Author: dominiccummings

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Open Policy Experiment 1: School Direct and Initial Teacher Training (UPDATED 25/7)

One of the things I wanted to do in the Department for Education was open up the policy making process and run things like wikis in open formats in order to a) start off with better ideas and then b) adapt to errors much faster than is possible with normal Whitehall systems.

Obviously this was ‘impossible’. In the DfE, one is not even allowed (officially) to use GoogleDocs. (Why? Officially – ‘security risk’. Reality – Whitehall’s fundamental operating principle is ‘obedience to process‘. It is not – have a good product, service, or idea. Decentralised collaborations are inherently threatening to Whitehall’s core principles. Hence, for example, why they hate the model of: incentivise a goal and be neutral about method. Although this model has been a success throughout history, it obviously flouts the principle of ‘obedience to process’).

So we could read what was happening in the outside world far from the 7th floor of DfE, and occasionally email or get people in, but we could not interact it with it using modern tools.

But I have a proposal that costs nothing… I’ve planned to do it for a while but today’s twittering on School Direct prompts me to do it now.

I will pick a topic. Today, School Direct & ITT.

And I invite people to enter comments explaining –

What does not work with X?

Why?

What specific things would improve it?

The more specific complaints and recommendations are, the better. A curse of being in the DfE was generalised whining and when we asked ‘what SPECIFICALLY do you mean, what SPECIFIC regulation is causing trouble?’, <1% of people had an answer.

I specifically INVITE criticism of what we did. Not abuse, not praise, not general whining – but specific criticism that can be used to improve things.

The ideal comment would be something like –

‘The following specific regulations XYZ and guidance ABC say on pages X the following Y. This is damaging because X. The evidence for this is X. What should Charlie Taylor do? Tell Marcus Bell and his team to eliminate pages X-Y, and rewrite Z to make everything much simpler and the incentives better aligned. The whole of document A should be withdrawn apart from para B on page C, which should be added to D. The funding system causes problems by XXX. If you simplify it by doing YYY, it will eliminate 90% of the problems with A but won’t solve B. B could only be solved by changing primary legislation XXX…’

You get the drift. This is the sort of advice that approximately never is given to ministers or spads. If the people on the ground dealing with the consequences of Whitehall decisions could give them such help, then it is possible that lots of small improvements could be made quickly. I often made small improvements / corrected our own errors  in response to emails from the front line but this was very sporadic – not systematic – and the process left me screaming at my computer that we were, because of the insane Whitehall structures, so disconnected from reality.

Why would you bother?

DfE ministers, spads, and officials watch this blog. They might change things if you help them by explaining SPECIFIC things they can do. They might also think ‘if we do X, then education world will complain Y, so let’s not do it’.

Gove will read the comments (this is not a promise based on discussion but a prediction based on character). Gove is going to be involved in writing the next Tory manifesto. Therefore if you can show why something is wrong / stupid, you have a chance to influence him and give him ammo to head off the appalling stream of gimmicks that are, as we speak, being cooked up. Others in No10 will also read it. (A plus is that this process can influence No10 even though everybody in No10 will deny they even read it.)

Labour’s team read this blog looking for information to harm the Tories therefore will happen upon useful information that may also nudge them in useful directions. If they become the next government – which betting markets think is reasonably likely – you will have helped educate them.

The media read this blog looking for ‘news’ so also will see worthwhile information.

I will try to answer questions (from those interested) about why we made certain decisions, relying on memory, emails, papers etc. But my goal is not to ‘defend what we did’ – it is to discover what we did wrong so others can improve it. Also, NB. I left DfE partly because I was desperate to have as little involvement in the election as possible and I plan on implementing this by being abroad for its entirety so I don’t have to listen to a word. From recent interviews etc, it ought to be clear that this experiment is not designed to help Cameron or any other political force win an election.

Nothing will be censored or edited by me other than abuse/swearing/obvious frivolity etc, so that hopefully reading the comments will be worthwhile.

If nothing comes of it, then I’ll stop and nothing has been lost apart from a little bit of my wasted time. If someone comes up with a better technical solution then I’ll ditch this and transfer whatever has been done to it…

So, School Direct.

What do you think, why, and what should be done. SPECIFICS PLEASE.

I’ve texted Charlie Taylor so you know he’s going to be reading…

UPDATE 1: Acronym glossary.

Someone reasonably pointed out in comments that non-specialists don’t want to have to google all of the acronyms so here is a quick list of the most common used in comments below.

EEF = Education Endowment Foundation: http://educationendowmentfoundation.org.uk

HEI = higher education institution.

IP = intellectual property.

ITT = initial teacher training.

NLE = national leader of education.

NQT = newly qualified teacher.

PGCE = post-graduate certificate of education.

QTS = qualified teacher status (a Whitehall-defined certification process for new teachers).

R&D = research and development.

SCITT = school-centred initial teacher training.

SD = School Direct. (A post-2010 programme in which schools recruit people before they do training (unlike PGCE), then train them, then often give them a job. Controversy over the flaws / merits of this programme is one of the reasons I did this blog.)

SLE = senior leader of education.

TS = teaching schools.

UPDATE 2: next steps.

To those who have commented…

I am going to leave this thread as it is until Sunday/Monday, then do another blog summarising / clustering the comments and publish that (Monday), in the form of a note to ministers / spads / officials in the DfE. Then people can send corrections / additions etc, and I’ll redo it, then post a final (for the moment) version.

Thanks to all who have contributed so far. I know many of the relevant people in the DfE have read your comments so hopefully some good will come from your efforts…

 

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Wargame predictions from 2010 – how well did the Cameroons do?

Going through papers and emails today from my time in the DfE to write The Hollow Men Part II (hopefully tomorrow), I found this doc, link below. It’s only one page.

In autumn 2010, James Frayne organised a wargame in Westminster to consider the likely dynamics of the next five years. I was one of about 20-30 participants.

At the end, I jotted down a summary of conclusions that came out of it.

I thought it may be of interest to some of those who took part in it but I can’t remember who most of them were, so here it is… Pass it on if you were there.

Do leave comments or a scoreboard below.

Of the 17, how many did the Cameroons come out ahead on?

The PDF is HERE.

 

 

 

Complexity, ‘fog and moonlight’, prediction, and politics I

‘What can be avoided

Whose end is purposed by the mighty gods? 

Yet Caesar shall go forth, for these predictions 

Are to the world in general as to Caesar.’ 

Julius Caesar, II.2.

‘Ideas thus made up of several simple ones put together, I call Complex; such as are Beauty, Gratitude, a Man, an Army, the Universe.’ Locke.

‘I can calculate the motion of heavenly bodies but not the madness of people.’ Newton, after the South Sea Bubble ‘Ponzi scheme’. 

‘Everything in war is very simple, but the simplest thing is difficult. The difficulties accumulate and end by producing a kind of friction that is inconceivable unless one has experienced war… Countless minor incidents – the kind you can never really foresee – combine to lower the general level of performance, so that one always falls short of the intended goal.  Iron will-power can overcome this friction … but of course it wears down the machine as well… Friction is the only concept that … corresponds to the factors that distinguish real war from war on paper.  The … army and everything else related to it is basically very simple and therefore seems easy to manage. But … each part is composed of individuals, every one of whom retains his potential of friction… This tremendous friction … is everywhere in contact with chance, and brings about effects that cannot be measured… Friction … is the force that makes the apparently easy so difficult… Finally … all action takes place … in a kind of twilight, which like fog or moonlight, often tends to make things seem grotesque and larger than they really are.  Whatever is hidden from full view in this feeble light has to be guessed at by talent, or simply left to chance.’ Clausewitz.

‘It is a wonderful feeling to recognise the unity of complex phenomena that to direct observation appear to be quite separate things.’ Einstein to Grossman, 1901.

‘All stable processes we shall predict. All unstable processes we shall control.’  Von Neumann.

‘Imagine how much harder physics would be if electrons had feelings.’ Richard Feynman.

At the beginning of From Russia With Love (the movie not the book), Kronsteen, a Russian chess master and SPECTRE strategist, is summoned to Blofeld’s lair to discuss the plot to steal the super-secret ‘Lektor Decoder’ and kill Bond. Kronsteen outlines to Blofeld his plan to trick Bond into stealing the machine for SPECTRE.

Blofeld: Kronsteen, you are sure this plan is foolproof?

Kronsteen: Yes it is, because I have anticipated every possible variation of counter-move.

Political analysis is full of chess metaphors, reflecting an old tradition of seeing games as models of physical and social reality. (‘Time is a child moving counters in a game; the royal power is a child’s’, Heraclitus.) A game which has ten different possible moves at each turn and runs for two turns has 102 possible ways of being played; if it runs for fifty turns it has 1050 possible ways of being played, ‘a number which substantially exceeds the number of atoms in the whole of our planet earth’ (Holland); if it runs for ninety turns it has 1090 possible ways of being played, which is about the estimated number of atoms in the Universe. Chess is merely 32 pieces on an 8×8 grid with a few simple rules but the number of possible games is much greater than 1090.

Many practical problems (e.g logistics, designing new drugs) are equivalent to the Travelling Salesman Problem (TSP). For any TSP involving travelling to n cities, the number of possible tours when starting with a specific city is: (n-1)!/2. For 33 cities, the total number of possible journeys is:

32!/2 = 131,565,418,466,846,765,083,609,006,080,000,000

The IBM Roadrunner, the fastest supercomputer in the world in 2009, could perform 1,457 trillion operations per second. If we could arrange the tours such that examining each one would take only one arithmetical operation, then it would take it ~28 trillion years to examine all possible routes between 33 cities, about twice the estimated age of the Universe. As n grows linearly (add one city, add another etc), the number of possible routes grows exponentially. The way in which the number of possible options scales up exponentially as the number of agents scales up linearly, and the difficulty of finding solutions quickly in vast search landscapes, connects to one of the most important questions in maths and computer science, the famous $1 million dollar ‘P=NP?’ Clay Millennium Prize.

Kronsteen’s confidence, often seen in politics, is therefore misplaced even in chess. It is far beyond our ability to anticipate ‘every possible variation of counter-move’ yet chess is simple compared to the systems that scientists or politicians have to try to understand and predict in order to try to control. These themes of uncertainty, nonlinearity, complexity and prediction have been ubiquitous motifs of art, philosophy, and politics. We see them in Homer, where the gift of an apple causes the Trojan War; in Athenian tragedy, where a chance meeting at a crossroads settles the fate of Oedipus; in Othello’s dropped handkerchief; and in War and Peace with Nikolai Rostov, playing cards with Dolohov, praying that one little card will turn out differently, save him from ruin, and allow him to go happily home to Natasha.

