The wind vane on Brin Croft

James, Isobel’s son-in-law, roofer, got astride the ridge of Brin Croft and tugged at the iron wind-vane, already loose in its bracket, until it pulled free. He lowered it to me on a washing line.
“Do you want the bracket as well?”
We’d tried – Colin, with a good socket wrench, and I with a mole grip – to loosen the bolts on the bracket; treated them several times and weeks ago with WD40.
“No, just leave it, James. Those bolts are too well rusted”
“It’d come off with an angle grinder”
“Too many sparks next a wooden house”
I’d thought of a blow lamp. Hot and cold, Hot and cold; brought one up from Birmingham.
“No way!” Lin had said
“So take a photo of the bracket with lens on zoom. I’ll have another made.”
We wondered where to put it; this vane with the sheet metal initials E, W, N, S on the fixed plane and above it, to turn with the wind, a Jack Russell called Sukie and a whippet called Jenny – dogs we had as children when a Newbury smithy made this up for the roof at Bagnor.
“Where shall we put it up again? In Handsworth, in Lydbrook, in Greece?”
“Where?”
“How about a bracketed metal pole that reaches 8 feet above the seaward balcony to mark, where we can see it easily, the changing winds that blow across the village.”
“Can you get a wind vane all that way? How do you pack it?”
Clearing Brin Croft. Lin’s already done a good job, staying up most of Thursday night wrapping and boxing and packing, protecting the sharp edges of the vane with envelopes of cardboard; doing the same with a pair of antlers for removal by Dunne's to Birmingham, but all the way to far Greece and fair Corfu, up the Sidari road turn left to Ano Korakiana a mile beyond Doctor’s Bridge, wind down past the chickens and guinea fowl on the left and the goat-sheep grazings on the right, then up the hill to Democracy Street where other drivers will civilly wait in the narrow space between houses while our van’s unloaded.
“With the chests of drawers too - drawers full of other useful stuff”
This disassembly and dispersion is another part of the ritual of mourning and remembrance. It’s perhaps why after a death, offence can seem so trivially taken among survivors who surprise even themselves, not, as often surmised, through cupidity or covetousness, but through differences over something sacramental, umbrage over observance; matters of faith; worse - theology. Isn’t religious strife the most obdurate cause of war? Mum’s chattels become her diaspora – though some are made anonymous by sale and auction, memorialised in ordinary use by friends and relatives. The market doesn’t figure. It’s their association. Lin has packed a semi-opaque plastic tooth mug that Amy remembered “when I was brushing my teeth at Mains”.
Other things formally priced for probate have gone to auction at Dingwall – two full vanloads - and Roger from Auldearn Antiques packed his blue transit with things he values more than any of us.

One aside in chat with Roger...he'd advertised some prints on ebay, and been refused permission to show Da Vinci's Virgin and Child because of concerns not to depict infants unclothed. Hm? Context?

Lin with Roger Milton

Two most pleasant blokes – one of them older than me, drove up from Scarborough in a yellow transit – and filled it with mum’s disability gear...

Dave and Colin 

...paying just over a thousand pounds for things that cost mum new nearer ten thousand. It had taken Lin weeks on Gumtree to find anyone prepared to pay anything for these – a mobility scooter, mechanical bed, mechanical riser and recliner with remote control, a lightweight folding wheel chair, all terrain walker, ordinary walkers, a commode, a bath lift, a Pilates leg exerciser, numerous gadgets for twisting and lifting. Isobel at Inverarnie Stores has pointed customers up to the house, one to buy a freezer – the driver of the Strathnairn bus for the elderly who had a ready lift to keep the machine upright.

Oliver, Amy, John and Guy loading mum's freezer on the Strathnairn Community bus

Others have come and bought from the inventory. No large objects remain. Lin and I eat on a couple of old garden chairs and an ugly little MDF table rejected at auction. We sleep comfortably on a remaining mattress.

Two friends - nurses - one with a talent for cartoons and caricatures, stayed at the cottage attached to Mains of Failie in the late 1970s, when the wind vane I've removed from Brin Croft, stood on the roof of mum and Angus' shippen, a victim of mischievous spaniels.

