In this powerful manifesto, Steve Hilton argues that the frustrations people feel with government, politics, their economic circumstances and their daily lives are caused by deep structural problems with the systems that dominate our modern world – systems that have become too big, bureaucratic and distant from the human scale. He shows how change is possible, offering us a more human way of living.
STEVE HILTON is cofounder and CEO of Crowdpac, a Silicon Valley political tech start-up, and a visiting professor at Stanford University. He was formerly senior adviser to Prime Minister David Cameron and played a leading role in the modernisation of the Conservative Party and in the implementation of its government reform programme. Steve is a graduate of New College, Oxford University, where he studied philosophy, politics and economics. He now lives in California with his wife and young family.
SCOTT BADE works on the communications team of Michael Bloomberg and Bloomberg Philanthropies. He previously researched international security at Stanford University’s Freeman Spogli Institute of International Studies. Scott graduated from Stanford University and lives in New York.
JASON BADE lectures on social problem-solving at Stanford Law School and is active in the impact investing space. He often advises start-ups and social entrepreneurs on strategy and human-centred design. Jason graduated from Stanford University and lives in California.
To Rohan
Roop!
Since I wrote More Human, some big changes have taken place in politics. Against most people’s expectations, the Conservative Party won the 2015 election with an overall majority. Even less predictably, Jeremy Corbyn was elected leader of the Labour Party. In America, as I write, Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump are giving ‘establishment’ candidates a run for their money in the presidential election. David Cameron has completed his negotiation with the EU, and now . . . the country will vote to leave or stay.
This book, too, has undergone some changes. I produced a version for the US – and I prefer it to the original. So when the time came to publish a paperback version for the UK, I wanted to use the American edition as the basis – adapted, of course, for a British audience, and to take account of recent political developments on both sides of the Atlantic. I have also reflected on and taken account of some of the reaction to More Human.
The book was not (and is not) meant to be an instrument of partisan cheerleading, so I have been heartened to see many commentators note that key themes in More Human could apply equally to, or be adopted by, both left and right. Some suggested I should have run for Labour leader. I took it as a compliment!
Clearly the Labour leadership campaign went in a very different direction. I disagree with Jeremy Corbyn on many issues, but while his answers may be wrong (and some are very wrong indeed – downright dangerous, even), many of the questions he’s asking are absolutely right, relevant and timely. Over the past year or so, I have found myself repeatedly enraged by the way that the ‘insular ruling elite’ I wrote about in this book’s first edition arrogantly, patronisingly, contemptuously dismiss him. The truth is that Corbyn, like all of the populists of the moment – the SNP, UKIP, or even Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders in America – embodies a reaction to the policy failures of the political establishment. The discontent they channel is real and cannot be ignored by the ruling elite. I salute those who throw bricks at the establishment for pointing out its many flaws, even if they aren’t necessarily the ones we should call for the repairs. While the changes espoused by the would-be revolutionaries are often untenable or unwise, we do need to address the problems that make people pine for such extremes.
Democracy is still the best political system, but as long as it is controlled by vested interests, it will lack legitimacy; that means fixing politics so it is more representative, more inclusive, and more responsive to citizens. I have included a new chapter on Politics in this edition of the book.
Capitalism is still the best economic system, but as long as so much of it is rigged, it will be irretrievably stained; that means fixing it by making the rules governing markets fairer for workers, consumers, entrepreneurs and society – not undermining it by destroying the competition that is its lifeblood. Again, this topic is now covered in a chapter of its own, separate from the first edition’s chapter on ‘Business’.
Of course governing requires more than rhetoric. It requires grit, compromise and maturity. It requires adapting the best-made plans to events, and doing all you can to move enormously complicated systems in the right direction. Believe me, I tried – and discovered (and was insanely frustrated by) how hard change can be. Real change will only happen with leaders whose strategies encompass policy implementation as well as policy creation; who learn about problems with their heart, but solve them with their head; who deeply understand the lives of those they’re working to serve. It’s hard work.
But too often this reality is used by the elite and the insiders to dismiss the possibility of big, radical change. Revolutionary change is not ‘serious’, they say. Calm down and leave it to us ‘grown-ups’. Well, the people are getting restless. The ‘grown-ups’ don’t seem to be making much progress. Maybe they’re not so ‘serious’ after all.
Since the publication of the first edition of More Human, I have become even more convinced that the central problem facing our societies is a concentration of political and economic power in the hands of a tiny number. This revised edition shows how that power can be placed back where it belongs – in the hands of the people.
