It was like being a teenager again early this week, for all the wrong reasons – newspaper splashes like this. Depressing and pointless:

Tories at war over EU - Observer

Nick wrote extensively on the vote itself last week. But there are some wider points. Firstly, the motion which was put down was not government policy – so of course the government was going to impose a three-line whip on it. In fact, I think this was short-sighted of them – in opposition, there was much talk of more free and one line votes on non-binding, committee stage or backbench motions. But allowing one for the first time on this would have sent a message (wrongly interpreted) to those who put it down.

Secondly, what did the motion actually seek to achieve? It was entirely non- specific – what do they want to renegotiate? Going into an argument without knowing what you want out of it is not going to get you far. Related to this is a point I’ve made before – simply complaining about the EU and principles of sovereignty will not make voters see it your way. Being specific, identifying a problem that actually bothers people and then  linking it to the EU if that is actually the problem (as Douglas Carswell often does very effectively) is much more likely to work. But then again, that would require those demanding the vote to be specific – which they can’t be…

Because of my third point. They can’t be specific because no-one actuallyknows what they want to change. There are loads of mutterings about the Human Rights Act (not actually related to the European Union), or health and safety, or straight bananas or whatever. But so much of the time, these are spasms of grumpiness based on Daily Mail headlines, and not on fact. You need to prepare before you start making demands.

George on Wednesday made a point that hadn’t really articulated itself in my head before. In opposition, it’s very easy to rail simplistically against this or that. In government you have the chance to actually do something about it. But you need to be strategic. Beating the government on one vote (while it didn’t happen) wouldn’t have changed anything. There would still need to be all the preparation, investigation, drafting and strategising.

I confess that I find the whole EU debate deadly dull. But there are some principles I think we should apply to it. If we are serious about our free-market values, we should encourage a multi-speed Europe. By that, I mean that, beyond some fundamentals, if some countries want to sign up to some things but others don’t, then let them. For example, one area which is often mentioned for repatriation of powers is employment law. One attendee was horrified that Germany would have to maintain the EU regulations when we wouldn’t, and Germany would therefore feel that we had an unfair advantage. But surely the point is that if Germany felt that their implementation of the EU regulations was bad for Germany, they too could choose to withdraw from some of them.

Strangely, many of the EU’s principles externally are about competition. Internally however, it often seems to want to create a sort of collectivist blur of standardisation. Surely it should encourage political as well as economic competition?

My final point is this. The change to the rules of succession which was announced yesterday is not before time, but despite the dire warnings of trench warfare within the Commonwealth, it has been agreed swiftly, neatly and without much fuss. Because it was sensible, it was timely, and the participants were prepared. Lessons should be learnt.

Yet while Conservatives have been willing (although progress has been slow in Government) to support employee-ownership models in the public sector, there is less talk about it in the private sector. This is disappointing.

Not only is there a clear economic case as employee-owned businesses (EOBs), according to research by the Cass Business School, given that they survived the recession pretty well (eager job creating commentators should note that EOBs have increased employment numbers by more than 12.9% compared with 2.7% for non-EOBs after the recession) – but there is also a clear political case, which I hope to detail here.

Firstly, EOBs breed greater levels of responsibility in their staff – they have to. If employees are to own their businesses they have to understand how they work, the essential structures that make them successful and the painful decisions that need to be made to keep them going (whether that be pay freezes or job cuts). This greater understanding of the challenges of business would be useful as it would help people to understand the similar challenges of government.

At present, many people do not understand the difficult decisions that are being made by the Government such as on deficit reduction, because usually they are not given the authority to do so in their own lives such as through their work. Giving people more responsibility in one sphere will spill over into others, making them vote for more responsible governments and not be so easily seduced by those with flashier but less credible messages.

Secondly, for the “tax cutting” Tories, EOBs are more likely to create workers who appreciate the need to make business as competitive as possible and are likely to want to create tax environments which champion those principles. If you own a business and are trying to compete at home and across the world, then you don’t want to see your business paying buckets of tax away to the Government which could be re-invested into the business (or put back in your pocket).

