Progressive Conservatism In Contemporary Britain – Jonty Olliff-Cooper

Jonty Olliff-Cooper leads the Progressive Conservatism Project at Demos where he focuses on community, childhood, welfare reform and public service innovation. He has served in the Conservative Party’s Policy Unit, where he led on innovation policy, family and public service reform issues. Jonty Olliff-Cooper is also part of Bright Blue, a new group which aims to spread progressive conservative ideas to an audience beyond Westminster. As such, he works with a network that connects disadvantaged teenagers to young professionals willing to offer careers advice. Jonty Olliff-Cooper addressed The Sydney Institute on Monday 15 February.

PROGRESSIVE CONSERVATISM IN CONTEMPORARY BRITAIN

JONTY OLLIFF-COOPER

It’s very exciting to be here for the first time, particularly with the Centre for Social Impact but at The Sydney Institute and with Gilbert and Tobin. My rather broad topic covers a multitude of sins and policies, so I thought I’d start by looking at the context of what’s going on in British politics right now. I don’t know how much you know or if it’s old hat for you. If so let me know and I’ll speed up. I’ll go on from there to explain how define progressive conservativism, its key tenets and then, if we have time, I’ll move on to a few of the policies which illustrate all that.

At the moment, in Britain, we have an election that has to be held June and which shall probably be in May. The Labour Party has been in power since 1997, coming into government after a very long period of conservative rule. So we’ve had two long serving governments, and there’s really a strong sense that Labour has run out of puff at the moment. That has combined with the financial crisis which has been very severe in Britain, obviously because of our dependence on financial services. This has combined with an expenses scandal in parliament, which has very much lowered the reputation of politicians in the public mind from a position of disgust to plain old irrelevance. So that’s the context.

David Cameron, the leader of the Conservative Party, has articulated a vision of progressive conservativism which is of relevance both to Australian politics and the broader Right across the world. At Demos, my project is about developing what this idea is. A little earlier, someone remarked to me how it might be an oxymoron to talk about “progressive conservativism”. Indeed. Recently, our group was invited to give a talk in London on the title “Progressive Conservativism: Oxymoronic or just moronic?” So I’ll try and persuade you otherwise.

In policy term, progressive conservatism is what I think of as the triple crunch of challenging problems. We’re all familiar with the credit crunch, and that’s part of the problem. But the crisis we actually face in Britain, possibly also in Australia, is much bigger than that. And it’s important to understand about how severe it is, because otherwise the changes that we talk about don’t really seem all that necessary.

Australia has fared reasonably well in the global financial crisis, but Britain has not. We have something like 27 per cent of all our tax revenues coming from just one square mile in the city of London. That area is the financial district. And it’s been very severely hit. One in three young people leaving school is now what we call NEET – Not in Education, Employment or Training. So there’s an immediate problem short term problem to do with the dole queues, the welfare payments, the crisis in the budget.

Beyond that, there are two important and challenging other crunches. One is a combination of megafactors, things we’ve been putting off worrying about for too long. These are not new or things we’ve never heard before; they’re well worked. But we haven’t done enough to solve them and they’re all reaching fruition.

British politician William Beveridge talked after the Second World War about five “giants” that policy was at war with – things like want and hunger. Today we have a new giants. Issues like the ageing population. One in four people born today in Britain will live past 100, yet half the workforce is not saving anything at all for retirement. There’s a serious problem about the dependency ratio, the number of people working compared to the number who are not. This has major health impacts and it also changes the character of society. The ageing population is something we haven’t come to grips with in the way that we need to.

Another one of these mega challenges is the issue of chronic behavioural health. The war on drugs, so-called, has not gone particularly well in Britain. Addiction rates have fallen, but not fallen very much, despite a lot of effort. And that extends to other problems of behaviour, like diabetes and obesity. Obesity is rising very fast in the UK. Not as fast as in the USA but at worrying levels none the less. As a result, the costs in of public services are going up, but particularly with the NHS, the National Health Service. If we don’t check the rate of obesity it will take up half the current budget for health by 2040. That’s a very rapid increase.