 ‘I know that men are persuaded to go to war in one frame of mind and act when the time comes in another, and that their resolutions change with the changes of fortune…  The movement of events is often as wayward and incomprehensible as the course of human thought; and this is why we ascribe to chance whatever belies our calculation.’ Pericles to the Athenians.

Maths and models

Because of the ‘unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics’ in providing the ‘language of nature’ and foundations for a scientific civilization, we understand some systems very well and can make very precise predictions based on accurate quantitative models. Sometimes a mathematical model predicts phenomena which are later found (e.g. General Relativity’s field equations); sometimes an experiment reveals a phenomenon that awaits an effective mathematical model (e.g. the delay between the discovery of superconductivity and a quantum theory). The work of mathematicians on ‘pure’ problems has often yielded ideas that have waited to be rediscovered by physicists. The work of Euclid, Apollonius and Archimedes on ellipses would be used centuries later by Kepler for his theory of planetary motion. The work of Riemann on non-Euclidean four-dimensional geometry was (thanks to Grossmann) used by Einstein for General Relativity. The work of various people since the 16th Century on complex numbers would be used by Heisenberg et al for quantum mechanics in the 1920s.

The work of Cantor, Gödel, and Turing (c. 1860-1936) on the logical foundations of mathematics, perhaps the most abstract and esoteric subject, gave birth to computers. The work of Galois on ‘groups’ (motivated by problems with polynomial equations) would be used post-1945 to build the ‘Standard Model’ of particle physics using ‘symmetry groups’. In a serendipitous 1972 meeting in the Institute of Advanced Study cafeteria, it was discovered that the distribution of prime numbers has a still-mysterious connection with the energy levels of particles. G.H. Hardy famously wrote, in ‘A Mathematician’s Apology’ which influenced many future mathematicians, that the field of number theory was happily ‘useless’ and did not contribute to ‘any warlike purpose’; even as he wrote the words, it was secretly being applied to cryptography and it now forms the basis of secure electronic communications among other things. Perhaps another example will be the ‘Langlands Program’ in pure mathematics which was developed in the 1960’s and work on it is now funded by DARPA (the famous military technology developer) in the hope of practical applications.

Mathematicians invent (or discover?) concepts by abstraction and then discover connections between concepts.* Nature operates with universal laws and displays symmetry and regularity as well as irregularity and randomness.

‘What do we mean by “understanding” something? We can imagine that this complicated array of moving things which constitutes “the world” is something like a great chess game being played by the gods, and we are observers of the game. We do not know what the rules of the game are; all we are allowed to do is to watch the playing. Of course, if we watch long enough, we may eventually catch on to a few of the rules. The rules of the game are what we mean by fundamental physics. Even if we knew every rule, however, we might not be able to understand why a particular move is made in the game, merely because it is too complicated and our minds are limited. If you play chess you must know that it is easy to learn all the rules, and yet it is often very hard to select the best move or to understand why a player moves as he does. So it is in nature, only much more so; but we may be able at least to find all the rules. Actually, we do not have all the rules now. (Every once in a while something like castling is going on that we still do not understand.) Aside from not knowing all of the rules, what we really can explain in terms of those rules is very limited, because almost all situations are so enormously complicated that we cannot follow the plays of the game using the rules, much less tell what is going to happen next. We must, therefore, limit ourselves to the more basic question of the rules of the game. If we know the rules, we consider that we “understand” the world.’ Richard Feynman.

These physical laws, or rules, use mathematicians’ abstractions.**

‘It is an extraordinary feature of science that the most diverse, seemingly unrelated, phenomena can be described with the same mathematical tools. The same quadratic equation with which the ancients drew right angles to build their temples can be used today by a banker to calculate the yield to maturity of a new, two-year bond. The same techniques of calculus developed by Newton and Leibniz two centuries ago to study the orbits of Mars and Mercury can be used today by a civil engineer to calculate the maximum stress on a new bridge… But the variety of natural phenomena is boundless while, despite all appearances to the contrary, the number of really distinct mathematical concepts and tools at our disposal is surprisingly small… When we explore the vast realm of natural and human behavior, we find the most useful tools of measurement and calculation are based on surprisingly few basic ideas.’ Mandelbrot

There is an amazing connection between mathematicians’ aesthetic sense of ‘beauty’ and their success in finding solutions:

‘It is efficient to look for beautiful solutions first and settle for ugly ones only as a last resort… It is a good rule of thumb that the more beautiful the guess, the more likely it is to survive.’ Timothy Gowers.

‘[S]ciences do not try to explain, they hardly even try to interpret, they mainly make models. By a model is meant a mathematical construct which, with the addition of certain verbal interpretations, describes observed phenomena. The justification of such a mathematical construct is solely and precisely that it is expected to work – that is, correctly to describe phenomena from a reasonably wide area. Furthermore, it must satisfy certain aesthetic criteria – that is, in relation to how much it describes, it must be rather simple… If only relatively little has been explained, one will absolutely insist that it should at least be done by very simple and direct means.’ Von Neumann.

Some of these models allow relatively precise predictions about a particular physical system: for example, Newton’s equations for classical mechanics or the equations for ‘quantum electrodynamics’. Sometimes they are statistical predictions that do not say how a specific event will turn out but what can be expected over a large number of trials and with what degree of confidence: ‘the epistemological value of probability theory is based on the fact that chance phenomena, considered collectively and on a grand scale, create a non-random regularity’ (Kolmogorov). The use of statistical models has touched many fields: ‘Moneyball’ in baseball (the replacement of scouts’ hunches by statistical prediction), predicting wine vintages and ticket sales, dating, procurement decisions, legal judgements, parole decisions and so on.

For example, many natural (e.g. height, IQ) and social (e.g. polling) phenomena follow the statistical theorem called the Central Limit Theorem (CLT) and produce a ‘normal distribution’, or ‘bell curve’. Fields Medallist Terry Tao describes it:

‘Roughly speaking, this theorem asserts that if one takes a statistic that is a combination of many independent and randomly fluctuating components, with no one component having a decisive influence on the whole, then that statistic will be approximately distributed according to a law called the normal distribution (or Gaussian distribution), and more popularly known as the bell curve…

‘The law is universal because it holds regardless of exactly how the individual components fluctuate, or how many components there are (although the accuracy of the law improves when the number of components increases); it can be seen in a staggeringly diverse range of statistics, from the incidence rate of accidents, to the variation of height, weight, or other vital statistics amongst a species, to the financial gains or losses caused by chance, to the velocities of the component particles of a physical system. The size, width, location, and even the units of measurement of the distribution varies from statistic to statistic, but the bell curve shape can be discerned in all cases.

‘This convergence arises not because of any “low-level” or “microscopic” connection between such diverse phenomena as car crashes, human height, trading profits, or stellar velocities, but because in all of these cases the “high-level” or “macroscopic” structure is the same, namely a compound statistic formed from a combination of the small influences of many independent factors.  This is the essence of universality: the macroscopic behaviour of a large, complex system can be almost totally independent of its microscopic structure.

‘The universal nature of the central limit theorem is tremendously useful in many industries, allowing them to manage what would otherwise be an intractably complex and chaotic system.  With this theorem, insurers can manage the risk of, say, their car insurance policies, without having to know all the complicated details of how car crashes actually occur; astronomers can measure the size and location of distant galaxies, without having to solve the complicated equations of celestial mechanics; electrical engineers can predict the effect of noise and interference on electronic communications,  without having to know exactly how this noise was generated; and so forth.’

Many other phenomena (e.g. terrorist attacks, earthquakes, stock market panics) produce a ‘power law’ and trusting to a CLT model of a phenomenon when it actually follows a power law causes trouble, as with the recent financial crisis. When examining phase transitions of materials (e.g the transition from water to ice), the patterns formed by atoms are almost always fractals which appear everywhere from charts of our heartbeats to stock prices to Bach. (Recent work (here) has made breakthroughs in understanding the statistics of phase transitions.)

However, even our best understood mathematical models can quickly become practically overwhelming. Laplace voiced a famous expression of the post-Newton Enlightenment faith in science’s potential to predict.

‘We may regard the present state of the universe as the effect of its past and the cause of its future.  An intellect which at a certain moment would know all the forces that animate nature, and all positions of the beings that compose it, if this intellect were vast enough to submit the data to analysis, would condense in a single formula the movements of the greatest bodies of the universe and those of the tiniest atom; for such an intellect nothing would be uncertain and the future just like the past would be present before its eyes… Present events are connected with preceding ones by a tie based upon the evident principle that a thing cannot occur without a cause that produces it… All events, even those which on account of their insignificance do not seem to follow the great laws of nature, are a result of it just as necessarily as the revolutions of the sun.’ Laplace

Newton himself had warned of the potential complexity of calculating more than two interacting bodies.

‘The orbit of any one planet depends on the combined motions of all the planets, not to mention the action of all these on each other. But to consider simultaneously all these causes of motion and to define these motions by exact laws allowing of convenient calculation exceeds, unless I am mistaken, the force of the human intellect.’

It turned out that Newton’s famous gravitational equation cannot be extended to just three bodies without producing ‘deterministic chaos’, so although ‘cosmologists can use universal laws of fluid mechanics to describe the motion of entire galaxies, the motion of a single satellite under the influence of just three gravitational bodies can be far more complicated’ (Tao). Deterministic chaos, a system which is ‘sensitive to initial conditions’, was first articulated by Poincaré as he struggled to solve the ‘three-body problem’, and broke Laplace’s dream of perfect understanding and prediction:

‘If one seeks to visualize the pattern formed by these two [solution] curves and their infinite number of intersections, . . .[their] intersections form a kind of lattice-work, a weave, a chain-link network of infinitely fine mesh; … One will be struck by the complexity of this figure, which I am not even attempting to draw. Nothing can give us a better idea of the intricacy of the three-body problem, and of all the problems of dynamics in general…

‘A very small cause which escapes our notice determines a considerable effect that we cannot fail to see, and then we say that that effect is due to chance. If we knew exactly the laws of nature and the situation of the universe at the initial moment, we could predict exactly the situation of that same universe at a succeeding moment.  But even if it were the case that the natural laws had no longer any secret for us, we could still only know the initial situation approximately.  If that enabled us to predict the succeeding situation with the same approximation, that is all we require, and we should say that the phenomenon had been predicted, that it is governed by laws. But it is not always so; it may happen that small differences in the initial conditions produce very great ones in the final phenomena. A small error in the former will produce an enormous error in the latter.  Prediction becomes impossible, and we have the fortuitous phenomenon.’ (Poincaré, Science and Method, 1913)

Even with systems displaying chaos because of sensitivity to initial conditions, short-term predictions are not hopeless. The best example is weather – the study of which was actually the prompt for Lorenz’s re-discovery of ‘chaos’. Weather forecasts have improved greatly over the past fifty years. For example, 25 years ago forecasts of where a hurricane would hit land in three days time missed by an average of 350 miles; now they miss by about 100 miles. We have bought ourselves an extra 48 hours to evacuate. Is a weather forecast better than it would be by simply a) looking at historical data (climatology), or b) assuming tomorrow will be similar to today (persistence)? Our forecasts are significantly better until about day 9 when forecasts become no better than looking at historical data.