Grazings behind Brin Croft

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Richard Pine sent out a link to his latest Letter from Greece - from Corfu - published in The Irish Times, Monday 15 July

Antonis Samaras

In a recent opinion column (‘Greece in crisis needs a public broadcaster’) I made the mistake of saying that ERT, the Greek public service broadcaster equivalent to RTÉ, which had been shut down by the government, was back on the air. I wrote this in good faith. Faith that the Greek supreme court, which had ordered the reinstatement of ERT, would be obeyed by the prime minister, Antonis Samaras. However, I had not allowed for the fact that Samaras had engineered the closure of ERT for many reasons, one of which was to test the water of what he could or could not do in respect of closing or radically changing a number of public bodies, for which ERT has provided the test case. Ordered by the supreme court to reopen the broadcaster, pending a review of its activities and a likely reduction in both its staff numbers and its budget, Samaras has chosen to behave as if there had been no such order, just as he has proceeded with the suspension of ERT as if he had a single-party government, rather than a fragile coalition. Not only this, which has dismayed the Greeks, who are hard to impress these days with arrogance of this magnitude, but Samaras has also defied international opinion.....(continued)

From the Ano Korakiana website:

Για την ΕΡT26.07.13 Θέλω μόνο να υπενθυμίσω ότι η ΕΡΤ είναι ακόμα εκεί και λειτουργεί.Εκπέμπει 24ωρο τηλεοπτικό πρόγραμμα, μέρος του οποίου ζωντανά, μέσω του European Broadcasting Union.Επίσης εκπέμπει 24ωρο ραδιοφωνικό πρόγραμμα που στην Αθήνα λαμβάνει κανείς στα μεσαία κύματα (ΑΜ), στα 729 μέτρα. Με δελτία ειδήσεων ανά ώρα και το αγαπημένο ιστορικό σήμα της Ελληνικής ραδιοφωνίας (τσοπανάκος)!Θα πρέπει λογικά να ακούγεται από αναμεταδότες και στην υπόλοιπη Ελλάδα. Ακόμη όλα αυτά μεταδίδονται και από το Internet.Οι εργαζόμενοι της ΕΡΤ είναι πραγματικά αξιοθαύμαστοι που σχεδόν 2 μήνες μετά το "μαύρο" και παρά τα προβλήματα επιβίωσης που αντιμετωπίζουν πολλοί από αυτούς, καταφέρνουν να διατηρούν ένα υψηλού επιπέδου ραδιοτηλεοπτικό πρόγραμμα. Το μόνο που χρειάζονται είναι μία συμπαράσταση. Στον κήπο του ραδιομεγάρου στην Αγία Παρασκευή (από όπου και η φωτογραφία) συμβαίνουν καθημερινά πολύ ενδιαφέροντα πράγματα, όπως καλλιτεχνικές εκδηλώσεις και συζητήσεις. Πολλά από αυτά μεταδίδονται ζωντανά. Κάνοντας κανείς μία βόλτα και περνώντας ευχάριστα λίγη ώρα εκεί, εκδηλώνει ταυτόχρονα και έμπρακτα την τόσο πολύτιμη συμπαράσταση. Για να μη σιγήσει για πάντα η φωνή της Ελλάδας. Για να μην χαθεί για πάντα από τον αέρα το σήμα που όλοι έχουμε στ' αυτιά μας από τότε που γεννηθήκαμε. Για να σωθεί η μοναδική νησίδα πολιτισμού και ιστορίας στα ερτζιανά. Για να μην γίνουν τα σκύβαλα των ιδιωτικών καναλιών ο απόλυτος κυρίαρχος του ραδιοτηλεοπτικού τοπίου. Γιώργος Σαββανής

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From Jan D: 

...Something to ponder. You know I have been 'predicting' that LAs are heading for insolvency. £14.4 billion in the red. Add to that anything between £30-50 billion shortfall in NHS by 2021. I think it is time to take stock. Today Detroit City in USA have filed for bankruptcy. This was the centre of the American Motor industry in the richest country on earth. If it can happen there it can happen anywhere. Time for LAs to wake up and smell the coffee. Sadly they are far from doing this. This was a comment made by observers of the recent LGA conference re local councils: 'The magnitude of the cuts themselves provoked very little reaction and local government was very much business as usual – which is sadly why it will always be burden with such a large share of the responsibility to reduce public spending' - LGC 11 July. Hoisted by their own competence and compliance on the flagpole of political naivety and ostrich attitudes. This was after being harangued by Pickles to the effect that there was not a hope in hell’s chance that the recommendations in in the LGA Rewiring Public Services report would be accepted. He called LAs 'Luddites' creating 'Groundhog Days'. I need a holiday! Enjoy the summer. See you in the autumn.