California, February 2016
On 9 June 2014, Jennifer Devereaux boarded a JetBlue flight from New York to Boston. She was travelling with her two young daughters. Everything seemed normal: the passengers found their seats, the announcements were made, the plane left the gate and moved towards the runway for take-off. But then it all started to go wrong. The captain announced that there had been a delay and the aircraft would have to wait on the tarmac for around forty-five minutes. Jennifer’s three-year-old daughter announced that she needed to use the bathroom. Because they were just waiting around on the tarmac, Jennifer thought it would be fine to get up and take her daughter to the toilet – they were sitting just a few rows away.
Big mistake. As soon as she started getting up, a JetBlue cabin crew member zoomed up and yelled, with that special kind of rudeness we all know and love: ‘Ma’am, you’re going to have to sit down.’
‘But I’m just taking my little girl to the restroom.’
‘You need to sit down right now. The captain has the seatbelt sign switched on.’
‘Please, can you let us go? She’s a three-year-old and she can’t wait.’
‘Ma’am, I’m ordering you to sit down and fasten your seatbelts. You need to comply with my instruction.’
That was just the start.
After another half-hour or so, the poor little girl couldn’t hold it any longer and wet herself in her seat. Jennifer, upset and wanting to do anything to reduce her daughter’s discomfort, called a crew member and asked whether she could have something to mop up the mess – a cloth, some napkins, anything. The flight attendant walked off – and didn’t come back. After a few minutes of waiting, Jennifer couldn’t bear it any longer. She remembered she had a sweater in the overhead bin and thought she could use that to dry her daughter’s seat a little. So she stood up to open the bin and – you guessed it – a crew member raced down the aisle and screamed at her to sit down. Jennifer explained that because no one from JetBlue had brought her anything, she was just trying to get her sweater so she could mop things up and surely, as they weren’t even moving, it would be okay to—
‘It doesn’t matter what it is – the seatbelt sign is on, and you have to sit down right now!’
In disbelief – remember the plane was just sitting on the tarmac – Jennifer kept going, reaching for her sweater.
‘That’s enough, ma’am. Sit down now!’
Defeated, Jennifer did as she was told. You can imagine how she felt. And worse, how her poor little girl felt.
Then the captain’s voice came over the intercom.
‘Ladies and gentlemen, I’m afraid that we have a noncompliant passenger on board and are going to have to return to the gate to remove them from the aircraft.’
That ‘noncompliant’ passenger was Jennifer, trying to look after her three-year-old daughter who needed to use the bathroom.
Rude, aggressive, lacking in compassion – even though, thanks to the last-minute intervention of an off-duty pilot seated nearby, the flight crew finally relented and allowed Jennifer and her daughters to remain on board, JetBlue’s behaviour towards that family was inhuman. Talking about it after the event, Jennifer said, ‘Why can’t we just treat each other with kindness and decency, like human beings?’1
It’s a good question and one this book will try to answer. You could look at that story and say, ‘Well, that’s just the way some of these airline employees behave. You see that kind of thing all over the place with officious bureaucratic-minded people. That’s just life.’
But it’s not just life. Being inhuman is not the natural order of things. People don’t instinctively behave that way: they’re made to by the circumstances they’re in and the structure of the world around them. And being inhuman is not just about bad behaviour – it’s actually a big part of our deepest problems. Economic problems: our efforts to end poverty, to deal with rising inequality, to make sure everyone has the chance to get a decent, well-paid job. Social problems: how our children grow up and are educated, how we organise the places we live and the healthcare we receive. Political problems too: the way we’re governed and the way we make policy. We are designing and building a world that is inhuman. Government, business, the lives we lead, the food we eat, the way our children are raised, the way we relate to the natural world around us . . . it’s all become too big and distant and impersonal. Inhuman.
In governments the world over, political leaders who mean well (and who are, if anything, underappreciated for the good they do) preside, frustrated and impotent, over vast bureaucratic systems that routinely disappoint and leave citizens enraged that they can’t control what affects their lives. The schools we send our children to, the hospitals that care for us when we’re sick, the very food we eat – we’ve allowed these intimate things, that matter so much, to be provided by anonymous, distant, industrialised machines. Business, such an awesome vehicle for human ingenuity and interaction, has become dominated by a detached and unaccountable global elite who think that the solution to the social and environmental problems they cause is to fly to Davos and pontificate on ‘panels’ and in ‘plenaries’. Technology, with its incredible power to liberate and educate, has become unhealthily fetishised as an end in itself, while those who dare to question its remorseless rise are dismissed as mad – or, worse still, old-fashioned. Nature? Who cares, let’s conquer another planet.
