Weekend extracts from Steve Hilton’s new book, More Human, suggest that David Cameron’s policy guru has spent a lot of free time on his new Silicon Valley perch contemplating the blindingly obvious. A Channel 4 programme I happened to catch called Damned Designs: Don’t Demolish My Home, made the point more graphically.
Yes, many voters do feel alienated from big government and impersonal corporations. Modern technology has downside costs, too. Poor people often have miserable lives, and the well-off may feel they have a frantic, unsatisfied existence.
No wonder many turn to fringe political parties with simpler solutions – from environmental imperatives to the siren voice of nationalist identity politics – or tune out of civic engagement altogether.
Hilton, who is alarmed by both the Tea Party and the Occupy movement, urges his independent-minded readers who “want to see more human politics enacted” to run for office (“Yes, I know it’s daunting”) and challenge the insiders and vested interests he feels now dominate our societies. And no, he hasn’t done it himself.
However, that’s not easy, is it? In the wake of the election, Green and Ukip voters – with 5m votes and two MPs elected between them – feel particularly hacked off. Even the winners, led by Hilton’s pal Cameron, have their alienated grievances: against Europe, immigrants, the council and the BBC.
In the case of Damned Designs, this kind of alienation was made tangible by the self-satisfied attitude of council planning chiefs – of the elected and bureaucratic varieties – towards assorted oddballs who had built dream homes without proper planning permission. Clearly they should not have done it – here is a sample case study – but they mostly weren’t doing much harm. Councils pursued them using our money, like avenging furies.
That, of course, is part of the problem with Hilton’s remedies, which emphasise the local, the informal and the human, over the centralised, endlessly more efficient, the bureaucratic and conformist. Local is not always better.
When the shorts-and-sneakers biker left Whitehall in 2012, frustrated by official obstruction and Cameron’s caution, the coalition had already enacted the Localism Act 2011, though its instincts under Eric Pickles remained centralist.
Greg Clark, the new man in charge of local government (like Hilton he is a rare Tory fan of Polly Toynbee), may do better. In his book, Hilton reveals that in 2010 he wanted the coalition to impose a network of city mayors – he says visible and accountable mayors are the most popular kind of politician today. However, Nick Clegg insisted on prior referendums, all but one of which – Bristol – saw local voters reject the model in 2012.
You may recall that the ballots for locally elected police commissioners were imposed on the same day. It has not been a great success (so far?), while the supposedly more localist and progressive Holyrood addressed police problems by amalgamating local forces into a single Police Scotland.
Meanwhile, George Osborne is now imposing elected mayors as part of his northern powerhouse plans for a more devolved England. At least there is some evidence from around the world to support his case. Some of Hilton’s articles of faith remain hunches, such as free schools, where supportive academic evidence is scant or disputed.
Local control over planning decisions? It is a formula for nimbyism. No surprise then that recent research suggests Conservative councils reject far more home building applications than Labour ones.
The Sussex farmer who turned down £275m for his land rather than see his village developed is rightly seen as noble, but the homes still have to be built somewhere. So does the south-east’s extra runway. In 2010, outgoing Labour ministers begged the Tories not to scrap their strategic planning authority, set up to resolve vital issues of this kind. But they did.
All the same, Hilton’s plea (the Sunday Times extract mocks him up as Delacroix’s painting of Liberty Leading the People but on a bike) will strike many chords with readers. The clever son of Hungarian refugees (it is not true that they took their English name from the first hotel they stayed in), he rails against the power of money and lobbying in our supposedly democratic and accountable societies. A “donocracy” is what he calls the US and the UK, societies where the rich will increasingly call the shots unless we stop them.
He speaks as someone who was a member of what he calls Britain’s ruling elite, the London world of corporate bosses, politicians and officials, media types too, who “all go to the same dinner parties and social events, all live near one another and send their children to the same schools”.
I sit close enough to that world to know what he means (Hilton used to live near Cameron in Notting Hill, which can’t have helped), but I wouldn’t want to exaggerate its importance. Some people go in for cliques and others are repelled by them; loners such as Michael Heseltine, for example. And small-town cliques of council officers, solicitors, estate agents and their kind are just as pernicious if left unchecked. Come to think of it, so is Silicon Valley, whose pampered elite workers enrage ordinary citizens up the road in San Francisco.
It is never fair to judge a book from newspaper extracts, even three full pages worth of extract and interview (paywall), and it’s full of good stories. John Major’s experts warned the then prime minister that a minimum wage which raised costs would reduce the number of low-paid jobs, so Major blocked it. On different advice, Tony Blair went ahead with it in 1997 and, Hilton concedes, “the sky didn’t fall in”. All firms should pay a living wage in return for lower taxes, he argues. I think that is now blue-collar Dave’s view too.
However, on what I have seen so far, I cannot help suspecting that Hilton’s tome is thinktank wonkery which highlights some familiar problems without getting much beyond the “get involved, think locally, money and GDP isn’t everything” conclusion. Millions of people already know that without shelling out £18.99.
Hilton is pro-capitalist but also pro-ethics, a “polluter pays” critic of supermarket monopolies who regrets that Ed Miliband did not develop his critique of predator v producer conduct. He is also the man who gave Cameron his briefly cherished “big society, small government” idea. At the time, I checked out the theory in Cameron’s constituency of Witney. Without the supportive structure of the state and its revenues, the voluntary world Hilton admires struggles even in prosperous communities.
That is really my point. Before the Industrial Revolution, Hilton argues, all decisions were almost entirely local. This is not quite true, but we know what he means.
Technology helped bring about central bureaucratic states and corporations, lots of progress and wealth creation on a previously unimagined scale. It also led to many interventions to alleviate extremes of injustice and poverty, the story of social democracy’s advance for most of the 20th century.
There was a reaction to statist solutions – expensive, inefficient and unjust in some ways – that Thatcher and Reagan embodied. They restored the centrality of markets to much of our daily lives. But efficient markets in turn came to be seen as increasingly lacking any sense of human community, obligation or privacy.
The pendulum never ceases to swing between liberty and security, efficiency and human values, central and local. In their different ways, Greens, assorted nationalists and trades unions articulate a very human resistance to the imperatives of globalisation. So does Hilton’s call for localism and accountability.
It’s part of the mix, nothing more, and has its downsides too. As part of Silicon Valley’s elite, Hilton’s book is unlikely to address the questions raised by the cryptographer Bruce Schneier’s new book Data and Goliath. Here is a sample from Sunday’s Observer, which suggests we are all no longer Silicon Valley’s customers, but its product.
“Rethink everything,” says Hilton. This is hard when everything we do can be monitored by the very interests we may want to challenge.
So it will take bigger, tougher government than Hilton envisages to keep the tech giants in their place on our behalf. Not so much big society as Big Brother. Standing for the local council is a fine thing, but it’s not quite up to the task.