However, chaos means that beyond the short-term, forecasts rapidly break down and usually greater and greater resources are needed to extend the forecasts even just a little further; for example, there has been a huge increase in computer processing applied to weather forecasts since the 1950’s, just to squeeze an accurate forecast out to Day 9. (Cf. Nate Silver’s ‘The signal and the noise‘ for more details.)

‘Even when universal laws do exist, it may still be practically impossible to use them to predict what happens next.  For instance, we have universal laws for the motion of fluids, such as the Navier-Stokes equations, and these are certainly used all the time in such tasks as weather prediction, but these equations are so complex and unstable that even with the most powerful computers, we are still unable to accurately predict the weather more than a week or two into the future.’ (Tao)

Between the precision of Newtonian mechanics (with a small number of interacting agents) and the statistics of multi-agent systems (such as thermodynamics and statistical mechanics) ‘there is a substantial middle ground of systems that are too complex for fundamental analysis, but too simple to be universal. Plenty of room, in short, for all the complexities of life as we know it’ (Tao).

Conclusion

In England, less than 10 percent per year leave school with formal training in basics such as ‘normal distributions’ and conditional probability. Less than one percent are well educated in the basics of how the ‘unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics’ provides the language of nature and a foundation for our scientific civilisation. Only a small subset of that <1% then study trans-disciplinary issues concerning complex systems. This number has approximately zero overlap with powerful decision-makers.

Generally, they are badly (or narrowly) educated and trained. Even elite universities offer courses such as PPE that are thought to prepare future political decision-makers but are clearly inadequate and in some ways damaging, giving people like Cameron and Balls false confidence in 1) the value of their acquired bluffing skills and 2) the scientific basis of modern economics’ forecasts. Powerful decision-makers also usually operate in institutions that have vastly more ambitious formal goals than the dysfunctional management could possibly achieve, and which generally select for the worst aspects of chimp politics and against those skills seen in rare successful organisations (e.g the ability to simplify, focus, and admit errors). Most politicians, officials, and advisers operate with fragments of philosophy, little knowledge of maths or science (few MPs can answer even simple probability questions yet most are confident in their judgement), and little experience in well-managed complex organisations. The skills, and approach to problems, of our best mathematicians, scientists, and entrepreneurs are almost totally shut out of vital decisions.

These issues are connected to the failure of political elites to get big decisions right since the 1860s, as I discussed in The Hollow Men. In Part II next week, I will discuss some of the issues about how Whitehall works that cause so many problems and what can be done to improve this situation. In Part II of this blog, I will explore some more of the science of prediction. But I’d prefer you to look at my essay, from which most of this is taken…

*  This happens in social sciences too. E.g. Brouwer’s fixed-point theorem in topology was first applied to ‘equilibrium’ in economics by von Neumann (1930’s), and this approach was copied by Arrow and Debreu in their 1954 paper that laid the foundation for modern ‘general equilibrium theory’ in economics.

** Einstein asked, ‘How is it possible that mathematics, a product of human thought that is independent of experience, fits so excellently the objects of physical reality?’ ‘Is mathematics invented or discovered?’, Tim Gowers (Polkinghorne, 2011). Hilbert, Cantor and Einstein thought it is invented (formalism). Gödel thought it is discovered (Platonism). For a non-specialist summary of many issues concerning maths and prediction, cf. a talk by Fields Medallist Terry Tao. Wigner answered Einstein in a famous paper, ‘The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences’ (1960).

 

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My report for Business for Britain on the dynamics of the debate over the EU, and a small but telling process point on the EU

[NB. An op-ed I wrote for the Times on this subject (26/6/14) is added at the bottom of this post.]

My new company, North Wood, was hired by Business for Britain to do some market research on what swing voters think about arguments over the EU. The report is here. I do not work for or speak for BfB. If you want to know their views on things, ask them, and do not interpret what I say as their view or what they say as my view.

Please note that in this report I do not analyse any policy issues concerning the EU or immigration. I have written a lot about policy aspects of the EU (e.g. p.103-33 of my essay touches on EU issues, this blog gives a long view on UK foreign policy) but this report is purely about public opinion and the dynamics of political conflict. If you don’t like the comments reported, don’t get mad with me – ask yourself why people say the same things all over the country, and why their views are different to your views.

A few points on immigration and an EU referendum that are discussed in the Conclusions (p.16ff) and are often misreported / misunderstood….

1. The official OUT campaign does not need to focus on immigration. The main thing it needs to say on immigration is ‘if you are happy with the status quo on immigration, then vote to stay IN’.

2. The OUT campaign has one essential task – to neutralise the fear that leaving may be bad for jobs and living standards. This requires a grassroots movement based on small businesses. If when voting comes on a referendum, people think ‘all the local businesses are voting IN and they say they’ll be firing people and going bust if there’s an OUT vote’, then the IN campaign will win. If people think ‘small businesses are clearly in favour of OUT’, then OUT will win easily. If people think ‘business seems divided’, then OUT should win.

Immigration is now such a powerful dynamic in public opinion that a) no existing political force can stop people being so worried about it and, contra many hacks I speak to, it wouldn’t matter if the Tories and Mail shut up about it – people’s actual experience and conversation with friends, family, and colleagues is the most important thing driving opinion, not the media; b) it is therefore not necessary for the main campaign to focus on it in a referendum (others will anyway) and focusing on it would alienate other crucial parts of the electorate.

There are some other points about immigration and the Conservative Party which are not directly relevant to the EU issue and I do not discuss in the report but which may be of interest.

A. Many Tory MPs think that if Cameron gives more speeches on immigration and stresses ‘the government’s achievements’ this would be a big help for the Party in the next election. This is deluded. Swing voters do do not think the government has achieved anything – they think the government has ‘kept the floodgates open’ and ‘made the problem worse’. (They do not blame Theresa May for it – she is never mentioned spontaneously.) Trying to persuade the public they are wrong is futile. CCHQ couldn’t do it if they spent £50m on TV ads just on this issue.

B. Much of the commentariat, in my opinion, is also wrong on this issue. The reason for the error is a widespread false model of swing voter psychology (cf. p.18) in which people think that swing voters occupy an average point equidistant between a Right pole and a Left pole. Swing voters, however, are more anti-immigration and anti-free market than the centre of gravity in Westminster.

The fundamental problem the Conservative Party has had since 1997 at least is that it is seen as ‘the party of the rich, they don’t care about public services’. This is supported by all serious market research. Another problem that all parties have is that their promises are not believed. This includes Conservative promises on immigration since 1997 which have not been credible. Now, people have four years experience of a Conservative prime minister and they can see that he has not stopped hundreds of thousands entering the country despite promising to do so.

Over the past year or so, the government has tried to project a ‘tough’ message on immigration. The polls have not moved in favour of the Tories. The commentariat then conclude ‘the public don’t like this, it’s too nasty party’ etc. This is wrong. The reason the polls do not move is that nobody believes a word they say! Why would the polls move?!

Before the 2001 and 2005 elections, immigration was less of a worry than it is now and people concluded ‘I don’t believe the Tories promises on immigration and tax and they don’t care about public services because they’re the party of the rich’. Because of the experience of the past four years, they still think the same about the party now. Promises of tax cuts and action on immigration after the next election will not be persuasive because people will think ‘it’s all talk, they’ve had five years and taxes and immigration have gone up’. This does not mean that ‘swing voters don’t really care that much about immigration and lower taxes’ as many pundits will claim. It means the Tories continue to have a disastrous brand, Cameron has confirmed its worst elements (‘party of the rich’ (50p tax) and ‘don’t care about services’ (‘they cut the wrong things because Cameron has bad priorities’)), and the public doesn’t trust promises. (NB. Swing voters do not think the Government has ‘protected’ spending on the NHS and schools.)

Many pundits write about the Tory 2001 and 2005 campaigns as if they were models of brilliant campaigning – ‘they tested X to destruction’, ‘if they didn’t work, what could?’ But the failures of 2001 and 2005 were merely proofs that the Party was led by people who did not understand the country’s priorities or effective political action and the campaigns were very poor (2001 was appalling, 2005 less so). Promises to cut immigration or taxes fail because those making them are not believed and, in 2001 and 2005, because neither issue was as important as public services which Labour led on – not because swing voters are ‘really’ happy with uncontrolled immigration and higher taxes.

A wrong model of swing voter psychology plus false logic about the 2001 and 2005 campaigns has led to false conclusions and false dichotomies about Conservative strategy. So-called ‘traditionalists’ wrongly concluded that if the Party shouts louder on the same subjects it would finally be persuasive. Some (not all) so-called ‘modernisers’ wrongly concluded that promises to cut immigration were unpopular with swing voters. Both sides in this conflict underestimated – and often still underestimate – the general anti-Westminster dynamic.

A small but telling process point about  Whitehall and Europe

A huge amount of what goes into a Cabinet Minister’s box should not be there – it is a measure of the system’s failure (not Private Office’s failure) – so I usually ignored a large amount of what went in MG’s box but now and then I would go through all of it, particularly on a Friday.

One of the things that is most striking is how much of a Cabinet Minister’s box is filled with EU papers. Here the process is simpler than for Clegg’s appalling Home Affairs Committee, where at least there can be disagreements about policy. In order to continue the pretence that Cabinet Government exists, all these EU papers are circulated in the red boxes. Nominally, these are ‘for approval’. They have a little form attached for the Secretary of State to tick. However, because they are EU papers, this ‘approval’ process is pure Potemkin village. If a Cabinet Minister replies saying – ‘I do not approve, this EU rule is stupid and will cost a fortune’ – then someone from the Cabinet Office calls their Private Office and says, ‘Did your Minister get pissed last night, he appears to have withheld approval on this EU regulation.’ If the Private Office replies saying ‘No, the minister actually thinks this is barmy and he is withholding consent’, then Llewellyn calls them to say ‘ahem, old boy, the PM would prefer it if you lie doggo on this one’. In the very rare cases where a Minister is so infuriated that he ignores Llewellyn, then Heywood calls to explain to them that they have no choice but to approve, so please tick your box and send in your form, pronto. Game over.

