It's not fair!

It really isn't. Just when you expected a minister to say something reassuring and profound about the government's commitment to equality, he goes and lets you down.

John Denham, the communities secretary, has been putting the cat among the pigeons, or at least any pigeons of a liberal disposition. Which, it would appear, are fewer in number than we thought.

His pronouncements, in a speech to the Fabian Society today, were touted by the Guardian as a retreat from egalitarianism. In reality, it was rather more nuanced, but still significant.

Using recent research from the Joseph Rowntree Foundation about public attitudes to equality, he argued that what people are really interested in is fairness. This 'hard-nosed' concept, to use his expression, relates to rewards for efforts - inequalities are fair if they relate to the amount of work people put in:

What the research shows is that popular sentiment supports a tough, hard headed, but at the end of the day, compassionate version of fairness. One that does not turn its back on those in great need, but one that also insists that effort should be rewarded, and that society should be fair to those who play by the rules.

This sense of fairness is based on the idea that there is a set of obligations and opportunities that should underpin British society. When people say 'it's not fair' it is usually because they believe that the balance of duties and rewards, of right and responsibilities, has been upset.

Instead of basing an ideal society on an assessment of needs, Mr Denham argued, it should be based on what is felt to be fair. But here we run into difficulties.

First, we should acknowledge that he's dealing with an issue that arouses strong feelings of what is just and right, even if there's rather less clarity on how what is just and right should be measured. The great social researcher Michael Young and his colleagues picked this up when he revisited his seminal study of family life in Bethnal Green, east London. His book, The new East End: kinship, race and conflict draws out the strong sense of injustice felt by white working-class families because of the perception that Bengali families were getting preferential treatment in the housing queue; this sense of injustice was aggravated when middle-class council officials casually dismissed it as racism.

However, perceptions of unfair treatment can rapidly turn into unchallenged urban myths. We saw in Bradford, Burnley and Oldham in 2001 how such urban myths can take on a life of their own, and how much effort has been required to counter them. To suggest social policy should be based on popular views about who is or isn't deserving is deeply flawed.

The nub of Mr Denham's argument, though, is that this is the way to get elected: The number of people who sign up to a traditional egalitarian view of society (only 22% according to this research) is simply too small to construct a strong, viable and inclusive electoral coalition. And the extent that those who do are older and more traditionally working class, suggest that this task will get harder not easier...

The JRF research, based on a survey of 3,316 people and discussions with another 112 in focus groups, found that most people defined themselves as neither rich nor poor. However, while they thought wealth generally had been earned, the popular view was that those in poverty had only themselves to blame. As the researchers pointed out, 'two important factors driving these attitudes were widespread beliefs that there are adequate opportunities to earn a reasonable income and beliefs that benefit recipients will not contribute back to society'.

John Denham's view is this:

If you think you are in this middle group, policies and language aimed at 'the poor' by definition exclude you. They intensify the sense that someone else is getting a better deal than you and your family. And if you in the middle, you are more likely to be concerned about whether 'the top' is doing better than you, than you are about the situation of those at 'the bottom'.

So his answer is a concept of fairness that acknowledges these attitudes and ensures the poor only get what the majority consider they deserve. That isn't nothing: the researchers found support for a 'progressive' tax and benefits system. But it does suggest that what the poor deserve should be determined by the better off.

This approach fails on three counts.

First, it puts perceptions before evidence. It places the voices that hold sway in the pub and the shopping queue above the evidence that shows, for instance, that increases in the cost of living hit the worst-off hardest (see this research, just published by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation); or that the recession is disproportionately affecting areas that are already disadvantaged.

Second, it ignores and devalues the huge efforts made by many who are among the poorest in our society to improve life for their families and communities. I have met more individuals than I can count who survive on benefits or meagre incomes and have galvanised their communities into action, supporting regeneration projects, helping and advising their neighbours, tackling antisocial behaviour and standing up, often at huge personal risk, against gang and gun crime.

They include people like Linda Whitworth, whose 'A team' have restored local spirit in East Howden, Tyneside; Glenn Jenkins, who has chivvied and cajoled residents on Luton's Marsh Farm estate into developing their own job opportunities, despite continual opposition; and Pam Stewart, who despite coping with her own and her family's ill health has helped numerous voluntary organisations in Wigan. What marks these people out is not how little they have, but how much they're ready to offer.

