The MyPolice fiasco suggests that speaking to the vision of a Big Society is more important now than ever before
It is
The Hugo Young lecture, November 2009, and David Cameron has quoted a gaggle of post-statist philosophers such as Nobelesse Elinor Ostrom, and indeed our very own Phillip Blond. He has called for a state that enables, galvanises, renews and helps people to become active change agents – no, not the stuff in high end washing powder – people who, together, create a 'Big Society.' Flash forward six months; he launches his proposals to create these neighbourhood groups, community entrepreneurs and active citizens in a community centre in Coin Street, near Waterloo. The Big Society is here.
So we are beyond Hobbes, squarely into the grand, one-nation Tory territory of civil society as the goal, the vision, the
telos of modern government. The state is the benign enabler, not the scary leviathan. This is a grand vision, and like all grand visions, it is hard to do. Because the state really can make a mess of civil society and this little cautionary tale shows how.
Witness The MyPolice Fiasco.
MyPolice was set up by two very modern innovators. So-called 'Service Designers' who do clever things with whiteboards and photographs and work out where the 'touchpoints' of a service are (my good friend
Ivo Gormley is another of these evanescent creatures) and so enable the provided-to to get more out of the whole public services thing than ever before. In fact their role can be even more than that. There does come a critical point where the more you are involved in the design of a public service, the more semantically difficult it becomes to class yourself as 'provided to' at all. You are the provider and you move from being a passive recipient in your community, to an active, innovative citizen. Innovation at its most inspiring.
Which is where the idea of setting up a website so you could evaluate and compare and converse with local police forces comes in. Geeky? Slightly. Potentially transformative? Definitely. This is the neighbourhood beat meeting of NYPD legend Bill Bratton hyper-democratised and arrowed into cyberspace.
And this is what they called MyPolice. From their site:
"MyPolice helps communities identify weaknesses and opportunities in Police services. In providing analysis and data for the Police to act on, MyPolice challenges policy decisions that are made and ensuring that service users have an active part in changing the Police for the better."
This was nearly a year ago. Two weeks ago, HMIC (Her Majesty's Inspectorate of Constabulary, the body which assesses police performance) announced that it was to launch a site that would enable people to comment upon its data. They were to call it: My Police.
The email trail that has gone back and forth around this is fast becoming the stuff of geek legend. The nub of the matter is that MyPolice, who owned the domain name mypolice.org, were contacted by HMIC who bought up domains around the MyPolice name - including mypolice.org.uk – not to collaborate but simply to inform that this development was taking place. Thinking back to my law school days, there may or may not be a legal claim in Intellectual Property ('passing off'). Why anyway didn't they use a different name, like OurPolice, or BetterPolice, or OurBobbyontheBeat-dot-com? It all feels like pretty shabby behaviour.
As Lauren Currie, director of the 'real' MyPolice said,
It is extremely unprofessional to view all our channels and move forward with the name mypolice.
Her co-director Sarah Drummond is speaking to a National Policing body today and she would be within her rights to be apoplectic. This, after all, is beyond idiocy. A small, social start up finds that its biggest competitor is the state it is trying to help. Not only that but the state attempts to crowd out its competitor by using the very same domain name. She would be entitled to ask: whose side are they on?
This is the biggest challenge to the Big Society and the Big Question for the Big Society is: what can the Conservatives do to change that which has seen Governments of all stripes in the past fail when it comes to procuring an enduring new relationship between civil society and the state; a relationship in which the latter doesn't always invariably bully, cajole and win. And how do they do it?
Two big changes are needed - and it will be interesting to see how far the Big Society proposals incorporate obeisances to these changes. The first change is philosophical. The Big Society must not simply a technical or technocratic construct. It must be a philosophical one. Witness. I was at an event yesterday which saw the formidable Polly Toynbee speaking against Phillip. One of her many arguments was that the state was the highest expression of our common endeavour. It doesn't stifle our effort; it is our effort. It is the welcome sign of civilisation. Nurturing the state, financially and with our affection, is the duty of a civilised populace. Cart before horse. The state should rather be the enabler of a number of different relationships. At the critical moment where the state can either 'perfect' itself or allow a small business to flourish, the philosophy that we know as one-nationism, distributism or red toryism suggests that the latter is the correct philosophical outcome. For the latter is the end: spread endeavour, ownership; assets and innovation. In this case, a technological innovation that leaches accountability and insight outwards. That's your philosophy.
The second change is implementation. Last week, I wrote about
a proposal to reform the way Government works by centralising the way it buys things. Not only was this an ill-constructed idea, as it offered no distinction between supportive goods and service goods, it was pernicious because centralisation would completely bar the opportunity for developments like MyPolice to turn service users into service designers and enable (there is that word again) people to become communities. As things become more centralised, they become more wrapped up in bureaucracy and red tape. This would be the managerialism of the market stifling the potential of the state to help small business, creative communities, civil society. And for what? For a cash saving? Think about it, leaving the space clear for a MyPolice would allow us to save money. Why, for example, instead of building a whole new platform, did HMIC not simply
transfer data to the
data.gov.uk central site for Government data? This was the distinction then emphasised between 'fordist' savings and 'innovation-driven' savings. It's an important one.
If successive Governments' attempts to create active communities and an enabling state have been condemned to the withered vine, perhaps it was because politicians, terrified by a ballooning state, were too fordist and centralised in their approach; perhaps also because they failed to address the real nuts-and-bolts issues of civic philosophy (glossed over by the civil service) and localised implementation (glossed over by the politicos) – and so failed to radically alter the way the tenets of state and market ideology are applied to the political and entrepreneurial space (incidentally, this is a good place to plug a project ResPublica are doing on social start ups that we will release in the next few weeks – watch this space). Fail to change this, and you won't get your enabling state/stakeholding society/big society with active change agents and community groups at all.
All of that Hobbesian jazz is hardly peculiar to ResPublica's work, or to Phillip's book, 'Red Tory,' which we launched on Monday. It is almost a cliché to say that, among a certain political constituency, a large, unwieldy state can cripple individual and community enterprise and endeavour. Belloc, Blond, Thatcher. We knew we'd get them to agree on something. Add to them the man on the Clapham Omnibus, all right-thinking people generally and it is unlikely that you will find many supporters for HMIC's rank idiocy in this case. Change the terms; take advantage of the radical moment proferred by
social innovation and civil society and the
Big Society becomes a reality. Fellow proselytisers of this cause would do well to take note.