It’s the sort of thing you read in history books about how a capital city operated just before the regime collapsed. Like many aspects of contemporary Whitehall, if one put it in a satire, nobody would believe it. It also shows how persistent the form of constitutions can be long after the reality has changed. It seemed to me a bad tactic for officials to to do this as it is a weekly reminder of the ministers’ impotence / irrelevance, and if I were a standard official in Cabinet Office I’d probably knock it on the head – out of sight, out of mind. But as I type these words another thought occurs – perhaps they are behaviourists and they think that if they get the Cabinet into the mindset of just ticking things without reading them, then Whitehall’s interests are well served. Maybe that explains why so few ministers ever complain about it. However, I think that it has also polarised people. A few will be confirmed in their view that ‘there is no alternative to the EU, keep the mechanisms hidden’ but there are certainly others who increasingly think ‘this is a joke, we can’t go on like this’. [No, I am not implying anything about MG’s views – I am talking about an observable radicalisation of Tory ministers in general.]

Ps. Whenever you read ‘the CBI said…’, remember they also said 1997-1999 that we HAD to join the euro or else inward investment would flood out. Also, remember that many of the companies who keep the CBI afloat have vital legal interests in Brussels (e.g. BA and landing slots). Remember that many of their members do NOT agree with the leadership. When Business for Sterling polled CBI members in 1999, we discovered that the CBI leadership had been lying about the views of their own members. Within a year, the CBI had fled from the euro battle. The same can be done again…

 

Cameron’s hollow euroscepticism, The Times, 26 June 2014 

[The printed version was very slightly edited.]

Recently I ran focus groups in marginal seats with people who voted for Cameron in 2010 but think they’re unlikely to again in 2015.

They think Cameron ‘cut the wrong things’ and is ‘just for the rich’ (the 50p tax cut was a disaster), Miliband is ‘weak, not a proper leader’, ‘everything’s gone up except my wages’, and ‘I don’t feel a recovery’. They think ‘I’m desperate for change’ but ‘they’re all the same’.

The combination of immigration, benefits, and human rights dominates all discussion of politics and Europe. People think that immigration is ‘out of control’, puts public services under intolerable strain (‘my doctor’s appointment was delayed’), and ‘stupid benefit rules’ allow immigrants to claim ‘without contributing anything’ then ‘they send the money home’ and ‘sometimes claim for kids back home’.

The biggest change in the EU debate since the the euro battle is that people now spontaneously connect the issue of immigration and the EU. The policy that they raise and discuss most is ‘the Australian points system for immigration’ and many realise that membership of the EU makes this impossible. People also repeatedly mention ‘the guy with the hook’, Hamza, who combines immigration, benefits, Europe, and ‘human rights’ in one striking story.

The second strongest argument for leaving is that ‘we can save a fortune and spend that money on the NHS or whatever we want’. They think that the EU’s ‘costs outweigh its benefits’, ‘we stick to the rules while the others cheat them’ and on issue after issue they side with ‘let’s take back control’ over ‘we gain more by sharing power’.

While a fifth of the electorate is strongly pro-EU and a third are strongly hostile, about a third is up for grabs. While most of these people would like to leave, what holds some back is fear: ‘if we leave they’ll shaft us, businesses will close, jobs will be lost’. The Foreign Office’s belief that EU membership brings more global influence cuts no ice.

The focus of any future referendum choice will therefore be: do you fear economic disaster? If the answer is Yes, then they would reluctantly vote to stay. However, if not then the prize of controlling immigration and ‘saving all the cash’ mean that they would vote to leave.

Significantly, people no longer see the EU like the German football team – more advanced and successful than us. The post-2008 euro crisis has changed this long-term factor and provides an opportunity to argue ‘closer integration with the euro basket cases will cost you a fortune’.

Many Tories hoped that a promise of a referendum would swing the election but this is misguided as the pledge is not believed, and the greater the hostility to the EU the greater the disbelief. People believe that ‘Cameron and Miliband want to stay in’ therefore ‘they won’t risk a referendum’, and recent promises are ‘just because UKIP’s on the up and the election is coming’ – ‘just a typical lie’ because ‘nobody will do anything about immigration’. The fact that Cameron won’t threaten to leave confirms that he is ‘not serious’.

If there were to be a renegotiation, the two things they most want are ‘control of immigration’ and ‘send less money’. If the EU remains in control of immigration, renegotiation would be seen as a failure and would make people more likely to vote ‘out’, as renegotiation would raise expectations then increase anger. While the status quo in a referendum usually has a structural advantage, in an EU referendum this advantage could be lost as the ‘out’ campaign could say ‘this is your chance to change immigration policy’.

Cameron hoped that the referendum promise would push the EU issue beyond the election and he would not have to infuriate people by revealing how little he wants to change. Wrong. People have already concluded he doesn’t want to change much. Picking fights over Juncker won’t fool people.

He bungled into a promise he never liked that commits him to something he never wanted to do yet doesn’t even achieve his aim of persuading people to vote for him.

Because his policy lurches in response to pressure, it never solves his problems. His MPs do not trust him and may soon set their own red lines for a new relationship that does require major treaty changes. He rages that his party is making his position untenable. As they say in Moscow, ‘everybody’s right and everybody’s unhappy’.

If Miliband hires a proper chief of staff and campaigns on the message ‘I won’t put up your taxes and you can’t afford another five years of Cameron so vote for change’, Cameron is finished. If Miliband doesn’t, Cameron will soon face an awful dilemma: the country wants more back from Europe than he wants to ask for, or Europe wants to give.

Meanwhile, many ‘eurosceptics’ have defined their goal as winning a dicey and distant referendum. But even if people vote ‘out’, who thinks Cameron could negotiate the details, and who doubts that powerful forces that want us to remain may try to force a second vote?

It is unlikely that we will remove the supremacy of EU law and negotiate a new treaty until there is a prime minister who can articulate inspiring goals in a completely different way to the petulant and hollow euroscepticism of Cameron, who is supported by an unprecedented grassroots movement mobilising small businesses, and who can exploit what they call in Brussels ‘beneficial crises’, just as Monnet exploited them to build the EEC. We cannot conjure leaders from thin air but we can build the movement as we await the crises.

 

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A few responses to comments, misconceptions etc about my Times interview

On Monday, I wrote a blog: The Hollow Men (Part I). I will finish Part Two shortly but in the meantime here are a few comments regarding responses to my interview.

1. The silliest error is to think MG knew about or ‘approved’ my interview. Michael’s a friend of mine but since I left I don’t work for the DfE. I make my own judgements and have my own priorities. I did not tell him what I was planning. MG is an old friend of DC. Obviously he does not agree with my views on Cameron. The issue of Cameron’s qualities is probably the thing we most disagreed about over the years.

2. The second silliest error is to think that it is connected to a plot by me to make Gove leader. I’ve said hundreds of times off and on the record – MG would be a bad leader, he knows it, and so do his best friends. People in Westminster are (understandably given the extreme vanity everywhere) so hardwired to think of everything through the prism of leadership struggles that if I published photos of Gove in bed with a live boy or a dead girl, someone would write ‘Cummings launches pre-emptive strike to lower expectations as part of secret Gove leadership plot…’

3. A misconception. ‘Cummings has gone mad dog and he’ll keep going until the election.’ Wrong. My motives are in my essay. I told MG I was leaving in September 2013 and I left in January 2014 partly because I did not want to be involved with the election. I dislike gangs and I am not a club joiner (‘nobody would have you!’ I hear echoing across Westminster). I make judgements about people and ideas individually – for me parties are just a vehicle of convenience, not something that define my choices, likes, and ideas. I’m not saying this is better than being a committed party member, I’m just explaining motives.

I want people to understand the barriers to serious government in order that more people take action. I also want to discourage No10 from their habit (growing since summer 2013 as Clegg sank more and more rapidly) of seeing the DfE as a piggy bank from which they can buy off Clegg. If No10 gets serious and stops trying to force DfE to do stupid things, I’ll go back to my history books and rocking chair.

As I explained in my essay, I think the answer to Dean Acheson’s famous challenge is to make our national goal: to be the best place in the world for education and science. Obviously, I do not expect Cameron to think deeply about such a subject. But he will think hard about his own survival. And he may think: ‘NHS – got to keep quiet, bloody Lansley. Universal Credit –  not happening, bloody IDS. Schools. Mmm. Only thing that the Right is happy about. Only thing I can claim to be a mega big bang public service reform. Sort of fits with the long-term economic plan gizmo from Lynton. Fed up of people saying Tories don’t care about poor people, need something for the election. Mmm. Promising a load more cuts for schools won’t go down too well Lynton says. Ok, well I’ve got to make some cuts somewhere but I won’t force the DfE to make more cuts to the wrong things [e.g. 16-19] because of Cleggy’s dopey priorities.’

The most worrying words in the DfE were ‘No10 is interested in doing something on schools’. Without exception, this meant trouble – never progress. All I ever wanted from No10 was for Cameron to say to Heywood ‘I agree with Gove’ and keep his trap shut. Sadly, he wouldn’t do it. But one can hope…

4. The Macmillan issue. In the Times interview there are little dots after my Macmillan reference because my original quote was something like ‘… picture of Macmillan on the wall and he gave that Keith Joseph speech in 2004, that’s all you need to know’. My point was the combination, not just Macmillan. (I’m not blaming The Times, they had to make some cuts and that was an obvious cut.) A few people such as Tim Bale have suggested Macmillan was quite a good prime minister. While I don’t think he was ‘good’, I do think he was a more serious character than Cameron – he was actually a prime minster whereas as far as one can tell Cameron seems to regard his role as the nation’s uber-pundit. (This is particularly odd since Osborne brought in Crosby to provide a focus for Cameron that Cameron cannot provide for himself and Cameron agreed to this, yet he continues with his uber-pundit role anyway.) Anyway, I can see why some people think ‘just saying Macmillan doesn’t mean he’s terrible’ and I agree, but read the 2004 speech too – when read in the context of how he mismanages No10, what I mean will be clearer. (The CPS do not have it on their website so I can’t quote from it but my memory is it was awful.)