Often because people see business tax cuts only go back into the pockets of shareholders or in the bonus payments of a privileged few, they do not see why they should support a competitive business tax policy. After all, they only see the benefits indirectly (if at all sometimes). A greater level of EOBs is thus likely to create amore pro-business electorate.

Thirdly, for pro-Localism Tories, EOBs would help to encourage more people to support the localism agenda. If you help to take decisions within your business or are part of a participatory environment at work, then you are more likely to support decentralisation of powers because you have seen work, at work.

Moreover, knowing that getting more people involved can work, you are more likely to participate outside of work in your local neighbourhood or at council level to ensure it does work.

Because in so many businesses decisions are taken only by a few at the very top, this has created a culture in which people do not have direct experiences of participatory decision making. This is a barrier to the Localism agenda which the current make up the private sector supports.

These are just some of the political reasons why the Conservative Party should be embracing the EOBs agenda. In the future, I would like to come back to some of the economic arguments, but for now, it is important to make the political case.

David Cameron has a fantastic opportunity in the wake of the economic crisis to champion new forms of business such as social enterprises and EOBs – he should seize it and with it, help to sow the seeds for future electoral victories to come.

So in such a crowded marketplace, what do websites unaffiliated with government do to stand out?  Social startup Digital Democracy has an idea; or rather, it has three.  Digital Democracy’s strategy, evolved since it’s pilot phase launched 6 months ago, is to be open, non-confrontational and local.

The site’s emphasis on ‘openness’ sets it apart from other online campaigns organisations – all campaigns are user submitted, and there is no vetting of campaigns.  Instead of choosing a campaign to champion in the media, Digital Democracy lets its users (anyone in the country) decide what the most important campaigns are.  In this way the site could draw comparison to ePetitions systems like the government’s, were it not for a small but crucial difference.

This difference is seen in Digital Democracy’s desire to produce a non-confrontational dialogue on issues –users can either support or oppose any campaign posted on the site.  This produces what Digital Democracy’s creators claim is more useful than an ePetition – a conversation about the solution.  It also tackles the problem quite obviously facing the new government site – petitions immediately mirrored by counter-petitions by people opposed to the original petition.  The goal of establishing a conversation with MPs and with government from the outset helps to foster communication and cooperation, rather than aggression or faceless signature collection.

Finally, Digital Democracy stands out from the crowd by doing something which many believe represents the future of the internet – localising.  Although the site caters for large national campaigns like many of its rivals, its real power lies in local campaigns.  When a user enters their postcode they’re show the boundaries of their constituency on a google map, along with all the campaigns going on in their area.  Users’ local MPs are regularly notified of all the campaigns his or her constituents have supported (or opposed) and given the opportunity to respond to them all on the site.

This informal online engagement between (and amongst) local people and their MPs allows people to be drawn in who might be too busy to go to community meetings or not inclined to be in touch with their MP directly.  This large and growing demographic is often caricatured as selfish and apathetic; so disengaged from their community that they barely know their neighbours.

In reality most people have strong opinions about their community, as well as ideas on how to improve it.  However, our political system still fails to take advantage of the technologies we all use every day to engage with people about the decisions affecting their lives.  Digital Democracy shows that there is no technical reason for this backwardness – its system lets you openly and collectively engage with your neighbours, community leaders and MP online, about whatever issue you want.

Digital Democracy has the potential to become much more than a method of airing your grievances or collecting support for a campaign – valuable though those functions are.  With the right support it could point the way toward how we bring community politics kicking and screaming into the 21^st century.

To see what Digital Democracy can do, go to www.digitaldemocracy.org.uk – the site is free and open for anyone to join.

I’ve pondered this before, but from a different angle – asking whether the Coalition agreement was being progressed through so fast that there would be little to do in the later years of the Parliament. My conclusion was that these things were all necessary, and that they needed to show improvements in peoples’ lives by 2015 in order to go into the election with any chance of success.