...the present model of a highly centralised state “will not see us through for very much longer”...'

'...the shadows they make real...'

Crumbs from a year's conversation with Jan D:

...There is a tendency to respond to problems by adopting legal or bureaucratic means (sometimes these are necessary) rather than solving the underlying real causes which in most cases are cultural and behavioural.  These are more difficult to deal with and do not  easily fit into a climate of Quick Fix and Sound Bites peppered with blame games and finger pointing (very different to true accountability). I can't remember last time I heard the phrase ‘Big Society’. It has disappeared from the political narrative I fail to see how (or understand ) the reduction of the public sector or the rolling back of the state will promote the Big Society. I think the government don't understand it either or can find any credible narrative for it, hence it has been allowed to fade away. It is more likely that the vacuum will be filled by economic interests and/or ‘intelligent’ criminals....

...I have mentioned before the need to recalibrate the relationship between LAs and government and for LAs to have their own 'narrative' for this. Whilst this remain important, I am coming more and more to the conclusion that it is the relationship between LAs, their population and local community, which requires more attention and recalibration. The traditional models are becoming increasingly irrelevant; no longer fit for purpose. The old saying that “all politics are local” remains true, but a narrative (and practice) based on delegated democracy, selective engagement and top-down consultations is not going to promote Localism...more likely it will be used to drive the current policy objectives. Perhaps the time has come to  phase out this narrative or reconstruct it within an overall narrative of 'mobilisation and support'; for LAs to make this focus a priority because if (when) successful this would impact significantly on the LA-government relationship, simply because the political foundations of LAs would strengthen. No government could ignore that for long. This will take courage and persistence. The starting point is to ditch the parent-child relationship of local to centre; 'cleanse' local government of its Stockholm syndrome with Whitehall...a tall order; to get  hundreds of LAs to 'sign up' is near impossible, but what is the alternative? What I find frustrating is that no such narrative, backed up by analysis, leading to  a Localism Agenda has even started to emerge. This may be unfair but it seems that the mind-set is stuck in the past and past methods are being rolled out to deal with the new agenda when in reality something very different is called for...

...So you and I are in tune on the matter of narrative – the need for one that can get some grip on the reality of our current circumstances. To borrow from Lord Grey “plots are being lost all over Europe” - probably beyond – and we may not see them recovered in our lifetime. The many headed public is gathering snake-oil narratives with enthusiasm inventing the facts to make them work, as we can all do so well. ‘Intelligent criminals’, mountebanks, hucksters, profiteers (especially) and populists are enjoying the confusion, fashioning common-sense interpretations of what’s going on from rumour, speculations, distortion and amplification – the common vice of gossip. The shadows they make real include a profusion of lurking invasive ‘others’; proliferating foreigners, a continent of bureaucrats, a mass of work shy benefit thieves, neighbourhood fanatics plotting destruction, malign and invisible forces conspiring to contaminate and destroy what matters to decent folk. Best wishes, Simon...

...I am trying to weave this into the dialogue we have had so far. I am trying to create a framework which can accommodate these trends and hook the other points we have made on to it but I am struggling a bit. When are you back. I am happy to make the trip down to Birmingham. Could do with chewing these things over with you. Best Jan... 

Meeting Jan D

From Jan D on 2 July:

Simon. At long last the Local Government Association (LGA) has come up with something worthwhile - see attachment, news of the speech at the LGA Conference by its Leader Sir Merrick Cockell.