5. My job. Understandably, the media story about spads is that they are ‘spin doctors’. However, my role in DfE was not this. Less than one percent of my time was spent dealing with journalists. The vast majority of my time was spent a) thinking about how to operationalise our core goals (reversing the devaluation of exams, simplifying funding, stripping bureaucracy, improving teacher training, building Academy chains, getting a functioning Free School process etc), b) managing officials and processes by hour, week, month, and quarter to achieve these priorities, and c) reducing local entropy (e.g. every financial model being wrong) and squeezing time scales (no this won’t start in 2014 it will start in September 2011, here’s how etc). I focused on priorities, keeping a weather eye on the umpteen mini-disasters per day, trying to stop them becoming big problems, while spending most of my time on (b). (NB. Zoete was the media spad yet he also spent a huge amount of time doing a similar role.)

Formally, spads are not supposed to manage processes and operations. In practice, if you do not do this you may as well be on the beach because government departments are so dysfunctional that even the great officials who could manage things properly are seldom allowed to by the system. At the start of 2011 there was massive resistance to this. By September 2012, it was normal. (Also, we were greatly helped by exponential improvements in the Private Office – the unsung heroes, often women 25-35 working in the early hours to fix errors made by middle-aged men (on 2-3 times PO salaries) who left at 4 not caring if something works or doesn’t.)

Part of the reason No10 does not work is that senior people issue airy instructions (usually in response to a column rather than as part of a serious plan) but, not understanding management, they do not know how to follow through and ensure things are done. (Some of the junior people do do this and helped us.) By the time it realises its instructions have been ignored, months can pass. (I remember one very senior No10 person saying to MG and me one day ‘good job I fixed the planning law changes for you’. In fact, they had told their officials to do that, then forgot about it, their officials did nothing except say ‘the ECHR makes everything impossible’, and to the extent we made progress with DCLG it was despite No10 and because of help from Sheridan. But – thanks to Olive on TUPE!) Given Campbell and McBride et al it is a convenient media stereotype to assume I am some sort of crazy figure who spent all his time on the phone arguing with hacks – but it is not true. The media naturally focus on the media but the important lessons about the DfE for people who want to change things are about project managing priorities in dysfunctional bureaucracies.

Nothing I did from a management perspective would be regarded as special or interesting by anyone who really understands management. The only interesting thing about it is that it needed to be done, is unusual in Whitehall, and nobody senior does it in No10. (There are other aspects of ‘how we got things done in the DfE’ that were not conventional but they do not fall into the ‘management’ category and are for another day.)

6. Gaby Hinsliff and pragmatists v kamikazes. For Gaby, MG and I are ‘the Westminster kamikaze tendency, those so passionately convinced of their own rightness that they are willing to go down in flames for it, and if necessary to take others down with them… For the kamikaze tendency, there’s always something bigger at stake; always a burning reason to blow stuff up… People who don’t need to see the evidence to know they’re right… It’s just that occasionally, when considering the alternatives, you wonder if a little woolly pragmatism isn’t the main thing keeping politics sane.’

A few points…

A) After reading the physicist Richard Feynman’s famous speech on education research as ‘cargo cult science’, I got Ben Goldacre into the DfE to do a report a) to spark a debate about evidence-based policy, and b) revamp the DfE’s analysis division. All the people who write endlessly ‘Gove’s an ideologue who ignores evidence’ never mention or refer to this. It was attacked by many (inside and outside DfE) including the unions. Many are cross about it because the thought of randomised control trials proving that their pet theory is rubbish is not appealing. (Many of the social science academics who write letters attacking Gove – often Marxist economists still in the pre-1989 jungle, ‘literary theorists’, and others from the lowest ranks of academia – are appalled at the idea of techniques from the hard sciences invading their domains and exposing their frauds. For them ‘cargo cult science’ is a lucrative business.)

It is fashionable to say that we ‘ignored evidence’ but it is false. As Tim Oates, head of research for Cambridge Assessment said, ‘Michael Gove has been vilified for ignoring evidence, but I have never worked with a politician who listens to evidence as much as he does’. When I arrived, the DfE did not even subscribe to either Science or Nature – the two most prestigious scientific journals. It took me six months of fighting but that changed. The idea that we dislike ‘evidence’ while the pure civil service or our opponents love it is a comical caricature. We often invited into DfE people who disagreed – often random bloggers or twitterers who had made interesting arguments or pointed out mistakes. In a large bureaucracy, it is vital to keep eyes on the grassroots as they almost always will give you warning of problems faster than official signals (which says a lot about official signals). Large scale RCTs of Sure Start or the Pupil Premium would be excellent. Who do you think oppose them? Not me – bring them on! I wish we had gone further on the Goldacre stuff but like everything else it was a victim of our limited bandwidth in the face of determined resistance. Only a huge restructuring of the DfE – inconceivable on any plausible current trajectory – would enable genuine evidence-led policy to become the norm. Lots of people internally would like it to happen but the obstacles are too high and the incentives won’t push things that way. But at least Goldacre was a start…

B) My objection is not to pragmatism. Our team was pragmatic daily as one must be to get things done. Action requires focus and priorities and these inherently require compromises and pragmatism. It is a tendency of political columnists to polarise every column so Gaby polarises to ‘pragmatists’ and ‘kamikazes’ but I would suggest that if one wants to over-simplify it would be more accurate to label the two sides ‘focused planners’ and ‘unfocused pundits’, with Cameron being self-evidently in the latter category.

C) We were not just wondering around ‘blowing stuff up’. We have been trying to deal with a terrible system and helping many new institutions to grow. E.g. Teaching Schools and School Direct, to give good schools more control over training. Obviously the bureaucracy / Labour / unions hate this as it disrupts DfE central planning (which itself is based on data that is massively and consistently wrong, but who cares about that!). You can disagree with the policy but it is not just ‘blowing stuff up’ – it is an attempt to build healthier institutions bottom-up.

D) Other pundits, encouraged by Clegg, have taken a similar line to Gaby – Gove has turned school reform into ‘an ideological battle’ etc. Let’s leave aside the word ‘ideological’ which often just means ‘different ideas to mine’. We have tried – within the severe constraints of Cameron’s nature, the Coalition, Whitehall dynamics – to take power out of Whitehall on the basis that nothing is worse than the dysfunctional central bureaucracy controlling things (a feeling strengthened exponentially by experience). E.g. When we gave power over A Levels back to Universities, everybody screamed (some Labour MPs were so confused by the sight of us giving power away they simply claimed we were lying – e.g. Barry Sheerman just said ‘I don’t believe it!’). When we tried to remove GCSEs from the accountability system in 2012 we were stopped by Cameron. (We did not try to bin GCSEs themselves – an important distinction.) Interestingly, all the people I have seen who complain about us being ‘ideological’ also opposed this move, as they like Whitehall controlling exams because they hope to capture control of Whitehall. When we got rid of ‘levels’ from the Curriculum – because great teachers told us they were rubbish and were used by Ofsted to enforce bad practices on schools – everybody with power in the school system complained. Why? Because few of those who are powerful in education really believes in decentralising power because they think that will lead to ‘a mess, chaos’.

The people who call us ‘ideological’ seem to me generally to have their own ideology – Whitehall knows best, keep power in the hands of the select few not the dopey parents or voters, aim to capture Whitehall to enforce your prejudices on schools.

E) One of the biggest misconceptions about Gove is ‘he doesn’t listen to argument’. His team argues with him non-stop. We say ‘you’re wrong’, ‘you cocked that up’ when we think it. I told every new person ‘in this team we are honest about our mistakes with each other and Michael’. In all the time I’ve known him, Michael has never said to me or anybody else in our team ‘don’t criticise me / you are wrong to argue with me’. Never. MG has various failings, as we all do, but being closed to criticism is not one of them.

F) Fundamentally, our message is an uncomfortable one. It is: ‘the exam system has been cheated, loads of schools that think they’re good aren’t, massive change is needed, Cameron won’t prioritise extra money.’ Even Reagan’s comms people would find this a challenge. Given Cameron’s team, it was obvious from the start that any sort of serious communication was impossible, which is one of the reasons the media was my bottom priority. (I never listened to the Today programme in my entire time in the DfE, other than occasionally in cars when someone had it on or specific interviews online. Its self-satisfied smugness is nauseating and ministers who change tune because of a bad morning on Today are idiots – it is a paper tiger that you can safely ignore as we did. Few things would do more to improve the quality of government than a mass switch-off of the Today programme and for MPs to spend the time on the Good Judgement Project instead.)

To avoid any confusion: the problem with Cameron is not that he is ‘pragmatic’, it is that he does not know how to get anything difficult done and his judgement of people is such that he cannot hire people to do this for him, so is at the mercy of the media and civil service.

7. Seldon. Seldon said something like – people like Cummings become advisers without ever having had proper jobs or having done anything then they criticise Cameron… Other defenders of DC have said similar things. This is ironic as I did have ‘proper jobs’ between Oxford and getting into the anti-euro campaign at the end of 1998. I’m not claiming I was good at anything but working in nightclubs and starting businesses in Russia counts as ‘the real world’. I also think that this experience was very useful in politics as I had an understanding of how large complex organisations work, both badly and well – something that Cameron has never had, his experience being limited to working in badly managed political organisations. This is one of the reasons he is genuinely baffled by criticism he gets. For Cameron, he’s dealing with an incredibly complex environment (true), in which some things are bound to go wrong (true), as well as could be expected (wrong!).

8. The Economist. It gets my job wrong (see above). Like quite a few pieces it wrongly says I’m a ‘libertarian’. As I make clear in my essay, I am not. (I don’t think libertarianism is consistent with evolutionary biology, for starters.) They think that because I think that a voucherised school system would be better, therefore I wanted Cameron to do this and am infuriated he did not. No no no! I very much opposed any talk in No10 of profits. Given my views of the competence of Cameron and his team, do you really think I wanted them to try to voucherise the school system and allow profits?! No way Jose. I think that if Cameron were to promise that his next government would allow profit-making schools (doubtless as an unthought out move to keep ‘the Right’ happy), it would be a disaster both for the Conservative Party and the idea of for-profit schools. The Economist also seems to think MG and I are ‘sound and fury’ while No10 is marked by ‘doggedness’!? Well, if they mean ‘dogged determination to switch course every time DC reads the papers’, we agree…

[Update. Clegg’s advisers, Reeves and Astle, did argue for profits. Clegg’s ‘I stopped Gove from doing profits’ speech was pure invention, dreamed up by Reeves in summer 2011, and was even more dishonest than a straight lie given his own and his advisers’ views.]