We also have mental health issues, which have been rising sharply – matters like stress, depression, anxiety disorders. This is another giant. Add to that the crisis of Britain’s international position, where we are losing the war in Afghanistan and where we are hideously overstretched, the army working double time and not designed to fight this scale of conflict.

We have a number of major, big ticket defence items – aircraft carriers which need renewal and which we probably can’t pay for; the Trident nuclear missile system is also up for renewal with debates as to whether it should be renewed considering it cost £20 billion. In foreign affairs, we’re slipping down the rankings and will continue to do so over the next century, unless we change our tactics in relation to the European Union. We’ve got a seat on the UN Security Council but I can’t see us keeping that in the current format in the world of 2050. These are major foreign policy challenges.

The final challenge is one of trust in politicians. Democracy is dying in Britain. If you look at voter turnout it has fallen very sharply, particularly since about 1992, and it’s predicted to continue falling, even though the coming election is a crunch one. Local government elections have even lower turnouts, perhaps just 18 to 20 per cent of eligible voters. At present the standing off politicians is very low. We’ve had a spate of vigilante attacks against politicians known to be abusing their expenses, where people have egged them, or set fire to their lawns, that sort of thing.  Recently the public have moved beyond outrage to not caring about it anymore.

And just when you’re thinking, “What a tirade of pessimistic predictions for the future”, we find that we don’t have any money to deal with such problems. In fact, it’s more severe than not having any money. Having no money would be an improvement on the UK deficit £2 trillion. So it’s really important that we start to address the budget deficit.

When we think of progressive conservativism, it’s important to understand that this isn’t just a question of shaving five per cent off the budget here and there, or reducing the size of the workforce in the public sector. None of that will be anything like enough to cope with the kind of challenges we’re talking about. We have to focus on, not a five per cent improvement in efficiency but maybe a 50 percent improvement. And that doesn’t mean doing the same a bit better; it means a whole new approach.

The background to progressive conservativism is a new model. The first thing to say about progressive conservativism is that it’s not bland centrism or moderate conservativism. It’s not half way between left and right positions, going slowly in a compromise position on all issues. What we’re aiming to do is something radical and different and I hope that’s conveyed by the seemingly contradictory terms in the title. In a nutshell, it is about moving from a conservativism that cuts the supply of the state to a conservativism that cuts the demand for the state. That’s a subtle or technical difference, but it involves a big change in the way you think about what you’re trying to achieve.

It’s nonsensical to say we don’t like having a great big bureaucracy so let’s make it smaller. It’s big for a reason. You need to reduce those reasons so the size of the state will fall as a result. It’s putting the horse before the cart to just cut everything by 20 per cent. It would render social problems all the more which is not really the outcome you want. That’s a key tenet of what we’re trying to set up.

Three new trends support this approach – and it’s the right time for a new conservativism, for a new resurgence on the right. One trend is rejection of top-down mechanisms or state-driven approaches to solving social problems. The New Labour government of Tony Blair was elected in 1997 with enormous public will and one of the biggest majorities we’ve ever seen in British history. Blair was then a very popular and charismatic leader. For governing, they had everything they possibly needed, including an enormous budget surplus and a booming economy.

Labour has thrown so much money at social problems, along with many brilliant people’s ideas. Yet, they have not been able to solve most of the social issues we were facing in 1997. The UK remains a country struggling with the same kind of issues we were struggling with then. And you would have noticed that, in the triple crunch I described, the biggest changes and growing problems were all problems of behaviour – such as reducing people’s carbon footprint, or maintaining healthy lifestyles, or antisocial behaviour, or drug addiction. There’s an enormous amount of new science about the way we behave and how we can change our behaviour. To understand how behaviour is changing is key territory for conservatives.