As I’ve said before, this government is not communicating its narrative properly.I would FAR rather they governed well than just talked about it, but they can’t ignore the press, nor voters’ concerns, and they need to talk and talk and talk about what they are doing and keep explaining how it makes sense.

The reforms in education, health and local government in particular are about enabling people to have more choice and control in their lives. The welfare reforms are about making sure that the welfare system is a safety net, not a “hammock” as I’ve heard it described. Changes to the tax system are feeling their way to reducing taxes for everyone once it’s affordable, making them fairer, and shifting them from ‘good’ things (work, saving, investment) to ‘bad’ (consumption).

The best statement I’ve heard from the government on why all these changes are necessary was in response to the Archbishop of Canterbury’s comments a couple of weeks ago. But, once again, that was defence, not an all-out making the case pre-emptively. As I’ve said before, until there is a crisis, there seems to be an unwilllingness to really make the case.

As I’ve argued before we need, as a society, to have a serious think about what we think the state should do, and what we think is affordable and fair, and what we think we can do better for ourselves.

Far from being concerned that the government is doing too much too soon, I wonder whether they are in fact doing enough? Is giving way on so many (relatively) small parts of the agenda going to undermine the sum of its parts? Is the machine of government, vested interests and the loudest complainants going to defeat the ambitious but necessary programme that the silent majority understand and support?

The government needs to take people with it on its reform programme. Explaining why it’s necessary, what will happen, why it will make things better is a key part of that. People fear the unknown; they can be enthused by the radical ideas of this government. But only if the government stands up for them – and, crucially, actually delivers them. For too long, we had politicians who talked about making life better but failed to do so. This government seems unwilling to talk but – if you read the manifestos and the Coalition Agreement – really does want to make Britain better.

Then yesterday I read an illuminating piece from Dan Hodges in the New Statesman, discussing the Labour Party’s current policy reviews (which, by the way, sound incredibly unfocused and designed to delay having anything to say rather than any serious attempt to identify where Labour went wrong and what they should do to put it right, but that’s for another day).

Some of his criticisms chime with mine. The most important thing when you’re undertaking a policy review is, I think, that you still hold fast to your values and you make sure that you knit your policies around them to suit the times. Certainly that is what the Conservative policy review process did in 2006-8; and usefully as well, the point of them was to actively seek ideas from non-traditional sources.

So to me, it’s completely bizarre that one of the main complaints in the article is that only a small proportion of the responses have come from Labour party members. Now I could understand that if all the non-members send in is criticism of Labour’s record in government (and there’s plenty to criticise) but surely one of the fundamental problems of Labour in government was that they were convinced that they knew best and we knew nothing?

Given that that appears not to have changed, Labour’s policy review doesn’t look terribly likely to succeed…

More broadly though, is my presumption in favour of crowd-sourcing really a good one?

You can read page after page of complaints from people who’ve tried to get involved with, for example, the Budget crowd-sourcing, or with reviews of regulation, or with Big Society projects, or even the Great Repeal bill – and so many of them say that no-one centrally bothered to engage with them, that their ideas were ignored, or – perhaps worst of all – they were told that what they were making suggestions around was not up for discussion.

And then if I talk to some people who are involved in actually inviting opinions and responses, they too have their complaints – it’s always the same (few) people who reply, saying the same thing, with their corporate-speak and their lobbying campaigns; and if someone with a real passion for something but no vested interests does come along, too often they refuse to see that their issue is affected by and has effects on other areas.

So there are problems on both sides with crowd-sourcing. But it can and does work – though, as I argued in my czars piece – the participants on both sides need some ground rules.