What they now need to do is to work this into a strategy for making it happen. Governments do not give up power easily nor do their civil servants! I don’t think that any of the main parties are really serious about devolution beyond paying lip service to it. More delegated responsibilities do not necessarily mean more devolved powers. Rather the reverse. The key to this is to come up with a radically different taxation system and much legislative powers at local level; but the real challenge is how to wrestle power away from Whitehall. Cunning and stealth are key factors. I think this report plus the recent LGIU report - Connected Localism - offer a way forward. Should not INLOGOV start to do some work on this?* Perhaps you and I should join the affray! It would really invigorate me. Best Jan

LGA calls for devolution to 'local treasuries'2 July, 2013 by Mark Smulian

The LGA has proposed a radical devolution of public services and financial power to localities in a bid to lead debate for the scheduled 2015 general election. It said that handing responsibility for all public services and resources to ‘local treasuries’ in elected authorities would foster faster economic growth while offering a solution to over-centralisation in England. Public services could be transformed through local leadership “rebuilding democratic participation, fixing public services and revitalising the economy,” LGA chairman Sir Merrick Cockell (Con) said.
With ideas to appeal to national politicians in all main parties, the LGA’s Rewiring Public Services report said the present model of a highly centralised state “will not see us through for very much longer”. Devolution and local financial autonomy would reinvigorate democracy with local politicians taking responsibility for tax and service standards, so voters would no longer hold national ministers responsible. Local services decisions would be “together in one place, for each place,” with resources fixed by national government but shared out by English local government collectively, not ministers. This would help answer the ‘English Question’, where voters have been angered that devolution has lagged behind Scotland and Wales, the LGA argued. Voter engagement with local politics would increase because the public would see direct consequences from voting, taxation and service standards if an elected ‘local treasury’ were visibly responsible for these.
Sir Merrick (Conservative) said politicians in all three parties were sympathetic to these ideas.
“It certainly seems to chime with some of the things being said by people in different parties,” he said "Things cannot stay as they are now. We are looking for the three main parties to adopt these ideas in their manifestos and then one would expect any party to deliver on that.”
Sir Merrick said the coalition had supported pooling and devolution of local public service resources to a limited extent, “but logically if you believe in community budgets and city deals the consequence is that you need structural change and things cannot stay the same”.
The paper stressed the need for single places to control public services and resources but did not explicitly say what should happen in two-tier areas.
“A local treasury could be based on a city or large town but also on a county – not necessarily a county council – with all partners including districts coming together and looking to the long term rather than current structures,” he said.
“Seeing a further cut of 10% we will have to think hard about the viability of councils to operate in the way they have been”
The LGA has also sought to appeal to the political parties by offering a route to faster economic growth. Localities could alter business rates and local tourist or sales taxes – to support their economies and target investment “in projects that will unlock growth potential and improve productivity,” the report said
This would end the “top-down bidding culture and refocus decision-making decisively on local employer-led priorities; enabling the public sector to provide a better tailored service to local businesses”.
Sir Merrick said that despite the paper’s concerns about local political apathy, the LGA did not look at changes to the voting system.
“I don’t think first- past-the-post is the problem in causing the stagnation, it is that people want to feel that their vote matters because it will have consequences in local taxation and services,” he said.
Were this to happen, the role of councillors would change substantially as they would be responsible for all public services not just those of one council, Sir Merrick said.
The paper also suggests that a large though unspecific number of council leaders should sit in the House of Lords and raises the possibility of MPs being involved in local treasuries, possibly as formal consultees.
The LGA’s plan for devolution of public services and the accompanying money to localities is based around six propositions it claims would revive local democracy, transform service standards and boost economic growth.

Independent local government - This would see each ‘place’ act as a local treasury. The departments of communities and local government, transport, environment, energy, culture and parts of the Home office would be combined in an England Office to discourage the silo culture in Whitehall when it engages with localities. England’s share of UK resources would be based on need, not the Barnett formula and be shared out by local authorities collectively. This settlement would have formal constitutional protection to put it “beyond future Whitehall revision”.
Growth - Local treasuries would budget for growth and be able to impose local taxes and vary business rates. There would be local leadership of skills and jobs initiatives.
Adult social care and health - Local commissioners would direct resources through place-based public service budgets where they have the greatest impact on the health and wellbeing, with savings in acute services from more effective prevention and re-ablement reinvested in the local community.
Children - Councils would have the flexibility to redesign services around individual and family needs, bringing services and decisions together in education and children’ social care, so allowing greater investment in early intervention.
Financial sustainability - Local government would become self-funded through council tax, business rates and other taxes, all under local control with the right to set new local taxes and fees which fully recover costs.
Borrowing would be freed from Treasury restrictions scene it must already meet prudential rules. There would be a local government bond agency and the right to develop earnback deals to reinvest the proceeds of growth.
Transforming local government - The time is right to transform local government, the LGA argued, because it is more trusted than national government. It cited Ipsos MORI polling shows that 79% of people trust councils to make decisions about local services, while only 11% similarly trust central government. LGA research showed 70% of residents think councils do a good job and it said the sector was “in a strong and credible position to develop a workable model for the delivery of local public services”.