The second of those trends that make things interesting is the social aspiration gap opening up in Britain – the gap between how you want to live and what you actually live with. I find myself saying all the time that I really care about climate change. It’s an issue important to prioritise. I imagine I should be doing, I’m going to do something about it. Then I take a 12,000 mile flight to Australia. Or you say that you are really passionate about developing-world issues; you really care about what’s happening in the developing world at the same time as saying, what do you think of my new trainers that were made by sweated labour in a developing country? There’s a gap between what we say we want to do and what we actually do.

While that injects a note of pessimism, over the last 15 years in Britain there’s been a rise in the number of new cultural and social movements – groups like the Slow Food movement for organic food or the Make Poverty History campaign. These have had an effect in Britain. Thus, it is possible to create cultural change in spite of the gap in what we say and what we do. And that’s one of the directions conservatives should move towards. Connected to that, is the idea of stewardship over the future, of passing on something to coming generations. This has become particularly acute. That idea of stewardship is traditionally conservative; it’s a Burkian notion of society, of handing something on to the next generation.

We define the core areas of progressive conservatism along four strands. The first is about power, and about localism and neighbourhoods. If you read any social attitude survey in Britain at the moment, there’s a palpable sense that people feel powerless, that they cannot influence their lives. They are at the mercy of those that call the shots – rich bankers or powerful, and sometimes corrupt, politicians. The daily issues that bug them, they can’t deal with, possibly because they don’t have legislative power and feel too distant from parliament. But it goes down to a more micro level than that.

If you’re woken up at three o’clock in the morning by the bar down the road, who do you call? Do you call the council? Do you call the police? Is this something you call the business executive about? You’re not quite sure. In our urge to create an efficient state we’ve created a state that’s so complex, it’s actually quite regressive. It’s hard for people, especially the most vulnerable people in society, to navigate it. This contributes to this sense of powerlessness.

What we do about that? One of the major shifts is to take government not just to the local level but to a neighbourhood level. We’ve been doing some work in Birmingham, Britain’s second biggest city and an interesting city because it was almost bombed to pieces in the Second World War. It was rebuilt with a lot of social housing estates. It also has the largest local authority in Europe; it has about one and a half million people under the authority’s jurisdiction. The problems of local government are acute in Birmingham because local action isn’t very local at all.

We’ve been looking at a couple of estates in Birmingham where neighbourhood action -residents who met on the street – are starting to get involved, to organise themselves. On one estate, of some ten thousand people, this action has probably saved about £180 million in the last ten years. That’s just one estate. There are 300 estates like that in Birmingham alone. And if we could generate that sort of enthusiasm across Britain then we could be onto something. So we’re looking at ways in which the state can pay and reward neighbourhood activity, thereby leading to a direct saving in reduced graffiti, rubbish, harm and physical suffering, medical needs or whatever it might be.

The second strand of our work focuses on childhood and the early years. This is quite a departure for Tories. Traditionally conservatives have been very set against intervention in the preschool years, seeing this as an intervention in private lives, a rather nanny state thing to do. But if you want to reduce the intervention in people’s lives overall then the place to focus is early childhood. By doing that, we know we can have a major influence on social problems; problems like crime and educational disengagement, particularly with schemes which are targeted to the poorest areas.

In Britain, we have a scheme called Sure Start. The program has been effectively captured by the middle class. It’s a free service, and fairly flexible as to what it offers. There are jewellery making classes and yoga for yummy mummies – and it’s a very expensive scheme. Poor single mothers don’t go to Sure Start because they feel it’s not their kind of place. So we re trying to refocus that and to think about relationships.