I would suggest that both sides need to be clear on what is being asked for – is it blue sky craziness (which, as Tim Harford argues persuasively, sometimes can be what’s needed) or is it good, solid best practice? Is the Party prepared to fundamentally re-examine its policies, or is it just window-dressing? Are the fundamentals right in the first place (for example, when the Conservatives did the policy review, it was after 3 big defeats and a – slow but eventual – realisation that we had to operate in the modern world. I’m not sure Labour has got to the crux of their problem yet).

Perhaps the key to crowd-sourcing though is asking the right people – or at the very least, identifying those people who have something useful to say. How you do that is open to debate, and it very much depends on what you want to know. People who are happy with services generally tend not to say much about them; it’s the unhappy ones who make a lot of noise, which of course is likely to give you an unbalanced view.

Part of how to identify the right people is something that the Big Society is all about – it’s about engaging many many more people in what goes on around them. Crowd-sourcing probably isn’t really a valid mainstream way to address big problems in society as yet. But it could be. Just look at how people ask for recommendations on Twitter, or at some of the examples in this article about specialised problem-solving. And then think about the power of having all the energy, brainpower and experience of a whole load of people brought to bear on the little things that make our lives worthwhile…

The biggest and most enduring impact of the Big Society may well be its influence on the reform of public service. Empowering front line staff and communities to take over public services and public assets (like libraries) has the potential to turn how Government operates on its head forever. There is certainly a lot of national political good will directed towards the public service mutuals agenda, the full fruition of which would see one million public sector front line staff taking the delivery of their service away from direct public ownership and into the independent social enterprise sector. A fledgling public service mutuals market is starting to emerge but it is now at a delicate juncture where it could either blossom or wither depending on what happens next.

A couple of weeks ago at POPse (which was an innovative pop-up social enterprise think tank) I got together with a group of social enterprise experts to discuss what needed to happen to boost the mutuals market.  From these discussions and from long conversations with my colleagues at Mutual Ventures, I think there are six key positive steps which need to be taken in order to give the mutuals market the best chance of thriving and becoming self sustaining. They are:

1. A robust Right to Challenge/Provide is needed, which will allow staff and communities the opportunity to bid to take over local services and assets. With the exception of the now closed NHS Right to Request programme, most of the current mutualisation innovators have been responding to a top down initiative from their commissioning authority or central Government. If the market is to become truly self sustaining it needs to be driven from the bottom-up with front line staff groups driving the process. A robust Right to Challenge/Provide will allow this to happen.
2. Easier access to seed funding for groups of staff who are thinking about mutualising is a must. Groups usually won’t be able to access traditional social finance loans or equity investment when developing their business plan so are going to be reliant on grants or support from their current public sector employer.  In the longer term, some bright spark needs to come up with a new and innovative financial vehicle for this initial start up phase. If someone already has then don’t keep it a secret!
3. Clearer guidance on procurement rules. EU procurement law has confused and put off many public authorities who have wanted to give their staff the chance to mutualise. Every public authority and every law firm has a slightly (and sometimes more than slightly!) different take on what is allowable and what isn’t in terms of awarding internal staff a contract. It all comes down to their attitude towards the risk of being challenged by another potential provider who feels aggrieved. The current lack of clarity is not fair on either the internal staff who are denied the opportunity or on the other external providers, who are often charities and social enterprises themselves.
4. To allow mutuals to demonstrate their real value as service providers, there needs to a robust and accepted methodology for measuring social value. This shouldn’t just be a nice to have. Chris White’s Social Value Bill is a very important step in the right direction – hopefully it will make it to the statute book without too much dilution!
5. There needs to be step change in public service culture and leadership. Too often the inclination to avoid any risk leads to chronic inaction. Unfortunately, even the managers and staff who are enthusiastic about the mutualisation opportunity are sometimes not immune to this affliction. In addition to this, the mutualisation opportunity is often viewed as an additional burden which can easily be avoided rather than a long term solution to other burdens.
6. Finally and critically, there needs to be a clear message to front line staff, service managers and local politicians that this is not back door privatisation or a “Trojan Horse” for big private sector providers – mutuals maintain the public service ethos, most are non-profit making and there are safeguards available such as asset locks to prevent abuse.