We’re told: things are getting better. Growth is up! Big Government is on your side, along with Big Business and Big Energy and Big Food and Big Tech and Big Media, all giving us Big Savings! Big Value! But the problem is, we’re not Big. We are quite small, actually. We tend to be happiest when we can relate to each other in a human way. We do best when things are organised on a human scale.
But size is not all that matters. Big is not always bad, and small is not always beautiful. Just look at a company like Airbnb, the website that allows people to rent out spare rooms, flats or entire homes. It has enabled previously unimaginable new personal connections, showing that scale and technology don’t have to be inhuman. There’s an even more significant point about technology. The information revolution is giving us untold power: people talk warily about Big Data, but the truth is that big data is flowing into our own hands, giving us the chance to make decisions and choices as never before.
For all these reasons – the problems and the opportunities – it’s time for a real shake-up. We need to make the world more human.
This aim of this book is to kick-start the debate. I don’t have all the answers, but at least let’s ask the right questions. In the summer of 2015 Hillary Clinton, in a revealing conversation with a Black Lives Matter activist, said, ‘Look, I don’t believe you change hearts. I believe you change laws, you change allocation of resources, you change the way systems operate.’2 She’s half right. Of course, in the end, in order to make a difference in people’s lives, you do need to change laws, budgets, systems. But the starting point – especially when the changes needed are really big – is to change hearts, and that’s my primary aim in this book. More Human offers an argument, not a prescription. It is not a comprehensive survey of every problem out there; I’ve focused on areas where I have the greatest knowledge and experience and, frankly, on the things I care about most. I know there are important things left out.
Chapter 1 looks at politics. We all know our system is broken, beset by cynicism and corruption; we can see the rage at the political machine. But is there something constructive we can do with that rage? My answer is yes. I believe we can bring about the kind of revolution people are yearning for, but without yelling at each other – instead, getting involved, working together, crafting the radical reforms we need, as a community of people rather than a collection of positions. Politics is the starting point for government, and that’s the subject of Chapter 2. We need to change priorities so government focuses more on real people than abstract numbers. We need to change the way policy is made so those who make it understand the lives of those who experience it. I’ll look at how innovations in the way we design products have the potential to transform how we design government programmes too. But we must also tackle the structure of government, a structure that too often impedes progress; the inefficiencies and needless centralisations of federal, state, and even local power that accentuate the worst of government while suppressing its best.
In Chapter 3 I take aim at our schools, where industrialised processes for cramming knowledge into children’s heads are churning out young people equipped for the last century, not the current one – and making them miserable in the process. Similarly, in Chapter 4 I argue that the care has been ripped out of healthcare by bureaucracy and an obsession with ‘efficiency’ that undermines one of our most human instincts: looking after other people when they’re not well. But we should also look after ourselves, an aim made more difficult by the vast culinary-industrial complex: our taxpayer-subsidised factory food system, which I’ll investigate in Chapter 5.
Corporate bureaucracy is a common theme in this book, and I address it directly in Chapters 6 and 7, looking at the hotly contested arguments over capitalism and the role of business in society. In Chapters 8 and 9 I take on the topics of poverty and inequality and show how a more human way of looking at them – with a particular focus on families – could move us further forwards than the somewhat sterile debates we’ve seen so far.
Children are humans too: that’s Chapter 10. One of the most profound failings of the modern world is that it undervalues the needs of children. This may seem strange in an age when family life is celebrated, parenting advice is everywhere, and the imperatives of ‘child protection’ trump all other concerns. But as I will argue, we’re getting it completely wrong. We are blasé about the impact of technology on children’s lives and at the same time are undermining one of the most natural, human, and, above all, developmentally important aspects of children’s lives: play. Finally, Chapters 11 and 12 examine the world around us: the spaces we design for ourselves and the way we relate to nature.
Throughout we’ll meet people who, in their own way, are making the world more human – extraordinary people you may not have heard of yet. Nadine Burke Harris is a San Francisco paediatrician in the vanguard of reshaping how we see the effect of adverse childhood experiences on children’s life chances. Jamie Heywood is an engineer who has used his brother’s tragic death to change the way we see medicine. Paul Willis has made pig farming ethical on a large scale, and Jason Pittman has a vision of the classroom of the twenty-first century. We’ll engage with some of the world’s brightest minds who are helping lead the way to a more human future, like E.O. Wilson, perhaps our greatest living thinker on ecology, and Sebastian Thrun, the Silicon Valley technologist who is reshaping skills training for the digital age. I’ll also introduce some of the people I’ve been lucky enough to work with, both in California – such as Sarah Stein Greenberg, who taught me ‘design thinking’ at Stanford – and in the UK – like Rohan Silva, my closest friend and former colleague in government, now creating the world’s most innovative creative work spaces; or Louise Casey, an amazing civil servant who is leading the programme charged with turning around the lives of Britain’s most troubled families.
