite work for me.
On the other hand, I found the above mentioned Dictating to the Estate, based on found words surrounding the Grenfell tragedy, very powerful.
Questions, comments and arguments are very welcome. Insults will get you summarily blocked on every platform that no longer hosts Donald Trump. I’m at emmaburnell@gmail.com or on Twitter (far too often) at @EmmaBurnell_.
Step one: break up the treasury. Currently it's just a department that puts shackles on every other department. That has to stop.
Emma, thanks for this and making this clearer in my mind. I think the issue of a lack of humanity is a broader one of course and it occurs in human interactions in the private sector workplace as well as the public sector. Management texts suggest that failure to treat employees properly (if we can accept the definition of this in a broad sense) will result in the business not working optimally. Yet how many businesses really embrace the idea of treating people ‘properly’? Hard systems (processes, procedures,rules) may be designed to deliver e.g. a service - but as the security guard in your example - it is delivered by a person. They could have behaved differently to deliver the result prescribed by the system in a more human way? Isn’t this true of a raft of interactions that frustrate us or dehumanise us? To me Labour’s vision must take us away from the culture that leads to people behaving in this way ( tribal, divisive populism?) and to a more collective responsibility which acknowledges the role we have towards each other and the community as a whole. In other words changing behaviour is arguably more important than the hard system an individual is working within. In terms of a vision I believe Labour may be hesitant to articulate one when it seems they have potentially many different groups to resonate with to win the next election (Fabian Report Winning 150) and are frightened of alienating some key votes. What to do? In my view, of course, we need a Labour government or even a Labour led coalition. This won’t be easy to achieve although at the moment it seems we may dare to dream. We may not get all we want in terms of our socialist ideals simply to get the votes we need (without compromising too much I hope) but then we can begin to work on building the society we want to see - one with much more humanity in our dealings with each other.