Compare that with John Denham's assertion that people in 'the middle' feel excluded. If anything, it panders to the view that the worst-off are implicitly less deserving precisely because of their hardship.

The JRF researchers sounded a strong caveat about the attitudes they discovered, which John Denham glosses over:

Many participants exhibited strongly judgemental attitudes towards people on out-of-work benefits, motivated by beliefs about the ready availability of opportunity and beliefs that those claiming benefits now will not necessarily make a future contribution back to society. This suggests an important route for challenging judgemental attitudes here would be to raise awareness of the barriers to opportunity faced by many people and to highlight the contributions that many of those on low incomes currently make to society and will make in future.

Third, the Denham approch subjects principles to utility. Here he diverges not only from his Labour forebears, but from the most significant social reformers across the political spectrum.

From Victorian philanthropists like Thomas Barnardo, whose slogan was 'no destitute child ever refused admission', to clerics like David Sheppard, former bishop of Liverpool, who argued for a 'bias to the poor', there was a burning sense of moral obligation to those who found themselves in need. John Denham's version of fairness removes that: it changes the value of a human being from something that is innate into something determined by the popular mood. And the popular mood can easily decide that particular groups are of no value at all: you only have to look at the recent treatment of Roma families in Northern Ireland to see where that can lead.

Community versus bureaucracy?

Shadow housing minister Grant Shapps set out his stall at today's community land trusts conference.The Conservatives' ideas about local housing trusts would be to enable people who want to build local homes for local people to do so, free from excessive bureaucratic interference.

Listening to the likes of David Brown from High Bickington in Devon, you can see how the regulations (or the way officials interpret them) can frustrate the democratic decisions of local councils and the expressed wishes of communities.

But should we see this as another pitched battle between the state and the individual? Others, such as Philippe Castaing from Brixton Green, made it clear that his local council was highly supportive of his community land trust plans.

Watch the short video interviews from today's community land trusts conference and see what you think. You can see them here, or there's one below:

Who's listening to the people?

After yesterday's paean to localism and citizen empowerment by Gordon Brown, today there's a chance to learn what it's like on the ground.

I'm chairing the national conference on community land trusts, which New Start magazine is staging in partnership with Community Finance Solutions at Salford University. After many years of slog, the first community land trusts in England are up and running and more than 150 homes have now been built. Not many, but every one of them speaks of the effort and aspiration of local people.

You'd have thought, given their aspirations, that ministers would be keen to support - and learn from - community land trusts. And, to be fair, there have been steps in that direction. But the current iteration of localism apparently doesn't go as far as enabling a minister, or even a civil servant, to make a five-minute trip from Whitehall to say a few encouraging words at a national event that showcases local action. Instead it's the opposition that's making the running.

Ministers have many calls on their time, and their average day probably isn't too far from the caricature portrayed by the TV series The Thick of It. So we can live with their absence from a conference. What's telling, though, is the contrast between their willingness to tour TV studios and attend stage-managed photo ops, and the reluctance to sit and listen to people who've put years of their life into creating solutions that meet local needs.

• There'll be more from the conference here later, and also at New Start magazine, and on Twitter (search for #clt09)

Mmm... apple pie

Let's, for a moment, resist the temptation to greet statements like Gordon Brown's pre-manifesto manifesto, Building Britain's Future, with world-weary cynicism.

'We know that bold reforms and the setting out of clear priorities - based on a new strategy for governing - are needed to restore people's trust in politics,' the PM said this afternoon.

Put aside, if you can, your doubts about whether the people who allowed the financial services bubble to inflate and MPs' expenses to go unchallenged are the right people to draft a new vision for the nation. It's easy to snipe.

What of the substance?

First, it's worth looking at the principles Gordon Brown says underpin his policy vision. These are

• A commitment to social justice and a fairer society;
• The belief that each of us has a responsibility to play by the rules and make a contribution to our communities;
• The recognition that we owe an obligation to protect the planet for future generations;
• The understanding that only national and local government and people acting together can solve the most difficult challenges facing our country, and make the most of the opportunities; and
• The certainty that the only guarantee of security, opportunity and prosperity is that the institutions of market and state are efficient and properly accountable.