This book – the analysis and the ideas – is the product of my experiences in government, politics and business, most of them in the UK. For two years, I worked at Number 10 Downing Street as Senior Adviser to Prime Minister David Cameron and had the incredible privilege of being in a position to help implement policies and reforms that could tackle many of the problems addressed in this book – and you will find some of the lessons reflected in these pages. Prior to that I was part of the team that led the modernisation of the Conservative Party’s political strategy and policy programme. And before that, with my firm Good Business, I spent years working on social and environmental issues from a business perspective. In 2012 I moved to the San Francisco Bay Area with my wife, Rachel, and our two children. I was fortunate enough to take up a teaching post at Stanford University and went on to found a political technology start-up, Crowdpac.
When I served in government I was called a ‘blue-skies’ thinker, the government’s ‘ultimate radical’. Another way of putting it: I was the annoying, crazy person. So is this book, as some will suspect, basically just a list of all the ‘crazy’ things I wanted to do in government but they wouldn’t let me? Well, yes, partly. But a much bigger part of More Human is based on the thinking I’ve done since leaving government and reflecting on what I got wrong as well as what went right. In particular, the book conveys what I’ve learned as part of the incredible, entrepreneurial community at Stanford, especially its renowned Institute of Design, or ‘d.school’. At the d.school, students are taught to solve problems by starting with people – what they need, how they think, how they feel. Learning to teach there has been a transformational experience and has profoundly affected my point of view on almost everything. In Chapter 2 I look at how we might apply the d.school approach in government, but its principles of human-centred design are present in every chapter.
My experiences as a government veteran turned Silicon Valley CEO have profoundly changed how I view policy challenges. Unquestionably government can learn a lot from the tech sector, and harnessing some of California’s entrepreneurial spirit could go a long way towards improving the sclerotic institutions that dominate our lives.
I also aim to do something else: provide the view of an outsider to politics. That may seem odd – some would say I was the ultimate insider. But I never felt that way. Although I am a close friend and supporter of Prime Minister David Cameron, there are plenty of positions I take in this book that would fit more comfortably in the Labour or Green Parties. Although I am a fan of markets and decentralisation, as you will quickly learn in this book I am also a strong believer in well-organised and well-funded state intervention to tackle social problems. I’m as anti-establishment as the best of them (or worst, depending on your point of view), yet I’m pro-immigration – not just because I’m the son of Hungarian refugees and a Brit now working in America but because I believe it’s vital for both Britain and America’s future success. I strongly support marriage equality and generous parental leave for mothers and fathers; in fact, I believe in marriage equality so much, I even think straight people should get married if they’re going to have children. Yes, I’m afraid this book will likely goad right and left in equal measure. And that’s okay. (Not least because my political tech start-up, Crowdpac, is non-partisan.)
To be honest, goading the two old parties is precisely what I want to do. We live in a political system that is almost completely broken, ossified into a structure that most people simply can’t identify with. I hope this book can challenge voters and politicians alike to think about solutions that cut across ideology and the narrow dogmas of party politics. As shown by the introduction of the world’s first national living wage law by my (Conservative) former colleagues, you don’t have to be on the political left to be on the side of workers. But equally, you don’t have to be on the political right to recognise that unleashing (reasonably regulated) markets is often the best solution to a given problem, even social goods like education and healthcare. Indeed, whole sectors can benefit from a judicious blend of government and market-based solutions that might appeal to and repel extreme bases in equal measure.
Although Britain sometimes seems broken, it is still making great strides. I hope I can help point the way in a few places. That starts with government. It’s time for us all to envision the country we want for ourselves, not the country politicians (and their donors) tell us we should have. The wise men – and they are mostly men, still – of the political and governing establishment may scratch their heads in bewilderment at the rise of candidates they consider to be ‘not serious’ – but the public, I’m afraid, no longer trust the serious people to steward their interests. In a way, that’s unfair. In my experience most politicians are good and sincere public servants. But the systems that have been built up over decades frustrate their efforts at accomplishing anything, let alone actually changing the systems. We all know the famous Little Britain sketch, ‘Computer says no.’ That’s certainly how government feels to the proverbial ‘little guy’. But, alarmingly, it’s all too often how it feels to the people in charge too.
That’s why changing the underlying systems – and not just the policies – really is so important, a priority I return to time and again in different contexts in this book. I believe it is eminently possible. Across the world we may soon see the birth of a new kind of politics that eschews left and right for engagement and transparency. We seek government that is effective and responsive, society that is orderly and fair. Those are values – intrinsically human ones, I might add – that no political movement can claim as its own.
