Thoughts after the Compass conference

I went to the Compass ‘Shaping our Global World’ conference on Saturday. My first political conference (and first non-telecoms conference). Dipping the toe in…. and the water wasn’t bad !

Two of the themes that came out quite strongly in the sessions I went to were around the links between ‘progressive social movements’ and the labour party, and the limits to the power of govt to change things. Resonant with some of my thoughts in my earlier post.

e.g. #1 Ann Pettifor who was heavily involved in Jubilee 2000 campaign described how the Labour Party wasn’t heavily involved (or involved at all?) in this until right near the end. Instead she built up a coalition of e.g. the BMA, faith groups, concerned people to lobby the politicians. She described how she spent 10 years on this campaign starting – under the Tories! – going around the UK talking to people about the need to cancel ‘Third World’ debt and encountering deep sceptism. Very inspirational – msg: attitudes can be changed if you make good arguments but it’ll be lots and lots of hard work and a long hard slog.

e.g. #2 Ken Livingstone talked about how he had partnered with a bunch of other major metropolitan cities around the world and used their combined purchasing power to negotiate with power suppliers e.g. to improve the greeness of public buildings through support from these companies. He said he didn’t even bother going to Government to discuss this as he knew it would make no difference.

So both positive examples about how change happens – but both illustrating how involving Government / politicians isn’t necessarily required, or even a good idea until you’ve build up a sufficient constituency demanding change. Not ‘Government is the problem’ so much as ‘Government can’t make any difference, for many important changes that are needed now – unless lots of people already are demanding it’.

Early, unformed ideas – how change happens

For a while I’ve been pondering how big changes happen in society.

e.g. Govt brings in smoking ban on 1 July in England. So restaurants, pubs, clubs become smoke-free. Big change. Caused, ostensibly, by Govt introducing a new policy. There will be unintended consequences (pub gardens will prob become much more smokey as all the smokers will be outside. –> more passive smokers for non-smokers during Summer? / non-smokers stuck inside during Summer to avoid smoke?

But is this it so simply? Why did the Govt feel it could introduce such a draconian nanny-state policy? I don’t really know the background. Maybe there is EC legislation it had to enact? But I guess it only felt it could do this because it had done opinion polling to check that more votes wouldn’t be lost than would be won by doing it.

So the question becomes – how does the general public get to a point of feeling strongly enough about something (e.g. banning smoking) that the Govt then feels it can do something about it? i.e. it’s not just a matter of Govt acting – it’s about a general sense in the general population that this is right to be done. Who does the leading? Govt – the general public – other opinion formers (pressure groups, media, business… ?). Who is the lead?

I was wondering about this in terms of the well-being agenda (see my Compass article). But it’s a generally applicable problem. e.g. a Govt in the UK wouldn’t introduce a law banning killing animals for food – they would be voted out of office. But if we got to the point where most people felt it was wrong, and unnecessary to kill animals for food – then you could see the Govt would introduce the appropriate legislation. So the question is how to get enough people won around to your argument that it shows up in opinion polls to lead to policy change. Hence, I guess, campaigning organisations. FoE/ Greenpeace/ Peta etc.

But the power of business to set its agenda through its spend on marketing/ advertising is so strong this must be a huge challenge. I’m suddenly gaining a lot more respect for my friends who work in campaigning organisations.

Goering on how to convince people the country needs to go to war

Just came across this quote in the NYRB from Goering after WWII at Nuremberg. It speaks for itself.

“Naturally the common people don’t want war… But, after all, it is the leaders… who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy or a fascist dictatorship or a Parliament or a Communist dictatorship… All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country”