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*INLOGOV's new book: 'Making sense of the future: do we need a new model of public services?'

Chapter 1 - Catherine Staite: Why do we need a new model of public services? 

Public services, including those commissioned and delivered by local government, have changed substantially in the past ten years. There have been changes in service delivery mechanisms, in relationships between users and services, in organisational structures and in partnership arrangements. It appears likely that the next ten years will bring at least as much change, if not more. INLOGOV is developing a new model of public services, in partnership with public service leaders, as a way of drawing together many of the themes in current debates about the ways in which the public sector will have to change. In particular, we are looking at how public services can manage demand, build capacity and strengthen mutual understanding, through the development of stronger relationships with communities as well as through co-production and behaviour change. The purpose of this model is to provide a framework to support public service leaders – both political and managerial – to make better sense of a complex world and find workable solutions to previously intractable problems.

Chapter 2 Lawrence Pietroni: The relational revolution. 

Why do we need a relational revolution? The challenge of enabling genuinely relational services is not new, but it is growing and becoming more urgent. It is a simple fact of demography that personal social care is going to become an even greater part of public service and (for the foreseeable future at least) a political reality that the financial resources available to support it are going to be even fewer. Working out how to meet the needs of vulnerable older people with humanity is one of the most pressing issues facing local public services. The relational challenge, however, goes much further.

Chapter 3 Beyond Nudge: Beyond 'nudge'. 

A three-fold change to the design and delivery of public services has been taking place over the past decade. Expectations of user choice or personalisation, emergent localism and most particularly the implications of cuts in public spending, increase tensions within the public service framework. One key factor underpins all of them: they require fundamental change in the expectations of individuals, communities and service providers if best use is to be made of ever diminishing resources and whilst securing public well-being. Many experts have said that the critical public service challenge of the decade is to encourage behaviour that benefits both the individual and the state, whilst preventing long term expense. They want to discourage behaviour which creates user dependency and attracts further costs. Behaviour change is vitally important, they say, because we can no longer provide the services we have always done, in the way we have always provided them. Various approaches to altering the behaviour of citizens have been outlined in a growing body of evidence including Nudge (Thaler and Sustein) ‘Think’ (John et al) and MINDSPACE (Dolan et al). However, in this chapter we set out our belief that behaviour change is a necessary but not a sufficient response to the challenges facing public services, because it focuses too heavily on individuals and not on the system as a whole. There is too much reliance on service users choosing to do something different when actually the need is for the individual and the community to think differently. We believe that this requires an attitudinal or cultural change and not simply behavioural change. INLOGOV’s new model for public services provides a useful distinction between individual co-production, community co-production and self-help activities (see Chapter 4) which this chapter will draw upon.

Chapter 4 Bovaird and Loeffler: We’re all in this together: harnessing user and community co-production of public outcomes.

 Co-production is big – it is rapidly becoming one of the most talked-about themes in public services internationally (Bovaird, 2007; Alford, 2009) and in the UK (nef, 2008; Loeffler, 2009; Department of Health, 2010).In this chapter, we set out what co-production is, why it matters and its implications for public services, as part of the INLOGOV model. We argue that the movement towards co-production can be conceptualized as a shift from ‘public services for the public’ towards ‘public services by the public’, within the framework of a public sector which continues to represent the public interest, not simply the interests of ‘consumers’ of public services.

Chapter 5 Bovaird and Quirke: Risk and Resilience. 