9. The two pieces I thought most interesting were by Janan Ganesh (FT) and Alex Massie (Spectator). The former is close to Osborne’s team (which is significantly better than Cameron’s). I think I’ve answered most of the latter’s points here.

10. Cameron. At the PolEx party (18/6), Cameron said that I am a ‘career psychopath’.

A) No10’s first reaction was to decide not to react to my interview, then one of his friends pleaded with me to ‘leave him alone because Miliband would be even worse’ and another threatened me (incompetently). The fact that Cameron then blurts out an insult reviving the story four days later is an example of my point about the lack of focus in No10. If they can’t decide a consistent line on me, what chance on ISIS?!

B) For Cameron, someone who focuses on priorities and gets stuff done every day according to a long-term plan stretching over years, while ignoring orders from Heywood, doubtless looks like a psycho! I’m not sure which of us would come out ahead on the Hare test, but I know who is better at getting stuff done and it ain’t the guy in No10 watching Netflix with a glass of red in his paw…

Although I’ve been critical of Cameron, I also think he need not be so rubbish – he’s cleverer and tougher than most in Parliament (admittedly a low bar). If his judgement about people were not so bad and he hired a deadly serious chief of staff and did what they told him instead of being the nation’s uber-pundit, then he could beat Miliband easily as Miliband seems to have an even worse operation than No10 and is failing to take advantage of the extremely favourable landscape. But of course Cameron won’t do this because he really does not understand all the criticism of his operation. He doesn’t listen to billionaires who have run things very successfully because he thinks ‘they don’t understand politics’ and because his only experience in life is working in dysfunctional entities – he doesn’t know what he doesn’t know…

So we beat on, boats against the current, towards an election that will be defined by a single question: are swing voters more scared of Miliband’s tax policies than they are of another five years of Cameron? And whoever wins, we’ll have five more years of Hollow Men stumbling from cockup to cockup. Unless those with power and money get behind my essay, of course!

The Hollow Men Part II next week…

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Gesture without motion from the hollow men in the bubble, and a free simple idea to improve things a lot which could be implemented in one day (Part I)

Mistah Kurtz—he dead.



A penny for the Old Guy

I
We are the hollow men


We are the stuffed men


Leaning together


Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!


Our dried voices, when


We whisper together


Are quiet and meaningless


As wind in dry grass


Or rats’ feet over broken glass


In our dry cellar



Shape without form, shade without colour,


Paralysed force, gesture without motion…

… Between the idea


And the reality


Between the motion


And the act


Falls the Shadow…’

The Hollow Men, T.S. Elliot.

In the past few months, between days of wading in concrete (where I am today – no interviews I’m afraid) I’ve been pottering around the country talking to people about politics and our education reforms. The contrast between watching the commentariat and MPs discussing ‘what the euro election means’ while spending hours per day talking to the people who had voted – two very different worlds – prompted me to jot some thoughts as I drove around. Somewhere around Birmingham, listening to a radio discussion of the election and the three leaders’ responses then listening to the news about the black flags racing south while Hague posed with Angelina, a line from the poem above popped into my head and I thought, hollow, hollow, hollow.

The Times interview today prompts me to put those jottings on my blog to explain a bit better what I mean. I don’t have time to do all in one go so I’ll break them up. Part II shortly. It’s written in haste and please send corrections, comments etc to dmc2.cummings@gmail.com

The long view

In the summer of 1862, as he awaited the summons to become prime minister of Prussia, Otto von Bismarck had a wonderful summer flirting with a beautiful Russian princess in the south of France and travelling to London. There, he had dinner with many of the leading British politicians of the day. After one dinner, he wrote to his wife about how little our leaders understood of European politics: ‘[Palmerston] and, to an only slightly lesser degree, Lord Russell too were in a state of complete ignorance… The British ministers know less about Prussia than about Japan and Mongolia.’ Soon after this party, the fateful telegram arrived – ‘Periculum in mora. Depechez vouz‘ – and a profound nonlinearity hit world politics.

For the next 150 years, those at the apex of British politics made colossal error after error.

By 1870, eight years after that dinner party, Bismarck had isolated France and the revolutionary Prussian army (a force decentralised to an unprecedented degree, contra British stereotypes) prepared to smash Napoleon III. The records show Whitehall in chaos over what to do about our guarantees of Belgian neutrality and it watched in bewilderment as Bismarck changed the course of world history with the unification of Germany.

Forty-four years later in 1914, the confusion over guarantees to Belgium, often expressed in almost identical language to 1870, resurfaced. Whitehall was overwhelmed by the crisis, the leading politicians had ignored the hard questions of exactly what we would and would not do in particular circumstances such as a German invasion of Belgium, and we tottered into a war which Asquith had confidently said to his mistress, only days earlier, that we would avoid. Despite 44 years to think about the crisis of 1870, we screwed up very similar questions. ‘Judge of the Nations, spare us yet / Lest we forget – lest we forget’, warned Kipling at the Diamond Jubilee in 1897, but Whitehall forgot 1870 and we were barely spared.

A quarter of a century later, for the third time our leadership was intellectually, psychologically, and institutionally unprepared to deal with the question of deterring Germany and we tottered into another world war for which we were unprepared.

Before both wars, our machinery for military and political planning was an abject failure. After August 1911, the Committee on Imperial Defence failed to have a single serious discussion with the prime minister about the main issues until the war broke out – an appalling failure by Asquith and others. During both wars, the tactical and operational superiority of German forces was eventually outweighed by their political leaders making more big mistakes than ours did, and, thankfully, Hitler would not appoint someone like von Manstein as supreme commander.

After 1945, the ‘Rolls Royce’ Foreign Office made a historic misjudgement about the formation of the European Coal and Steel Community and arrogantly dismissed Monnet who understood better than them how to change the world.

Our economy stuttered, the empire shrank. We failed to formulate a new national policy – an answer to Acheson’s famous jibe that we had lost an empire but failed to find a new role. In area after area, we either consciously abandoned trying to be a serious player (e.g. satellites and space) or cocked it up and frittered away big advantages (e.g. aerospace, computing). (My essay is an attempt to answer Acheson’s challenge.)

After our next disaster – Suez – the Conservative Party made another grand historical error – it begged to join the European Community, seeking in membership a way to avoid thinking about hard problems. After botching the attempts to join, we gave France whatever it wanted as an entry fee then spent the next thirty years handing over more and more power because those in charge could not think of anything else to do. Thatcher too failed here and when she woke up she was chopped.

Having run the world’s monetary system pre-1914, we spent 1945-1992 botching monetary policy (unlike Germany and Switzerland), we lurched from crisis to crisis, and eventually threw ourselves into the ERM only to be ejected in ignominy shortly afterwards. Then we were told that we had to join the euro or we would be ruined.

Thatcher dealt with some of the worst excesses of accumulated errors and weakness. But she failed on monetary policy, Europe, health, education, and welfare. John Hoskyns’ book Just In Time is a brilliant explanation of why she failed, analysing the interconnected issues of MPs’ qualities and Whitehall’s dynamics. (It is telling how little discussed this book is in Westminster.) If she had taken his advice and gone for all-out civil service reform with a proper PM’s department and different people running it, as Hoskyns pressed her to do – i.e. if she had been much more revolutionary – then much more could have been done (though such a move would obviously be an all-or-nothing gamble for any prime minister who really tried it and one can see why she shied away). She thought Hoskyns’ plan was too radical and, trying to muddle through, she fell. Her successors have struggled with the same issues of pulling what appear to be ‘levers’ in No.10 only to find that they are connected to the wrong thing, or not connected to anything at all (see below).

Whatever one’s view of the right response to 9/11 and international terrorism, it is obvious that our leaders and institutions coped badly yet again and have not learned the lessons of recent failures. Our approach to the EU now – whining, rude, dishonest, unpleasant, childishly belligerent in public while pathetically craven in private, and overall hollow – fits the pattern and the supposed ‘renegotiation’ will be the next bullet point on this list (if it’s tried), together with the next so-called National Security Strategy and the next Defence Review. Now, as the black flags of ISIS fly and Putin seeks to break NATO, Hague poses for the cameras with Angelina and Cameron’s closest two advisors stick with the only thing they know – a ten day planning horizon (at best) of feeding the lobby (badly) and changing tack to fit the babbling commentariat (while blaming juniors for their own failings).

Hollow, hollow, hollow…

The consequences of our inability to develop political institutions able to think wisely about the biggest problems in order to pre-empt some crises – ‘to win without fighting’ as Sun Tzu put it – are ever greater because scientific progress also brings ever greater destructive possibilities. Does anybody think our current system is thinking wisely about possible equivalents to the rise of Germany post-1870, such as autonomous robotics, synthetic biology, the rise of China, or the collision of Islam with modernity?

Markets and science show that some fields of human endeavour work much better than political decision-making. I think we could do much much better if we will face our problems honestly…

Coming soon, Part II – what does work, why Whitehall doesn’t work, and how we could do things better…

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Babble in the Bubble: UFSM, Clegg’s lies, and the general dysfunction of the British state

I’m going to blog more on recent events later but for now, a rushed response for various people interested in Clegg on WATO just now… (Please post errors in comments and I’ll fix later. Updates at the end… UPDATED again 15/5.)

Backstory

In September 2013, Clegg announced the UFSM gimmick at LibDem conference with no proper preparation or costing, and giving the DfE only hours notice. Absolutely typical of modern Westminster and a small example of broader dysfunction (HS2 and aircraft carriers are bigger examples of the broader dysfunction).

On 29 November, Gove wrote to HMT pointing out the DfE was already 400m overspent on capital.

On 3 December 2013, Clegg’s office told DfE that it would announce the next day new capital funding for kitchens. (Clegg’s office had forgotten about kitchens when they made the original announcement.)

DfE said (paraphrase)… Don’t announce stuff on this yet again on the back of a fag packet or it will go even more wrong. The numbers you want to announce are junk. 150m is not enough. You’re claiming 80m of it comes from ‘underspends’ – ‘it’s untrue’ (direct quote), we are 400m OVERspent on capital, what on earth are you talking about. You do not have clearance to announce this. (Clegg’s office: the media bids are booked, all systems are go, the DPM thinks you’re just jealous of his ace announcement.)

The next day on 4 December 2013, Clegg announced it all anyway without changing anything. Officials in the DfE press office refused to endorse Clegg’s figures because they knew they were lies. Clegg’s spin doctors went mad and told the BBC that the DfE had ‘gone rogue’. (They’ve got a partial point there but not in the way they mean.)