There’s another important point to bear in mind that makes the idea at the heart of this book more relevant and urgent than ever. In the last few decades great advances in science have given us new insights into who we are as humans: how we think, feel, and behave – and why. Neuroscience, social psychology, behavioural economics – work in these fields means we can now base our judgements about how to organise things much more soundly on what we scientifically know. These human insights don’t just tell us more about humanity; they also tell us that making things more human is itself natural.
For example, evolutionary biology shows that in the course of human history we have become ever more empathetic. Scientific and economic progress has in part been accompanied by an expanded consciousness of the experiences of fellow human beings. We have in some ways become more human, even as the world we have built for ourselves pushes in the other direction. The expansion of our capacity to communicate and collaborate with each other has enhanced our capacity to understand each other’s realities. As we’ve got to know one another better, we’ve extended basic protections and rights to ever-wider swathes of humanity.3
Although our capacity for empathy has evolved, it has always been one of our defining traits as humans. And there are other human values that define us and for which we should strive. Not everything can be quantified by data or captured on a spreadsheet. There are certain things that we simply accept make life worth living: purpose, happiness, beauty, compassion, laughter, love, joy. These are the things that dignify our lives and that every individual deserves the chance to experience. Another key part of our humanity lies in our differences. Fulfilment in life will come through different things for different people – whether it’s faith, literature, work, friendship, music, children . . . even baking a perfect loaf of bread. The burden of society – specifically of government – is to provide the greatest chance for us to find what life means and then live it to the fullest.
Society has another burden, though: to protect us from and help us to overcome our inherent flaws, the troubling aspects of our nature. For all the good of humanity, there are plenty of impulses that are harmful, traits like avarice, malice and intolerance. These also are human, and although we shouldn’t forget that, we should do all we can to help people avoid the worst of their demons, especially when their weaknesses hurt others. There is evil and terrible cruelty in our world. We see it in the crazed, Islam-derived brutality of ISIS, but while we confront and defeat it militarily, ideologically, politically, financially, diplomatically – as we must surely resolve to do – we must remember that there will be no final victory in this, the defining war of our age, unless we triumph at the individual, human level too.
But we are both individual and social creatures. We work better, as I will argue throughout this book, in communities, families, social networks, and on small-scale levels. So how, then, if human nature is naturally inclined to be human, have so many of the institutions that shape our lives become so big, distant, and removed from the human scale?
Think of it in historical terms. (Spoiler alert: for those readers familiar with the speeches of David Cameron, especially ‘the early, funny ones’ as Woody Allen might have described them, this is an argument you will recognise.) Before the Industrial Revolution, politics, government and business were almost entirely local – because they had to be. Rulers simply did not have the information and reach to make decisions about individual people’s lives or run centralised bureaucracies. Local governors or feudal lords were delegated almost all sovereign power, answering only nominally to the far-off capital. Bureaucracies existed, but even the most sophisticated ones in China and the Ottoman Empire relied heavily on provincial officials. Corporations were limited to the most complex of businesses – like banks, even then often in quasi-official roles. Companies like the East India Company or the Rothschild banking empire delegated wide autonomy to local officials; superiors at the centre had only the most limited strategic control. This period we could call the pre-bureaucratic age.
As with many things, war, commerce and technology changed the dynamic. With larger armies and more sophisticated warfare, the conflicts of the French Revolution and Napoleonic eras saw full-scale mobilisations that could only be managed through hierarchical and complex bureaucracies. At the same time, Napoleon applied these principles to the civilian part of his growing empire and created the first modern law code, the Code Napoléon, and an administrative state to implement it.4 Meanwhile economic trends led to similar developments in America. The invention of the cotton gin in 1793 spurred a revolution in the American cotton industry, but it required scale to really be revolutionary, especially in the form of railroads to connect distant farms and merchants. Unlike maritime trading companies, the railroad companies upon which the American cotton industry relied needed centralised management to ensure safety and efficiency (sharing track and sharing the seas are two very different matters). Bureaucracy was the only way to accomplish the logistical feat of connecting entire continents with one system.