If we don’t start to take these positive steps now then a sustainable public service mutuals market may never emerge. But there is still time – it’s all still to play for!

The Big Society is important in two ways. Firstly – and least interestingly, to most people – because it really is important to David Cameron. Secondly, and much more importantly, because it is a radical idea with huge potential to transform our lives.

I was veering towards agreeing with Nick on his point that we should simply stop talking about The Big Society and just get on and enable it, and talk again nearer an election. But this afternoon I’ve changed my mind. I spent the afternoon at the Big Society Network’s reception for Nexters – a programme to support the best innovations in social enterprise and technology that enables people to make the best of their lives.

I’ll come back to some of the ideas they featured – there are some amazing things.

I’ve written before about the need for – in shorthand – a sort of Google Map of big society ideas, so that people with an urge to get involved can see what is going on in their area, and can see where people who’ve done something similar have learnt lessons.

Every time I go to any Big Society event, I meet a number of people who are essentially doing the same thing. Now if all you’re interested in is making a name for yourself, having lots of the same project running is fine but not really scalable and probably involves a lot of duplicated effort and wasted funding and goodwill, and probably isn’t making the most of whatever their idea is.

As a dedicated localiser, I am reluctant to say this, but I think the time has come for some serious thinking to be done about how to encourage small enterprises to merge to maximise their effectiveness. Not everyone can set up the next big thing, and having lots of people chasing the same resources is a recipe for inefficiency. I have worked with a few charities and foundations, and one thing that has struck me over and over again is that at some point, the funders need to acknowledge that an organisation is too small to have any real impact, or that their model simply doesn’t achieve what it’s supposed to, or that the outcomes are not sufficient to justify funding.

Additionally, there has to be an acknowledgement that, yes, some ideas fail but it’s worth trying something that isn’t yet tested. Someone I talked to today said that in his corporate life, he asks his Board to keep an eye on his failure rate, and if fewer than about 30 per cent of his decisions aren’t successful, he considers that he’s not being brave enough – which I thought was an innovative and very different approach to the way we tend to do things in politics.

The other key thing that needs to happen – and it’s started – is that people need to be inspired and encouraged to do things. Not talking about the Big Society as a concept for the next three years is not going to encourage greater involvement – quite the reverse in fact. So the Big Society Network and Number 10 are absolutely doing the right thing in identifying great ideas and great people and spreading the word to people who don’t yet know, because if something becomes a cultural norm, it becomes entirely natural and second nature and we (nearly) all end up doing it without thinking about it too hard.

I repeat – again – what I’ve always said about the Big Society. It’s not just about volunteering, it’s not just about public services, it’s not just about nudging people into better behaviour. It is all of those things, but most importantly, it is about enabling all of us to live the best lives we can. And that is absolutely the most important mission of any government.

I’m not going to go too deeply into any one area, and my examples are – of course – limited in scope because localism is, by definition, what suits a particular area or demand. But she was concerned that the NHS reforms would lead to people in poor areas not receiving the healthcare they need (I think) and I think she is fundamentally misunderstanding why localism works. I don’t begin to pretend to understand the NHS reforms, but I have two things to say on health: firstly, that NO government is going to stop allocating funds on the basis of need (and no council raises anything more than 20 per cent of what it spends locally – the vast majority of what councils spend is from central government), and secondly that I think her fear is based on misconceptions of what these health reforms are supposed to do – they are supposed to reduce bureaucracy, free health professionals to innovate and treat their patients on the basis of need, and get patients the treatment that suits them the best wherever it comes from.

My main purpose here, though, is not to defend individual programmes, but to explain why the underlying principles are the right ones that this government should live by.