You can unpick these to your heart's content, but all of them have something in common: they're well-meaning but unspecific. Social justice and fairness, for example, are comforting but nebulous concepts. And you wouldn't expect a prime minister (or any other authority figure) to suggest we don't have an obligation to play by the rules. And so on.

From these motherhood and apple pie principles flows a motherhood and apple pie state. Read Gordon Brown's foreword to Building Britain's Future and for all its talk of urgency and action, it's set in the same mould as most recent policy initiatives.

So, for example, despite the collapse of the banks (and, more significantly, the collapse of public trust in the banks) Brown assets that 'we have shown that social justice and economic competitiveness are not mutually incompatible, but two sides of the same coin.' Well, no, we haven't. We've rather hoped they were two sides of the same coin, but all the evidence is that the recession will hit the poorest hardest.

Here's another one: 'Our institutions must be rebuilt for the global age so that they are held to account by a set of values we can all share - based on a fair balance between duties and rewards, opportunities and obligations to the wider society in which we live.' What exactly does this mean, other than that it would be nice if we all agreed on the way forward? Rebuilt for whose benefit, and to what ends? The idea that we can achieve social and economic justice by avoiding the conflicts between different interests and the need to debate, challenge and choose, is poppycock, tosh and twaddle.

And again: 'Above all, we will fight hard to deliver world class public services that give those who contribute to our society a chance to get on. This will involve a radical dispersal of power: in the future, patients and parents must drive the system, with real rights of redress where entitlements are not delivered.' This is the individualist agenda I discussed in my previous post, and is little different from the kind of thinking that argues for education vouchers and health vouchers that parents and patients can use in either the private or the public schooling and healthcare systems.

And what's missing? Really strong, radical action and vision on climate change; any sense that lessons have been learned from the last ten years of economic and social policies, especially at neighbourhood level; and clarity on what exactly is meant by 'social justice' and how, if at all, it differs from the stalls being set out by other parties.

'Building Britain's Future is the start of a process to engage with people on the big issues facing our country today,' Gordon Brown says. After twelve years of government, he may have left it a touch late.

Lipservice and localism

If only the people were given power as often as headline writers used that old cliché about power to the people. Localism is back on the agenda with a vengeance, and politicians are once again competing to roll back the state.

Gordon Brown is set to 'abandon the target culture for public services championed by Tony Blair', according to the Guardian. Instead service quality will be upheld through a system of individual rights.

The 'power shift' dangled before us strongly echoes the 'control shift' pledged by the Conservatives. The narrative is easy to understand - central bad, local good. Put people in control of their own destiny. David Cameron reinforced the message last week when he promised: 'At the heart of our programme for government will be our intention to change fundamentally the balance of power between the citizen and the state so that ultimately it's people in control of their government, not the other way round.'

I'm all for local control and community empowerment (another over-used and devalued term, unfortunately). But we need a critique of localism that goes beyond the kind of soundbites that appeal to Daily Mail readers. We need a localism that encourages people to work together, rather than pitching the individual against the state rather like Tweedledum and Tweedledee.

Bad localism is the kind that used to be practised by a bunch of politicians who called themselves the Economists. They were the nineteenth-century equivalent of the TaxPayers' Alliance, and for several disastrous years in the 1850s they ran Birmingham.

Their leader was the newspaper proprietor Joseph Allday, who delighted in holding council meetings in a pub, the Woodman Tavern. Allday slashed spending on roads by half and one of his first actions was to dismiss the borough engineer. The people at the Mail, with their campaigns against wheelie bins, would love him.

We're likely to see a lot of that kind of localism as public spending is squeezed and politicians scramble to promise savings for council tax payers. To see its effects it's worth looking at some of the early actions of the new Mayor of Doncaster, Peter Davies, who as well as cutting his own salary and scrapping the council newspaper, also appears to have withdrawn from regional and sub-regional partnerships on the myopic grounds that anything that happens beyond the confines of the borough boundaries is a waste of money.