Just like the cotton producers, railroad companies also had to consolidate, as building rail infrastructure was, by definition, large scale and expensive. Only big firms could manage the undertaking, and as the demand for capital correspondingly increased, a new, centralised banking system sprang up to finance it all. Bureaucracy was a cycle that built itself, feeding back into its own further expansion and centralisation. The new interconnected systems that enabled military and industrial growth soon spread to other aspects of life. Centralised governments were now able to build bureaucracies to run things on behalf of citizens, and government evolved into an accretion of massive hierarchies. Over the course of the twentieth century this model grew into the form of government that we have today. Along with its counterpart in the business world, it was – and is – the bureaucratic age.5
Bureaucratic modernisation brought a whole range of benefits, from universal schooling to a professional civil service, from healthcare to the rule of law. In Britain it built a national infrastructure and enabled a global empire. These same centralising mechanisms that enabled growth in the public sector eventually conquered the rest of the economy. With efficient transport and technology, unprecedented quantities of raw materials flowed to factories that, powered by steam engines, could now produce and distribute manufactured goods. Firms adopted the administrative apparatus of the bureaucratic railways, and the modern corporation was born. As commercial empires emerged, a cult of management science soon dominated, whereby businesses – and, eventually, government departments – were run by those at the top applying principles of ‘engineering’ to the workers below. It was all about mass production, mass management, mass distribution – and as the Second World War mobilised the American and British economies on national scales, the large corporation became a fait accompli. Coupled with automation and other improvements in technology, the process continued unabated; vast conglomerates were commonplace by the 1960s. The age of the independent local business wasn’t over, but it was dealt a huge blow.
The inexorable growth of big business throughout the last century and a half has brought great benefits; in many respects someone on an average income in the UK, America or Europe today has a higher standard of living than even the very richest did a century or so ago. But the mostly national corporations of the mid-twentieth century that had at least some sense of connection to and responsibility for their local communities have given way to rootless global entities – private-sector bureaucracies – many of which have lost all sense of community, of perspective. The never-ending trajectory of mergers, consolidation and growth has a cost – and not just a financial one (repeated studies have shown that corporate mergers generally destroy value for the acquiring firms’ shareholders).6 We are no longer driven by a human economy; we don’t know where our products come from or how they are created, and too many of our corporate bosses have no conception of their workers’ or customers’ experiences. We live in an age when the effects of our decisions seem less and less important because we don’t really know what they are. We ‘love a bargain’ but don’t see the appalling conditions endured by the people who produce a product that can be sold so cheaply. We troop to the supermarket but don’t see the small businesses and farmers whose livelihoods are wrecked by ‘everyday low prices’. The human consequences of our choices are felt by people separated from us by time, space and class.
In government, too, we continue to live with a system that is a relic of the past. It did work once, but we’re no longer in the age of either sail or steamship, so why are we still governed as if we were? Empire is no longer relevant, and many of the services that government provides – education, health, social services, welfare – are well established and no longer require centralised bureaucratic systems to run them. Simply put, the raisons d’être of centralised government no longer justify it. But its costs remain.
You can see it in the way that twentieth-century factory-style approaches – standardisation, automation, mechanisation – still infect intrinsically human areas like education, healthcare, food and housing. We used to think factories equalled progress. They were sanitary, standardised and quality controlled. They took urchins off the street while providing the middle and working classes with once-only-dreamt-of luxuries. Having tens of thousands of cows or chickens on a single farm seemed like the modern thing to do. But that vision is now out of date.
It’s not just the arc of history, bureaucratic momentum or mass standardisation that has led us to this point; we need to apply a critical eye to our unrelenting quest for progress and how some of our leaders – in government, politics, business and society – define it for us. Where I live now, in Silicon Valley, the goal is to be bigger, faster, cheaper. Does that equate to better? Much of the time it does. But too often the ‘progress’ we are offered is not an improvement; it’s just more ‘efficient’ and, worse, more efficient for the producer, not the user. Astronauts used to consume Tang, a powdered orange drink, because it is compact and nutritious (a requirement on space missions). But should we substitute it for actual orange juice? Or oranges? Just because something is more ‘efficient’ doesn’t mean it’s better.
The misguided quest for efficiency has led to negative side effects that are only now being understood. As technology critic Evgeny Morozov points out in his book To Save Everything, Click Here, efficiency can undermine much of what makes us human: ‘Imperfection, ambiguity, opacity, disorder, and the opportunity to err, to sin, to do the wrong thing: all of these are constitutive of human freedom, and any concerted attempt to root them out will root out that freedom as well.’7 I would add that a world programmed to perfection is no longer a human world: without problems to solve and imperfection to inspire us, we would become complacent. We would not only lose our ability to innovate and be creative but, worse, our world would become sterile. If we never get lost, we will never go to unexpected new places. If we never have to repair things, we will cease to tinker and make anew. Without the spontaneous discoveries – and mistakes – that so enrich us, humanity stagnates. Mother Nature itself is often ‘inefficient’, providing us with two kidneys, for example, where one is enough. Efficiency is not always bad, but we need the cultural confidence to say no, to reject efficiency for human priorities that matter more.