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-25220037

In January 2014, Laws then did a deal with HMT. 80m of unspent revenue was ‘converted’ to capital as part of an obscure HMT process called ‘budget exchange’. This 80m of newly created ‘capital’ was then dropped into the UFSM pot. This meant that technically the DfE could say that this was both ‘unspent money’ and ‘new’. Hey presto, Clegg hadn’t lied at all! It was ‘unspent’ and ‘new’ money! (Ps. I doubt Osborne was aware of this – I think it was signed off by Alexander.)

(Although I did have some very big disagreements with some officials, DfE officials behaved properly on this. The faults here cannot be blamed on them.)

In March 2014 I revealed some of this to WATO in the hope it would prompt some reflection in Downing Street about the way they let Clegg rampage around using his HA Committee as a blackmail weapon to extort money for his speeches / gimmicks.

Clegg and Laws said I was talking ‘utter balls’, I’m a ‘fantasist’ etc.

Some public spirited person leaked a load of emails to WATO showing that all my specific claims were true and Clegg and Laws were talking ‘utter balls’.

Instead of re-evaluating, Clegg went further off the deep end. Bad move. By yesterday, people in the Cabinet Office were wrapping cold towels around his head and pointing out this was a disaster for him. He then ran to Cameron begging him to ‘make Cummings stop’. In Downing Street, people sucked their teeth and said that might be tricky. Might Gove be able to? No, he doesn’t listen to anybody, he’s obsessed with his bloody essay… Mmm, Cleggy – best pipe down on this for a while…

WATO Today

Today Clegg goes on WATO. Is ambushed. Another public spirited person has tipped off WATO that the DfE Performance Committee has just moved UFSM to ‘red rated’ meaning there are serious chances of big problems. (Schools have a huge amount of change to cope with in September. Think of all the effort now being wasted that could have been spent on implementing the National Curriculum, or improving Ofsted. Gove warned Clegg and No10 of this happening and now he has to waste huge amounts of his time trying to sort out the mess, along with a load of officials who should be dealing with priorities.)

Clegg’s WATO response – this happens all the time in Whitehall [unintentionally this is both true and black comedy], everything will be fine, no it doesn’t mean Cummings was right about anything… He then uses the dodge Laws worked out in January – but botches it. ‘It’s unspent capital’ he said. Somewhere on the 7th floor of the DfE, the Permanent Secretary put his head in his hands and said to himself, can anybody make Clegg shut up about this, please, anybody…

When James McGrory tells the lobby ‘it’s all new capital, no story, nothing to see hear’ this afternoon, the answer is – This ‘new capital’ is funny money created out of thin air by budget exchange, and the DfE remains hundreds of millions overspent on capital because Danny Alexander (and others in government to be fair) never took Basic Need and maintenance seriously enough. And the programme has gone ‘red rated’ because too many people have no idea about a model for government other than government by gimmick and rubbish media grid…

Quick conclusion

A few people have asked why I am bothering. It obviously makes Gove’s life harder in some ways. UFSM is hardly the biggest issue around. True. But it is a good case study of general political dysfunction. In a small way it shows why we live in a constant series of gimmicks, cockups, and waste. It shows the daily routines of Westminster that operate against having serious people in charge of things – people who know how to set priorities, focus, and manage complex processes. It is a case study for my essay.

My point is: we need a serious change in how we are governed. My essay is an attempt at sketching some features of such a new approach that could bring people into politics with real talents, instead of just those who climb to the top of party hierarchies, and how we could build new institutions. Why do we have to be governed by Cleggs while our finest minds, entrepreneurs, and so on are shut out of government? Project management is not hard in the same way that theoretical physics is hard – there are tried and trusted methods that a lot of people without exceptional talents can use – yet we can’t embed it in government. Surgeons and pilots create ‘checklists’ to avoid repeated errors but we have… UFSM, aircraft carriers, HS2…

My essay also suggests that we should put education and science at the heart of our national policy instead of treating it as a piggybank for Cleggs to use when they need to fill a hole in their media grid.

Read a summary here:

https://dominiccummings.wordpress.com/the-odyssean-project-2/

Clegg now is asking Cameron for ‘a truce’. It’s the wrong question. This is not about personal grudges or party politics – it’s about whether we can do better than the system we’re stuck with. I don’t care whether powerful people are cross – if I cared about that, we’d never have done anything in the DfE. He’d be better off if someone puts a copy of my essay  in his weekend box and (as he gazes out the window, closes his eyes, and takes a deep breath) he spends 20 minutes reflecting on the question: ‘am I bending the truth too much, is it possible that this prick has at least a bit of a point?‘ (Don’t think ‘the rest of the Cabinet does the same’, Nick, focus on yourself.)

Ps. 1. I don’t care about this myself but there’s a depressing irony for Clegg. Clegg is so rubbish at communications that even if the public is happy with UFSM in September, nobody will know it was Clegg’s idea: Cameron will get the credit with the public and Gove will get the credit in Westminster for sorting out the mess.

2. Clegg thinks he can overcome the strategic disaster of tuition fees by picking fights with his own government on page 10 of the papers. If he or his staff understood strategy and communications, they’d know he has been on a doomed mission for the past two years. 1000 page 10 stories of babble in the bubble won’t undo one big mistake…

***

[Added later as things occur to me…]

Ps. 3. To hacks looking for follow-up angles tomorrow, it’s been mentioned before but has not got proper attention… The nonlinear effects of  ‘Clegging’ an announcement… Clegg and Laws forgot that by bringing in UFSM, they accidentally knackered the mechanism for distributing the Pupil Premium. The PP is based on eligibility for FSM – but if you make FSM universal, there is no ‘qualification’ for FSM. So because they did not think through one gimmick, they accidentally blew a hole in a multi-billion pound project that they had planned to make a centrepiece of their ‘achievements’ at the next election. When I left on 31 January there was no solution for this. Is there one yet? The UFSM gimmick removed the focus of FSM from the poorest and instead extended middle-class welfare. It would be particularly black irony if the manner of its introduction hit the poorest hardest by undermining the PP. Fingers crossed some brilliant DfE officials have managed to find a way to get everybody out of this hole…

Ps. 4. I said yesterday that in his rage Clegg had accidentally repositioned himself against Free Schools and he would execute a clumsy double reverse ferret. On C4 now, he’s pursuing both lines – he’s back to ‘Cummings is an unknown loopy’ (having told Cameron and Heywood yesterday he was going to shut up about me) and is claiming ‘I’m really pro-Free Schools’. ‘Loopy’ doesn’t work with the lobby. (If he’d said ‘eccentric’ he’d get more traction.) But he’s also boxed himself in on another front. Like Labour, he can’t decide whether to attack Free Schools to win votes from one subsection of the public, or to support Free Schools to win votes from a different subsection. And by making it obvious to everybody that everything he says is motivated by self-preservation, he lacks any moral credibility – the most vital commodity in politics.  

http://www.channel4.com/news/nick-clegg-dominic-cummings-free-schools-michael-gove

Ps. 5. A few have emailed saying what should No10 do? The most obvious thing that is also just faintly imaginable, depending on the psychological state of No10 at the time, is: a) After the euro elections when Clegg’s eyes are straining at the TV watching for signs of a coup, DC calls in Heywood and tell him the HA Committee system is changing, Cameron will chair HA from now, no more blackmail from Clegg; b) shunt Clegg into a corner with a fig leaf for his ego, something grand-sounding but fundamentally trivial (Heywood is very good at this); c) DC tells Llewellyn ‘we are going to stop using the DfE as a piggybank to buy off Clegg, he’s finished, we don’t need to, that phase is over’; d) Osborne has a friendly chat with Danny – ‘Danny you’ve done SUCH a good job, I now need you to have a crack at X, so-and-so will be taking over these other trivial duties from you from now, time you moved up in the world…’ Won’t solve everything but it would be a start (and it would give Gove’s team space to embed reforms and think about explaining them without constant stupid Whitehall battles over trivia). Odds of Clegg walking out on Coalition (which is what Llewellyn has nightmares about)? <5%.  There’s a decentralised ‘what Tory Cabinet Ministers could do themselves if they don’t mind a cross call from Llewellyn’ version of this idea but I’ll keep that to myself for now while I try to persuade someone (not Gove) to do it. Have a crack in comments if you want…

Ps. 6. UPDATE: Clegg, a Manchurian Candidate…

I’ve explained my goals and why prolonging the story suits me, and how Clegg can’t win. I’ve posted it on a blog for Clegg’s staff and No10 to read. And the BBC has printed a string of emails proving that I am telling the truth and Clegg is lying. And Clegg is trying to fight an election yet steps on his own story every time he does an interview because he won’t stop talking about me and food.

Yet, and yet… Does Clegg decide to pipe down? No! Does anybody in Downing Street lock him in his study? No – they send him out this morning like a balloon that they’ve let go of, to whizz around the broadcast studios making himself even more of a laughing stock and advancing my goals again.

Clegg has become a Manchurian Candidate…

A mole has filled me in…

Yesterday, Clegg storms along that funny little corridor from his office to Cameron’s office, an increasingly frequent event. ‘Gove’s making me look a fool, I demand that you make him sign a joint op-ed with Laws.’

DC wearily, with that bored pained expression he gets: ‘Yeahsss, ok, Ed will call him if you reeaally want Nick. You did say on Monday that it’d be best to pipe down though, are you suuuuure this is wise…?’

‘Yes, if Gove signs up then the media will change the story, they’ll see Cummings is lying.’

‘Mmmm, ok, Ed, call Gove, he’ll play ball, Nick, don’t worry. Jeremy, have we got anywhere with…’

Yes, this is how the people in charge of dealing with nuclear weapons, the EU, ‘flash crashes’, and terrorism are spending their time these days.

Gove being Gove says, ‘Yes no problem Ed [Llewellyn]’, before giving the piece a few little twists. Laws, himself now deranged on the subject and searching under his desk hourly for my moles (he won’t take them alive), signs it off not realising that the piece is a Gove joke.

Gove is very happy – the PM, happy. Henry Dimbleby, happy. Cleggy and Laws, happy. And Dom… VERY HAPPY! (Droll, Michael, very droll, I would have said ‘take out the Bruce Willis bit, Laws will never wear that’ but you got away with it.)

Then, it gets worse. Clegg tells his spin doctors ‘make sure the Times realise I got Cameron to order Gove to do it’. Yes!

And nobody in No10 said, ‘Errrr, but Nick I thought we were trying to convince everybody that Gove really does love this policy, if we brief that we forced him to do it, then we make our own story incredible, maybe we should shut up and stop talking about food since that prick wants us to keep going and his bloody moles keep leaking on us…’ (It’s a bit like that scene in Dr Strangelove where the guy screams – what’s the point of having a doomsday weapon if you forget to tell anyone about it… What’s the point of forcing someone to say ‘I really do agree’ if you tell everybody you had a gun to his head?!)