First off, I think it’s important to say that for decades, governments have centralised power and taken it further away from the people it affects, meaning that decisions are less personal and less accountable – it’s far easier to ignore personal circumstances and do blanket, impersonal, one-size-fits-all if you don’t know the people involved. I think that as the EU has extended its competencies, successive Westminster governments have seen their powers go up to the supra-national level, and so they have skimmed off powers from councils, who in turn have taken powers up from communities and thence from individuals.

I don’t think we should withdraw from the EU, but I do think a serious appraisal of what it does and doesn’t do is necessary (and we should draw lessons from the way that this government negotiated the UN into actually doing something in Libya when, in the early days, the UK seemed to have little international support for action).

Part of the reason for this is a desire to provide good services to all (I believe that most people – of whatever party – who go into politics want to do the best they can, even if they’re wrong about how to go about it); part of it is that if we pay national taxes, we have a right to expect a certain standard of services in return; and part of it is because we want life to be fair.

So, that out of the way… What is localism supposed to do? It devolves decisions as close as possible to the people they affect, allowing services to become more responsive to the desires of those people, and more accountable to them.  I’ve never hidden the fact that there are potential problems with this – what if the people with the power aren’t capable of exercising it? What if they become just another layer of martinet-like bureaucracy? Nor have I hidden the fact that decisions taken by different groups of people will have differing outcomes – what is pejoratively called a postcode lottery.

The point is, however, that with power comes responsibility. If services aren’t right, then people WILL vote out those who made the wrong decisions. And the point of postcode lotteries is that you can demand that your services change if you know that there’s something better on offer elsewhere.

I know that there are plenty of people who say, ‘But this is just a charter for the sharp-elbowed middle-classes’. And you know what? Yes, to an extent – because in shorthand, they are the people who want the best for themselves and their families and know the tricks that they need to get it. But it is only by consumer demand that services improve – and they improve for all when there are sufficient numbers of those demanding consumers. Services only become accountable when people have the right and the opportunity to move their demands elsewhere.

The most important thing about localism, though, is that it will free service providers to innovate to respond to their own consumers. Every community, area, group of people need different things. I heard recently about a village in Cumbria that decided to build some affordable housing. Sadly, in order for affordable housing to be ‘affordable’ that often means that the only economic way to build it is to build lots of it. But not in this village – they decided that they needed 22 houses. So they worked together to agree where they would go, who would build them, how much they would cost, what they would look like, and so on.

To illustrate my point about personal services – another place in Cumbria has agreed to share the burden of installing proper broadband. This costs a LOT of money – partly because farmers can (and therefore do) charge high fees to large companies to lay cables under their land. But instead, these villagers discussed with local farmers and – because they knew each other personally, and because it would bring wider community benefits –every single farmer in the area agreed to waive the fees.

The most important thing about localism is the accountability it will bring. This isn’t easy – and I think that in time, for properly responsive councils, it might be necessary to look again at election schedules and recalls and so on.

The three pillars of localism are power, responsibility and accountability. As I’ve said before, proper accountability will mean that the way local government is funded will have to be looked at at some point – though as I said above, no government will ever remove equalisation grants. I could see an argument for allowing councils to have more control over business rates, or perhaps VAT receipts – it’s a clear and transparent way for them to raise and spend money locally, and it means that councils can build an attractive offer to encourage businesses and individuals to move there.

I don’t pretend that localism is the way to resolve everything.  But for the things that make a difference to your daily life – whether that’s being able to work from home because you’ve got high-speed broadband, or actually being able to afford a home in the place you grew up, or having a great school down the road because your community has agitated for it, or having a post office that’s also a library, village shop, benefits office, GP surgery and community hall because you’ve worked together to get all the things you want in your village, or even just having a nice park down the road from your clean street because you’ve demanded it from your council – localism makes a huge difference to your daily life, and it’s something that with practice, only gets better and better as time goes by.

In December, when I met the Yes campaign, I was keen to find a killer argument for AV.

In January, when I met the No campaign, I was eager to hear their killer rebuttal and why we should keep first past the post.