As you will see, this book calls for dramatic changes in how we do things. Some might ask whether that is really necessary. They could point to the UK’s economic growth, political stability and social safety net; the falling crime; the strength of our culture; and the growing vibrancy of our cities and say, ‘Things are pretty good. Sure, they can always be improved, but take it easy . . . we just need a touch on the tiller, not a change of course.’
Really? Have you noticed that it tends to be the wealthiest and most powerful who say things like that? Life is certainly good for them. But look around: life isn’t great for most people, and in many ways it is getting worse. With years of stagnating wages, people don’t feel as though they’re getting ahead.8 They’re underpaid and overworked (Chapter 8). They aren’t gaining the skills they need (Chapter 9). They’re unhealthy because nutritious food is not only more expensive than heavily processed, toxic junk (Chapter 5) but often inaccessible. And their children – without the in-built advantages of their richer peers – are falling behind (Chapter 9).
But the inhumanity of much of modern life – in schools, in hospitals, in urban planning – is no concern for the elites because they (we) don’t have to experience it. Our children go to private schools, we supplement our NHS care with private insurance, and we eat our organic food from Waitrose or the farmers’ market. When life gets rough, we go on exotic holidays or to our tastefully appointed vacation homes. When things get busy, we employ nannies, housekeepers and delivery people to buy ourselves more time.
For most people, though, the current system simply isn’t working. Incremental change isn’t working. This is true in America, where I now live; and it’s true in the UK. But there is hope: small signs that things can be different; examples of the kind of change we need. I have seen them and learned from them over the last few years I’ve spent in California, and some of those signs of hope are profiled in this book. That is, of course, not to say that everything on the West Coast of the USA is perfect. America has its problems, just the same as – in many cases far worse than – the UK. In both countries, when most people haven’t seen a rise in living standards for over a decade and many have seen a fall, when daily life is often such a hassle, when people’s quality of life is below what they see in other countries, when there is a massive underclass persistently poor in every way for decade after decade, I think this calls for a sense of urgency. It’s a crisis, and it demands a big shake-up, not steady-as-she-goes. But our debates feel small, stunted, fiddling around the edges – and this fuels the dissatisfaction with politics and the political system, increasingly expressed in support for fringe parties and politics.
For all these reasons I think we need a revolution, not evolution, and I want to show you in this book that it’s possible. That we can heal Britain’s malaise by putting power back in people’s hands, taking back control over the things that matter to us from the anonymous, distant bureaucrats in government and business. We can move to something better: a post-bureaucratic age, an age when things work on a comprehensible and controllable scale. An age that is more human.
Apart from any specific changes, however small, that might happen as a result of the people, stories and ideas that follow, I also hope that they collectively help you to see the world a little differently. A little more humanly. And who knows where that might lead?
The modern world is a fantastic place full of excitement and ingenuity. But as we continue to invent and innovate and move forward, we should remember what makes us human: people, relationships, spontaneity, emotions. As we create and spread wealth and opportunity, build a world of technological wonder, remake our institutions, and push the boundaries of knowledge, we should try to do so in line with these essential human truths.
People love to complain about government – and yes, there’s plenty to complain about. (There is also much we can do to make government work better, as we’ll see in the next chapter.) However, before we even get to government, we have politics. Politics underpins government. If we want to make government more human, we need to start with politics.
You might think that spending a lifetime in democratic politics would be a positive attribute for a political candidate. Yet ‘career politician’ is now one of the worst insults imaginable. In just the last year, outsiders like UKIP’s Nigel Farage, Labour’s Jeremy Corbyn, and the SNP’s Nicola Sturgeon all had their moments exactly because they were perceived to be outside the political mainstream. Politicians have never been popular, and each new generation brings a new kind of backlash, but despite the Conservative victory in 2015, it seems that in many parts of the country the mood has turned violently against the existing political system.
This is a shame. Politics might seem like a weird blood sport, fascinating only to insiders, but it’s much more than that. A healthy political system means that solutions to problems are debated, citizens’ voices are heard, and society maintains a stake in how it is governed. More than that, it is a necessary conduit for the vast majority of the change proposed in this book. And that is how it should be. In a democracy, our political system is the only institution that truly represents us: our wishes, our rights, our aspirations.
That’s why instead of just railing against our broken political system, we should try to fix it. I agree with those who say that Britain’s problems demand a revolution, not evolution. But I also believe we can harness the political system to achieve it, that we can have a revolution without yelling at each other, a revolution based on real reform. That needs politics – more human politics.
It starts with engaging more people in the political process. It’s not just Britain; in most democracies trust in politics is falling – and one of the main reasons is people’s belief that their participation doesn’t matter. Democracy is in crisis: in Britain (and America, and Europe) it no longer seems that ‘we the people’ are being served by it, but rather the interests of the wealthiest. It seems today that political legitimacy stems not from votes, but money: the more of it you have, the more government pays attention to your concerns.