In this paper we suggest that the conceptualisation of risk depends on the character of uncertainty in which public service organisations operate and the content of the knowledge domain in which they make decisions. Very different approaches to risk management are appropriate to different parts of public organisations, depending on their specific cultures and the issues being handled.Risk management needs to focus more on those risks to the actual outcomes experienced by service users, communities and citizens generally; and less on the institutional risks to the organisations themselves and the people within them. A key element of future strategies must be to embed resilience within service users, communities, service providers and service systems. We propose an approach to managing risk and resilience which is based on an integrated risk enablement strategy.

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*** *** I pottered in our garden on Sunday, still reluctant to face our allotment.

A mown space amid profuse greenery, close cut grass now and then drizzled with petals, and a damp brick path to the shaded compost barrel, the pond water clean and clear protected by weed from too much sun; water lilies crowding the rushes. Early this morning, barefoot on our balcony, it occurred to me how long it's taken to get this semi-balance of neatness and mess, chaos and order, weeds and flowers, that we enjoy, debate and bicker over. The garden's husbandry is just within our skills and inclinations. In the case of oir allotment, can this wabi-sabi process be speeded up? Could some accumulation of gardening wisdom help bring me sooner to a similar relationship with 200 square metres of vegetable growing space barely a quarter mile away?

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Karen Leach of Localise West Midlands, who I knew from shared membership of Birmingham Friends of the Earth wrote a few days back of a localised approach to supply chains, money flow, ownership and decision-making...

When we saw the “new ideas in economics” strand of the Barrow Cadbury Trust’s Poverty and Inclusion programme [now the Resources and Resilience programme], we were surprised, and pleased. It’s long been an ironic state of affairs that charitable trusts have shown limited interest in exploring the systems by which we organise our livelihoods that cause the social problems the trusts exist to solve.
To us, it was an opportunity to research the assumption at the heart of Localise West Midlands’ mission: that in a more localised economy, more people have a stake, which redistributes economic power and resilience, reducing disconnection and inequality. Not, perhaps, a ‘new’ idea, when you consider 1960s Schumacher – but newly in need of exploration in the face of growing inequality and economic failure.
The chasm between charity and economic development thinking is mutual. There are plentiful ideas around what we have been calling community economic development: social inclusion as CSR, community-led job creation, co-ops and social enterprises, local procurement initiatives. To many economic development practitioners these are very nice projects that go into a little box labelled “voluntary sector” and have little to do with the real economy, which is about big sites, tax breaks for multinational corporations – “prostituting ourselves for inward investment” as the Centre for Local Economic Strategies‘ Neil McInroy colourfully puts it.
Our project, Mainstreaming Community Economic Development, is an attempt to take localised economies out of this little box. Firstly, to see the social potential not only of voluntary sector initiatives with social objectives, but also of private sector activity that is locally controlled and based, where the community’s participation is as owners, investors, purchasers and networkers.
And secondly to challenge what is given economic priority. Given the benefits of localised approaches, shouldn’t we try to integrate them better into our economic interventions? Shouldn’t they get a fair crack at subsidies and support structures? Shouldn’t we use cost benefit analysis to see which types of activity most maximise the returns to the local area and to those in disadvantage? It doesn’t fit into a little box, it’s just a consideration in all good decisions.
In its first stage, a review of the literature evidence for the benefits of localised economies, we found good evidence that local economies with higher levels of SMEs and local ownership perform better in terms of employment growth (especially disadvantaged and peripheral areas), social inclusion, income redistribution, health, civic engagement and wellbeing.
Such economies also support local distinctiveness and diversity, which we see as positives because of their contribution to economic resilience, economic options to suit a diversity of people, sense of place and belonging, area quality, added interest and richness of experience.
We found that a local economy largely controlled by ‘absentee landlords’ – distant private and public sector controllers with little understanding of the local area – is a recipe for economic failure. Locally-inappropriate decisions and ‘footloose’ businesses leaving the area for better economic conditions seem to combine to weaken local businesses and create a self-reinforcing cycle of decline and exclusion.
Many of our private sector case studies showed local commitment. From Birmingham Wholesale Markets to renewable energy consultancies, they demonstrated ‘enlightened self-interest’ in understanding their interdependency with local communities. Their role in an inclusive economy can’t be underestimated. If only their voices were louder than those of absentee landlords in today’s ‘pro business’, London-centric political environment.
Informed by this and our case studies we set out proposals for a strategic approach centred on local supply and demand chains, participation and control. Taken strategically, every regeneration project, every economic development decision, every spatial plan, would be based on maximising benefit to and ownership by local people, and particularly its excluded communities.
While much can be done locally, to enable CED to scale up requires national change to decentralise economic and governmental power and make changes around policy, support services, subsidies, tax, banking, infrastructure and measures of success, creating a level playing field for indigenous economic activity.
Politically, it’s helpful that localisation approaches are inherently pro-business, but also respond to public concerns over the concentrations of wealth and power that created the 2008 Crash. As we take it forward, civil society interest, international examples like Mondragon and careful use of language may help this agenda to stay out of that little box long enough to contribute towards a better economy.