We do have problems with how our democracy works. I spent two years working on pro-democracy campaigns abroad, which really made me think about how ours operates. I think we have a body politic that generally isn’t very accountable, that fails to really explain what it’s doing (and be honest about why and how and what that is – the positives and the negatives), that only pays attention to voters when it’s election time, and that fails to take into account the changes in politics, awareness and issues since the 1950s.

They can start to be addressed by proper recalls, proper open primaries, full reselection processes for all MPs every election, more localism, more transparency and frequent, proper boundary reviews.

They cannot be fixed by AV. Proper proportional representation might go some way to addressing some of them.

The Yes campaign told me MPs are lazy and venal. Given that I know a fair few MPs, I know that this is simply untrue. They work hard, they do a lot of incredibly dull and unnoticed work, and they really do have a desire to serve their constituents – even every single minister I’ve ever met has said that the thing they most enjoy is helping their constituents with their problems. They also told me that AV would remove the concept of a safe seat – which is just nonsense; we ourselves vote to make seats safe.

The No campaign told me that a different voting system was expensive and unfair. I disagree profoundly with both statements – if we value our democracy we should be prepared to spend enough money to make it work properly, and I can’t see what’s unfair about allowing people to express preferences; your first preference is counted in every round that your candidate is still in the voting.

The Yes campaign’s arguments are not arguments for AV – they are arguments for recalls, open primaries, full reselection for all seats every time – and no tactical voting. And their refusal to accept a turnout threshold completely blew out of the water any pretence they made of wanting majoritarian support for anything.

While I accept that they were running a negative campaign, by definition, the No campaign’s arguments were not arguments for FPTP until very late in the campaign – their change to one person, one vote was the best thing they did and they should have done it earlier.

I was seriously contemplating not voting today. I don’t care very much which system we have out of AV and FPTP – I don’t think it would make a huge difference. But I think if AV passes, and is shown to not make the sweeping changes the Yes campaign has been promising, that will disengage voters even further.

I voted no because the Yes campaign failed to persuade me.  The No campaign hasn’t persuaded me either (though they are the only people who’ve sent or offered me any campaign literature).

I voted no with reluctance. I want change. I just don’t think this one would make any difference.

 This reminded me of Andrew Sullivan’s critique of the US Right’s dogmatic obsession with tax-cuts. “Because of this ideological fixation on taxes, almost all the sacrifice required to get America back on it’s fiscal feet would be borne by those who need government health care. The wealthiest 1% would get yet another cut in their tax rate. The poorest 90% would see their benefits slashed or whittled away.”

 Being in Government is about achieving the right balance and, though it goes against most of my instincts to say so, taxation is an instrument which can be used to achieve a greater good.

The Respublica report understands that capitalism contains within it a fundamental contradiction. Big businesses compete to be the king. Their goal is to become a monopoly in the field they operate in. This desire can have great benefits for society and us. It is why a business wants to offer quality services at reasonable prices. It is why they want to create products that make us feel good. It is why they try to make interacting with them as easy as possible.  But paradoxically if the business ever achieves their monopolistic goal then many of the benefits they bring to society can disappear. If too many big businesses succeed then there is a risk that a vast majority of citizens will be restricted to the role of passive consumer. There will be no motivation to innovate because entry into the market becomes almost impossible. This is not a healthy situation for our society.

When a monopolistic situation arises this means someone has won, thus competition is over. The future that should be encouraged is one where the opportunity to be creative and innovative always exists, alongside the need to be always outwardly concerned. But this can only be done if competition is retained and competition can only be retained if there is the opportunity to compete. We need Tescos, Ryanairs and Glaxos but we need to ensure that new Tescos, new Ryanairs and new Glaxos can emerge. One of the big challenges today’s policy makers face is how do we ensure this environment exists without killing the motivation and desire to conquer, which is also crucial. Adam Schoenborn’s report might not have all the answers but I applaud it for not ignoring possible solutions just because they may go against neo-liberal economic orthodoxy. Life is more complex than dogma would allow it to be.