Clegg, let me explain a few things to you, I am telling you the truth if only you would believe that.

A. My motives are what I’ve put on my blog. You think I’m trying to help the Conservative Party. No no no!

B. This op-ed helps me. It does not help you. You see, I want this story to keep running. I want people in Whitehall to think, ‘I don’t want to be the next school food story.’ You, if you had sense, would be trying to make it stop. The more you push back, the worse it will get. Every time you rant in another interview that I’m loopy, it helps me. It just means more people read my blog, read the leaked emails, and conclude you’re a liar – and it makes it more likely that people will do what I want.

C. You cannot turn the story around now. Nobody with an IQ >75 is going to believe you when the leaked emails show I was telling the truth.

D. Not only do you not understand what my goal is, you don’t know what your own goal is. If you walk into your private office right now and say ‘Lucy, everyone, what the hell are we trying to do in this row on UFSM?’, everyone will have different answers. And someone will be thinking ‘you don’t know yourself Nick, you keep screwing your own interviews by engaging with that prick Cummings’ (but they won’t say it because you, like most people at the top of the greasy pole, don’t encourage criticism, hence constant errors.) You have a vague hope this nightmare can be turned around, but you don’t know how to do it. It can’t. Because your organisation, strategy, and message are hopeless and you don’t even have clarity about your own goal.

E. I blew this up because I want people in No10 to realise that every time between now and next May that they interfere in the DfE with some stupid gimmick, the story might go badly wrong because someone will leak something. I want Cameron to grit his teeth and say ‘Cleggy, I know you need your gimmicks, and you can have them, but why don’t you go and play somewhere else, if you go near the DfE again, it will probably just go tits up. Now, look Cleggy, Transport, trains, they’re shiny Cleggy, men in overalls and hardhats Cleggy, very good for TV Cleggy, aren’t they Dre-ster?’

The Dre-ster: ‘Very good PM, MUCH better territory than schools, you are so clever PM, you always get it right.’

‘Quiet, Dre, Nick’s thinking…’

Of course, maybe you’ll all just plough on. But you see – I haven’t lost anything. At least I’ve tried to keep your incompetent noses out of schools.

Back in 2004 I helped with the campaign that won the referendum on the North East Regional Assembly. Thanks to the talents (not of me but) of James Frayne and my uncle Phil, a 70:30 Yes turned into a 80:20 No, with a few thousand quid against an entirely hostile North East establishment. One of the things I remember from that campaign is that a moment arrived after which every time our opponents did anything, they lost and we gained. It didn’t matter what it was. It didn’t even matter if it was a good idea. The media turned it into a disaster. They were screwed, their internal cohesion imploded. Colonel Boyd used to call it ‘being inside your opponent’s decision-cycle’. In communication campaigns, this happens because your organisation works and your strategy and message are right. It doesn’t happen often. (NB. Frayne became director of communications in the DfE in 2011. No coincidence things turned around.)

Clegg – it looks to me like you are in this position now. Of course, I could be over-optimistic and maybe something will turn up for you. But it seems to me that, now, whatever you do advances my goals. Your credibility is zero. Everything you try will go wrong. You have become a Manchurian Candidate – you force people to read my essay and think about my critique of the system. As they say in Moscow, ‘thank God for fools.’ 

 

 

 

 

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A few thoughts on free school meals, Ofsted, and an answer to S Jenkins

Simon Jenkins has written a bizarre piece in the Evening Standard, here. As well as answering that, I’ll explain a few others things about it… (See

Unfortunately, he has completely misunderstood the basics of the universal free school meals fiasco.

He writes: ‘Gove decided, by a deal with Nick Clegg, that running every school meant insisting every child have a “proper meal”. The order went out over Christmas. Gove would be first to admit he has never run a whelk stall and was surprised to discover that schools were having trouble becoming Jamie Oliver academies overnight… Comrade Stalin himself would have warmed to the tears of gratitude.’

Where to start?! SJ clearly thinks that we did ‘a deal’ with Clegg because we wanted to do this UFSM gimmick. He must have missed the news all week. The whole point of what I’ve been saying is that a) the DfE was not told about the UFSM announcement by Clegg at his party conference (until hours before it became public) because it was a quad deal; b) after the announcement we  warned repeatedly that the way Clegg was trying to do the gimmick would cause big problems; c) his funding numbers were junk, his claims to the media of a DfE ‘underspend’ were fictitious since we actually had an overspend  of hundreds of millions, and finding the money for the gimmick from our maintenance budget, as we were told to do, would mean fewer collapsing school roofs fixed. We told Clegg these things before he told the media his tale.

When the Select Committee looks at the email traffic between the offices, it will see – and publicly confirm – the accuracy of the above paragraph. It will also show that Clegg’s claims that what I have said were ‘utterly, totally wrong’, and Laws’s claim that I am talking ‘utter balls’, were untrue. (I could prove it with 10 minutes effort now but it will be better to wait for the proper inquiry.)

Also, some basic logic confirms the truth of what I’ve said. Why did Laws have to hand out the money for the UFSM gimmick on the basis of ‘numbers of pupils per LA’? Because there was no time to find out which schools have no kitchen and therefore need the money. Why has the DfE had to add to the £150m? Because the original Clegg announcement was not enough, as we warned (e.g. on 4 December 2013). Why has Clegg had to drop his promise everyone will get a ‘hot’ meal? Because he made that promise without agreement with DfE then was told it was impossible to deliver by September 2014. (And why is David Laws in meetings about the effects on the Pupil Premium? Because they didn’t think before launching the gimmick about the knock-on effects, given the PP uses FSM as its eligibility criterion.)

Jenkins then writes: ‘Worse is the plethora of special advisers whom Cameron has allowed into government. These people have nothing to do except further their boss’s career. They leak and plot and lobby. In Gove’s case a “shadowy army” of schemers have done his reputation harm…’

If SJ knew what was going on in the lobby, he would know that I have consistently and repeatedly said the same thing on and off the record about Gove and the leadership – he would be a bad leader and nobody should encourage the idea. You will not find anybody in the lobby who says I have pushed that silly idea to them – I have knocked it down hundreds of times since 2007. So has Henry de Zoete. Understandably, nobody understands what our jobs were. I spent less than 1% of my time dealing with the media. My job was: what are our priorities, what policies can advance them, project manage them through the DfE, try to suppress the chaos-inducing entropic forces of Westminster/Whitehall. (One of the reasons our team could operate as we did was that MG did not want to be leader and we did not want to be MPs.)

Jenkins then writes: ‘Yet he wants to excuse “his” academies and so-called free schools from the same draconian inspection for discipline and curriculum that he imposes on local authority schools. This is a clear double standard.’

Completely wrong. Not just wrong – the opposite of the truth. The only ‘pressure’ we put on Ofsted was to reform itself quickly to avoid the many cockups. E.g. It is obviously bad for Ofsted to say ‘Outstanding’ then days later the school has a major sex scandal. Our ‘pressure’ on Ofsted was for  Academies and Free Schools to be treated in the same way as others – not the opposite. Why? Nobody in their right mind would think that trying to cover up problems was a successful way to embed the policy. Our main concern about Ofsted from the beginning was the gap between stated policy and actual practice. I think this was a reasonable concern given the evidence. (I will write separately about the Ofsted issue because there are many misunderstandings about it after Wilshaw’s unfortunate interview.)

Does SJ think that me raising this UFSM issue now helps Gove politically? It does not – it angers Clegg’s and Cameron’s team. Why did I do it? Because our team went to the DfE to improve schools. We did not go there to help politicians like Clegg try to buy his way into positions of power by bribing people with taxpayers’ money. We spent a huge amount of time trying to stop gimmicks from all over Whitehall, to limit Whitehall’s interference with schools, and to save taxpayers’ money. We tried to resist the widespread culture among ministers of – ‘I’m making a speech next week, I need a new announcement for the lobby, tell Gove to give me a hundred million for [summer schools, meals, nurseries, insert gimmick as appropriate].’ If Clegg gets a black eye on this gimmick, my hope is that it will be harder for them to push more silly gimmicks on schools over the next year. I will be similarly honest about gimmicks from the Conservatives if they come.

People tell me that SJ is a nice man and the only time I spoke to him at length we had a pleasant chat, but he should do some research before writing his columns – even just reading the papers! – to avoid spreading confusion. There are all sorts of legitimate reasons to disagree with what Gove’s team did or is doing. SJ should focus on those since he clearly does not like Academies.

Note. Below is a transcript of an email exchange between me and the World At One that was played on Radio 4, 11 March 2014. 

WATO: How did the policy come about in the first place?

Me: Clegg’s team tried to persuade us to do it in 2013. We refused. So Clegg said to Cameron in secret before party conferences, ‘you give me this and I’ll give you your marriage tax announcement for Tory conference, Gove refuses to do it so you’ll have to force him.’ The DfE wasn’t told until about an hour or so before the announcement. No policy work was done in advance.

WATO: Did the Department for Education support the policy and did it believe it would work?

Me: Officials in DfE were unanimous that it was a bad gimmick and introduced in a way that makes it hard to avoid implementation chaos. Officials were obviously right.

WATO: What warnings did the Department for Education give about the idea?

Me: We told Clegg a) it was a bad idea in principle as there were much bigger priorities for spending a billion quid; b) if he and DC were determined on it, do not rush it in, it would impose big demands on schools (e.g. new kitchens) at a time when they have a lot of really important changes to adapt to, that we wouldn’t be able to do it sensibly in time, and c) that all the figures bandied about were junk and he should not say them publicly.

WATO: What form did the warnings take? (emails? Meetings? Letters?)

Me: All three.

WATO: Where did the £150m budget for capital spending on kitchens and dining rooms come from?

Me: It was a back of the fag packet number by Clegg’s spin doctors. We told them it was rubbish. It is based on a supposed DfE underspend that did not exist and they were told it did not exist. Because Clegg only thinks about politics – and starts every meeting saying ‘I haven’t been able to read the policy papers but let’s talk about the politics’ – he assumed that our opposition was because it was a Clegg idea but it wasn’t. Our opposition was because it is a dumb idea badly executed that shows why politicians should have less power over schools, and although I had many disagreements with Whitehall officials and the methods of the civil service, this is very firmly the fault of Clegg and NOT CIVIL SERVANTS IN GENERAL AND THE DFE IN PARTICULAR.