Traditionally, the Right has a kind of mania with marriage, and the Left says it doesn’t matter what your social circumstance and your family structure is; both those things are wrong in my opinion. The Left are wrong to say it doesn’t make a difference if you’re brought up by a single mum. It does make a difference, it’s tough work; it’s hard to be one person looking after a number kids. That’s why we feel sympathy, and provide benefits to single parents. This doesn’t mean, either, that marriage is the answer. So what we are trying to do – and it’s an ambitious policy – is to find a way in which the state can promote stronger relationships. It’s a bold thing. But we found some ways.

There are simple ways to encourage a relationship. Advice before you go into marriage. If you were going to the Congo you wouldn’t go without taking your anti-malarials, but if you’re going into marriage you often just wade into it because you’re in love. But with advice, there are some pretty simple things that can make a difference. A questionnaire, comparing what your attitudes to money with your partner’s followed by a chat about it for example. Such simple steps can cut the risk of divorce by a third.

The third strand of our work concerns poverty. Here we’re trying to reshape conservative attitudes to poverty to move away from an idea that people poor because they are lazy. That is a crude stereotype, obviously, but that is the conservative public’s perception often, stereotyping people in poverty – that they don’t really care, because it’s kind of their fault. We are trying to reshape that conception, in the public’s mind. The way we’re doing it is by thinking about poverty in what we call a “thick” conception of inequality rather than a thin one. A thin one would be to think about inequality of income, primarily. A thick one would be to think about all the things that lie around that, that are connected to it, like poverty of aspiration.

On one of the estates I visited for the project I spoke with a young lad who told me how the estate was his whole world. He had never been off it – an area about one and a half Kilometres square. It’s quite hard for middle class people to understand how it is for people who don’t have cars, who might live in remote locations, or where there are no jobs. People who never mix with others of different social classes. All of this can have a huge effect on one’s social aspirations. If you don’t know any architects, you’re not very likely to become an architect. Where there is a poverty of cultural capital, those applicants who go to an interview are at a cultural disadvantage even before they get through the door.

The award winning author Amryta Sen has spoken of how to be truly free you need the capabilities to script your own life. These may be hard won skills. Not just literacy but also soft skills of persuasion, skills for yourself, what is called agency or control over your own life, long term thinking. If, for example, you’re privileged enough to go to a school that plays rugby – in Britain the wealthier schools – and you learned how to overcome the tough tackles, and you felt good, your team mates patted you on the back, your coach noticed with your parents on the sidelines, this is a positive start on confidence and an ability to tackle challenges.

The fourth strand of our work concerns the shape of the state. This is where our work tallies very closely to what the Centre for Social Impacts has been working on here. To my mind, it’s putting the cart before the horse to try and reduce the size of the state forcibly. It will only reduce successfully when social problems reduce. And there’s an enormous number of new and exciting techniques being tested and deployed in this regard – and not usually by government but only on the fringes of government around the world. Politics is full of false storms, and maybe this will be another, but there really are some exciting things going on.

One is social design – the idea that you take the approach of an ethnographer, product designer and policy maker and mix them together. There are people already who work in experience design where, instead of designing a table or chair, you design an experience booking a holiday or taking a flight. You design what it’s like from when you decide to take the holiday all the way through to sitting on the plane. Is it what you wanted? Is it the right time? Is it an easy process? And people are now taking that approach and using it in dealing with government. Say you have a disabled child. What forms of support are available to you? Are they there in the format that you want them? And when you want them? Such matters are usually designed by people externally. But if you work with people who are in the target group, then you can often not just learn from them but actually teach them how to design a new process, a new service that would fit them better.

Crowd sourcing is the idea that you can learn from the wisdom of many people to solve a problem. The internet had made this easy. And that leads me on to what I’ll probably close with which is the concept of the big society. UK Conservative Party leader David Cameron has been very influential in pushing this idea which is not so much about making government smaller as more efficient, cheaper, more effective. The role of the state is to be a catalyser, a resource to draw on for the third sector and civil society. We need to build a society where everybody is a volunteer, everybody is a member of three or four societies, everybody knows their neighbour. That’s the objective of social policy. When you get that right, you get everything else right.