Neoliberalism As Water Balloon from Tim McCaskell on Vimeo.
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Jan. I’ve done this blog page on the latest LGA narrative, which meshes with others (including I hope Inlogov’s)...Let’s get together soon in York after I’ve refined the critical incidents we worked on and see how it can help evolve the political-management-professional spaces model. I like the film at the end that I’ve embedded on how neo-liberalism works. Best S 

Simon. I like this. Good that we have joined the fray. I ‘m  reading all the reports and documents at the moment incl those by INLOGOV. It’s good to see that some new ideas are now emerging. Without sounding too critical and acknowledging they are much better than anything I have read for a long time, there are still crucial elements missing in these publications, e.g. 'new feudalism', managing the 'vacuum', the 'intelligent criminal', inequality, strategy for managing a change in the central-local relationship i.e. how to manage a change in the power relationship and conduct the 'power struggle' this entails. All of these and related elements are necessary. These have profound implications for the political-managerial arena and what is required of the people who inhabit it. The first step is to work out how to get LAs and their partners to run with these. The LGA report may be a good start. Two perspectives need to come together. The Inside of the Box needs to meet The Outside of the Box...we could organise something for late summer/early autumn? Best Jan

I entered the home of a woman...

From: Iason Athanasiadis Date: Fri, 19 Dec 2008 13:58:27 +0330 To: Simon Baddeley Subject: The tragedy of Greek apathy Dear Simon. In the end, I gave the piece to Guardian Comment and, as you can see, it's attracting a fairly lively debate! Thanks so much for the fascinating insight and historical background I couldn't hope to be able to provide on my own. Looking forward to hearing your comments. Warmly, Iason Guardian.co.uk 18/12/08: Moving back to Athens in 2003, I found a society living in denial. Greeks were skimming the cream off the last rounds of EU subsidies oblivious to the tidal wave of globalisation looming over them. I had been living in Qatar, the very definition of a globalised city-state. The return home was a welcome respite from the Arab peninsula's identikit steel-and-glass cities, where city centres had been abolished in favour of income-appropriate super-malls and the pursuit of business was supreme. On my first night in Athens, I sat in a leafy square and watched young couples enjoy ouzo and mezze as children played under the lemon trees. Some of those same children may have been torching the municipality's Christmas tree last week or chucking petrol bombs at its parliament. Greece's student intifada erupted over the shooting by a policeman of a 15-year-old student, but the anger and lasting power of the riots imply a deeper malaise. The violence and nihilism with which banks, government buildings and private cars were burned down wrong-footed the older generation. But after the smoke cleared, there was a self-conscious pause as both sides waited for lucid demands to be made. "Who if anyone is emerging?" asked Simon Baddeley, an honorary lecturer at Birmingham University's School of Government and Society in the UK, who offers coverage of the crisis through his Democracy Street blog. "The ideological stuff I've heard so far seems juvenile. Any new ideas would have surely to come linked to a set of workable economic and social ideas that don't look like the ones I'm hearing,"....