Then there's mediocre, muddled localism. It's full of mixed messages, and sadly this is what we're about to get from the government. Having retreated from the risky business of empowering and funding community organisations (see my post about the great empowerment heist, which is still valid), ministers are offering a hotchpotch of sops to individualism and extra freedom for local authorities.

But this is far from the confident municipal socialism as practised during the 1980s and 1990s, or the 'civic gospel' of nineteenth century Glasgow. It's a grudging, patronising approach that plays to the assumption that local government is synonymous with waste and bureaucracy.

The new secretary of state for communities and local government, John Denham, is a decent man with a background in public service. When he says he wants to 'defend and extend the role of local government', councils should be encouraged.

But what he offers with one hand he threatens to snatch away with the other. Consider his speech last week to the Chartered Institute of Public Finance and Accountancy. It was full of stuff about councils needing to make taxpayers' money 'work harder than ever', as if they didn't appreciate that already.

'The days when councils could claim to their residents that every problem could be answered by a cheque from Whitehall are over,' he said. So which days were those? I'd be interested to know the last time a local authority claimed that, either to its residents or central government. My guess is that it would be at least a decade ago.

You don't have to be a whizz at public finance to know spending is going to be tight, whichever party forms the next government. There are going to be arguments about who's cutting what, but whether we get Labour, Tory, or some other brand of localism, it will all be about trying to do more with less, because money that would have been available to improve local services has been used to bail out the banks.

Time will tell whether or not Gordon Brown's judgement on that was right. In the meantime, we need to rescue the debate from becoming a talking shop that offers a form of localism but denies it power.

Here are five pointers:

1 Subsidiarity. This is the principle that decisions should be made, and action taken, and the most local level that's consistent with effective decision-making. You don't have to be narrow-minded and parochial to believe in subsidiarity; rather, you have to be ready to trust people. There are some important discussions going on about urban parish councils as one way of doing this. There are debates to be had about how far to localise which decisions, but it should start from the premise that intelligent decision-making isn't the preserve of the few.

2 Conversation. Empowerment, localism, call it what you will - it's about discussion, not control. That entails a change of attitude from central government, who are apt to talk about local freedoms rather like a head teacher dispensing privileges to senior students. There is no special talent or merit associated with choosing to make your career in central rather than local government, so let's get shot of the forelock-tugging and cap-doffing on the one side, and the pontificating on the other.

3 Collective action. This isn't a case of 'all power to the soviets'. You don't have to be socialists to behave collectively. Womens' Institutes and churches and trade unions and amateur football clubs know what collective responsibility is. It's the understanding that teamwork is more effective than striving to achieve change as an individual. The trend towards a localism of individual rather than community rights is telling.

4 Organic change. In a world of public spending cuts and central government belt-tightening, local growth (whether economic or social) will depend much more on local resources. The most important of these resources is people, who need to develop the capacity and skills to forge their futures and feel ownership of them. People need to know that change is done by them, not to them. Otherwise it risks going horribly wrong.

5 Strategy. This is a long term business and should be decoupled from the ebb and flow of political fashion. The goal is involved, active citizens who can shape their own destiny. Don't run away from it the moment something goes wrong, or as soon as the newspapers haul out that old chestnut of a 'postcode lottery' whenever different areas come to different decisions about their spending priorities.

Get these five right, I'd suggest, and we might have a localism that springs out of the dusty corners of policy officers' filing cabinets and starts to generate a real sense of involvement among communities.

A walk on the mild side

There's an old German saying: Stadtluft macht frei. It translates as 'city air makes you free'. I read a fascinating piece in the Independent today about the suburb of Vauban, Freiburg, which has found a new twist to that axiom - by banning cars.

As the article makes clear, it isn't paradise (although some would think so). It probably has more in common with Ebenezer Howard's garden cities vision than the jostling pavement culture loved by Jane Jacobs.

What it shows, though, is that it's possible to plan for life without dependence on cars. If only our own proposed eco-towns were that ambitious.

Divided we fail

People who are familiar and confident with the internet learn more, earn more and socialise more. For those who don't have access or aren't confident, the results deepen the divide between rich and poor. This presentation by Helen Milner explains why.

Helen Milner Digital Inclusion The Evidence April 2009 National Digital Inclusion Conference London

View more OpenOffice presentations from Helen Milner.