We have, in some ways, regressed. Corruption used to be the norm in most countries, democratic or otherwise. Power was inherited and bought, political appointments traded for favours in a system where the elites literally owned the state. But although it is no longer so explicit, the ascent of big money and its lobbyists means that while there is no explicit quid pro quo, it is hard to mistake what donors intend when they make political contributions. Or what businesses want when they take politicians to dinner, the opera, the Brits or Wimbledon. We may not have aristocratic courts and inherited offices, but our democracies are increasingly captured by a ruling class that seeks to perpetuate its privileges. Our democratic system has, in the apt word used by political scientist Francis Fukuyama, ‘decayed’.1 America, where the rich and powerful literally buy the outcomes they want from the political system, is no longer in any proper sense of the word a democracy; it is a donocracy. The EU is no better: spend time in Brussels and you will find in the European Parliament and Commission a vast, stinking cesspit of corporate corruption gussied up in the garb of idealistic internationalism.
The fewer people in control, the fewer people who need to be influenced and swayed. At least in America, economic, cultural and political power is dispersed. In the UK, centralisation is a gift to the vested interests. When the corporate bosses, the MPs, the journalists – and the authors of books like this – all live near each other, go to the same dinner parties as each other, even choose the same holiday destinations as each other, an insular ruling elite precipitates. They flit and float between Westminster, Whitehall, the City; between government, corporate boards and shadowy advisory firms. Regardless of who’s in office, the same people are in power. It is a democracy in name only, operating on behalf of a tiny elite, no matter the electoral outcome. I recognise it because I was part of it. Although there is no conspiracy – and I know from personal experience that almost all politicians and officials have good intentions – the assumptions, structures and rules that govern daily life are not subject to anything as unpredictable as the will of the people. No wonder voters feel that others’ voices are being heard more than their own. It’s because it’s true.2
Politics is supposed to be a platform for people power, not plutocrat power. And despite the desire for the former, we still seem to stuck in the latter. In the 1950s and ’60s, politics was relatively simple. It was based largely on class, with workers voting Labour and the middle class and wealthy voting Conservative. Accordingly, around 90 per cent of votes went to one of these two parties. But by 2015, the combined figured had dropped to just over two-thirds.3 Clearly voters are searching for new options. But our political system is structurally deficient: our political views are more nuanced than the simplified two-party model the ossified electoral system forces onto us. Many of the ideas and proposals I will propose in this book would be at home in parties across the political spectrum; others wouldn’t be welcome anywhere. In a true democracy this is fine. Hardly anyone is a ‘dyed-in-the-wool’ anything, anyway. And in today’s age of nearly unlimited information, we can form a much more complex worldview. Yet in public life you have nowhere to go if you take Conservative views on taxes, Green views on the environment, and Labour views on social justice. Unless you want a protest vote, outside of Scotland your vote will invariably go to one of two parties. Our politics falsely project binary simplicity, and that’s a massive turn-off for many voters.
And frankly, when the Westminster elite who run the system across the major parties all sound basically the same, your vote really goes towards upholding the same system. Our views are not ’politician’; they’re human. We need our politics to reflect this.
This is especially urgent because the results of the 2015 General Election indicate that politics is moving beyond the simple labels of party, even if our politicians aren’t. The Conservatives might have won a parliamentary majority, but the British electorate is clearly no longer as tribal as it used to be. It votes Tory and Labour still, but also Green, UKIP and SNP. New and unorthodox challenges to the two biggest parties are regrettable for them, but not for the vitality of our democracy, which is only strengthened when we diversify political options.
There is a new kind of politics that goes beyond traditional party lines, a politics that eschews left and right for engagement and transparency. Tony Blair wrote in his memoir that he believes the new axis of politics is ‘open vs. closed’ and that we will concern ourselves less with ideological purity than with which politicians and their methods are most effective.4 He is exactly right: increasingly we seek government and society that works, that is fair, and that is responsive. Those are values that can’t be claimed by any political movement as their own.
At the local level, the picture is in even greater flux. One of the most exciting political developments of recent years has taken place in the least likely of places: the gentle country town of Frome, in Somerset. In 2010, fed up with partisan councillors, a group of civic-minded citizens got together and decided to run things on their own, resolving to stay independent of any of the national parties. By organising in a loose electoral alliance, Independents for Frome (in essence a party without a manifesto), they ensured that they would have the flexibility they needed to make council decisions on their merits, without the influence of a national party line.
Flatpack Democracy