Dear Iason. You quote me correctly. My thoughts were shared with a Greek citizen I admire, about a land that has furnished my life. Omit that and my interrogatives make me sound like yet another keyboard colonel aching for tanks on the streets - something that anyone but a dunce can see is not going to happen. Indeed your piece in the Toronto Star, on 16 December, quotes columnist Alexandros Papahellas writing that 'Our problem today is not whether tanks might roll in the streets, but that even if they did they would likely collide into each other.' I'm very grateful for your thoughts, for the comments it's encouraged, and especially for MilesSmiles' reflections on a 'Western condition' - reminding me that this crisis in Greece is only momentarily Greek:

We now have pretty good reason to think that neoliberal capitalist democracy is a failed ideology, incapable of dealing with the real problems societies face. Part of the problem is that neoliberalism is a bit like Ingsoc – an ideology that is paradoxically set up to destroy the possibility of ideology. Neoliberalism atomizes social discourse so that talk of a common good becomes almost incomprehensible, since nobody is supposed to criticize anyone else's values and all that rubbish.

I hope to be saying I was wrong to comment on lack of leadership in Greece, because I was unable to recognise original thought - because I'm locked, with the rest of us (including most of the rioters, with their multilingual posters), into looking at the present in the mirror of history. It's an old forgivable error. The future may be being worked on in a beer cellar; inhabiting some 'rough beast'; a sapling indistinguishable from surrounding annuals. What may be unfold may be good and bad and will have been developing in ways that are initially parasitic, sucking meaning and agency from familiar events and institutions. I'm more puzzled about what is happening than I ought to be. I am also rather excited and optimistic. I do not feel apathetic - a Greek invention describing stoic withdrawal from the affairs of the world - and I do not think what is happening will lead to the inevitable disaster that is the essence of that misused term tragedy. I wait on the moment, embracing conversation.

* * * * This situation posted to YouTube on 16 December has had nearly 57000 hits - the banner held up so awkwardly - well, a bit 'shuffly' after a while - invites viewers to stop watching television and go on the streets. The rather longer statement by the manager of the TV station deploring the invasion - not, he insists, a 'take-over' - has had less than a 1000 hits so far - not least I suspect because he's less aware that for those for and against a cause, situationism is, outside the psychotic obscenities of Mumbai, the only game in town. Even Dubya had the wit to make a point about the size of the shoe thrown at him by a Iraqi TV journalist last Sunday. I'm reading of Robert Shoemaker on The London Mob and George Rudé on The Crowd in History.[Ref: Adam Shatz in London Review] And this piece posted 17 December by Andrew Lamm plus the conversation/comments that follow illuminates changing perspectives in the hall of mirrors within which news is created

Editor’s Note: While nearly 500 journalists and media developers met in a five-star hotel in Athens to discuss the state of the media, the city smoldered from riots organized by young people using new forms of communication. [Reminder:"Karamanlis or tanks" - the choice that Konstantinos Karamanlis, uncle of the present PM, posed to Greeks in 1974]

* * * On Thursday I took the ferry from Portsmouth Harbour Station across the estuary to Gosport - about 8 minutes - to run a workshop on Questioning, passing through London via Waterloo Bridge, dropping off for an hour with Richard Wiltshire, co-author with Deborah Burn, of Growing in the Community, published by the Local Government Association with a foreward by Baroness Andrews - "Everyone benefits from allotments and we are conscious that there is rising demand..." This is the first time government has gone beyond saying allotments are good and acknowledged that more people want them. Richard gave me an overview of his current reading of the prospects for allotments and food growing in cities which I'll summarise shortly. I wasn't home until just after one on Friday morning but was immersed in reading Obama's memoir Dreams from my Father. I watch this man with such hope and interest as he assembles his cabinet. It was fascinating to follow his mind at work, parsing his growing up and emerging identity, as the offspring of black and white - the relief of encountering a mind that can struggle with and navigate dilemmas and contradictions is almost palpable. I see my face in the window of the train, hurrying through the dark, smiling at his prose. * * * *

A political-management disconnect

Councillor Margaret Eaton (video ~ October 2008), Chair of the Local Government Association and Paul Coen, its Chief Executive who, on 12 December, via the LGA website, wrote:

Since September it has become increasingly difficult to have confidence that the political leadership and the managerial leadership of the LGA are at one on both the direction of travel and the day-to-day leadership of the Association. On Wednesday I was asked to take leave, which I have done. The LGA and I will now seek to agree a way forward. We do not believe that this will be aided by further publicity and speculation. Therefore we shall be making no further comment or answering questions until it becomes necessary.