The curse of Oxford on our political life

A former minister explained to me how difficult, in fact virtually impossible, it is to get new ideas accepted by government. If you go to see a minister they will have their aides around a large table and it looks impressive. Loads of notes are scribbled down. A seriousness in the pursuit of new open government is suggested. ‘Yes, we do admire and value and are inspired by your forthright determination to quell the rise of poverty’ etc is accepted; ‘And we shall do our best to implement your innovations!’ 

The next meeting is smaller and another meeting may follow. But what is accepted at the first meeting, that innovation is on the way, has shrunk into a ‘might happen’. By the second or third meeting the process is terminated. Why? Because ministers are pulled hither and thither by other ministers. Aides and civil servants who have their own ideas are paramount.

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So a little game is played: for a moment you feel listened to. And then your ideas are consigned to the governmental dustbin. The only chance you have is to petition the opposition, of whatever political complexion, to get them to take on your ideas while they are open and not saddled with their own aides and civil servants and fellow ministers to impede new development. 

Of course what I am obsessed with is my usual bag of solutions: create a Ministry of Poverty Prevention and Cure. Start shifting government thinking from being obsessed with holding the hand of the poorest rather than preventing poverty or curing those in poverty of poverty. And developing the thinking now while in the emergency of poverty. Embrace the need to end the poverty that distorts all government and political ambitions.

All the ambitions of those who profess a need to quell it, kill it, prevent it, reduce it – but they always seem to end up as talkers rather than doers. As non-achievers. 

I will always remember the – seemingly – greatest moment in my political life when, after 18 years of Toryism, Tony Blair swept into office. No political moment before this had seemed so profoundly significant. Harold Wilson, after 13 years of the Conservatives, seemed seismic, but Blair’s arrival seemed to mirror that postwar Attlee government that took over just before I was born.

Blair had even said on many occasions that he came into politics to do all he could to end poverty. It was his life’s task. Yet 10 years after assuming office he had been defeated in his ambition, the very reason he first drew political breath. 

Let’s ignore his capitulation to US thinking on the invasion of Iraq. His programme for ending poverty had some successes, but none of the transmogrification of the state to accommodate poverty’s ending. No reformation of the civil service that would have been necessary to rid the country of the evils and enormous costs of keeping people poor. No reworking of budgeting to accommodate the vast resources that would need to be rallied to defeat the inheritance of poverty. No reinvention of the Treasury to stop its wasteful propping up of stop-gapism. No breaking of the silos of government departments. 

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Cosmetic politics were applied to the face of government. And this has continued haplessly ever since. Government of the complexion, you might call it. Thin surfacing rather than a deeper reconstruction of the spending of public money. Government is firstly about how you spend the money. But it is also about how you get the thinking to inform you on how to spend that money.

At the moment, and from even before Blair’s time in office, government is the plaything of Oxford. Oxford has bred the political classes and the civil service. With some notable exceptions it has bred the thinking and supplied the intellectual framework of decision making. Oxford has moulded some of the finest brains into the shape of government by emergency.

Government by appearance. Interestingly, the US, through its Ivy League-run governments, has done the same. Even Obama filled his government with the vacuous products of the Ivy League universities. Alas, it is an illness that needs to be faced. Why is it impossible to produce radical thinkers around the most pressing issue in society: the inability of government to move beyond stop-gapism? 

Yet with the creation of the welfare state, a limited and not fully thought-through apparatus to create efficient government, it was shown that change could be achieved. We need not apply the paralysis of Oxfordism to government.

We can achieve big and strategic thinking that isn’t simply empirically ‘getting by’. Cleverness, intelligence, even genius make their way to Oxford; and then become Oxfordised. Some of the best brains are marinated into becoming philistines because that is what is done to the bright and clever. 

It’s as if the public school system ‘twerpifies’ potentially thoughtful and caring people who have had the comfort of not living day to day as the workers and servers do. Instead of producing a superior version of a human being, they are fed social values that make them inept.

They cannot conceive of the grandness of a challenge to reinvent government because they only know how to deal with the art of the possible. The impossible defeats them. Yet as Nye Bevan said when creating the NHS, the possible is not enough. Only the impossible was possible to defeat ill health and suffering. 

I do hope you have a good new year. Government, alas, will have difficulty in supplying it. Which gives us more room to do our best to make better new years available for all.

John Bird is the founder and editor-in-chief of the Big Issue. Read more of his words from our archive.

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