Politics after the Big Machine

Jawarharlal Nehru, first Prime Minister of independent India was giving a speech in a bus factory. Nehru’s topic was ‘the place of the big machine’. It was 1955, the era of big industrial projects and the centralised state. Perhaps, his audience expected Nehru to celebrate massive mechanisation, to praise the beauty of the gigantic, but it was Gandhi’s birthday, and Gandhi’s argument had always that politics had start with the local and the individual. ‘Perhaps’, Nehru said, ‘the biggest scheme in India is not this big factory, but the hundreds and thousands of community projects that are changing the face of India’. Nehru was talking about the democratic revolution his government tried to unleash in the short years after independence from Britain in 1947. It was a revolution supposed to kick-start the growth of India’s poor countryside by giving budgets to villagers, ‘empowering’ people in their local ‘communities’.

Life in Britain – the same is true in India now – is dominated by institutions which try to get their way without listening to the people they’re supposed to serve. Big business, Whitehall, even political parties are ruled by what Jon Cruddas called in a speech today ‘the old model’, by ‘command and control’ rooted in the age of the big machine. As Jon argued, the traditional tools of policy-making, doling out money and issuing rules from the top, don’t work. The incapacity of centralised power to create a vibrant economy has been badly exposed. The momentum now is for the devolution of power, with Scotland leading the way but England’s towns and cities next. This is localism’s moment.

I start by talking about Nehru because there’s nothing new about any of this. Local communities were the centre of politics before the railway and factory. The industrial revolution built prosperity and solidarity on a large scale, as well the delusion that effective power could be held by a small number of individuals, whether the factory manager or bureaucrat. But the counter argument, made by Gandhi and millions of others, has always been there.

The argument is this: Small is powerful. Change can’t be made by machines. It happens through millions of small actions that are driven by individuals with strong personal motivations, not commanded by others. It’s about people having a sense of individual power and dignity, being an active part in groups and institutions small enough for them to be recognised, but which connect outwards in networks that can create a greater good.

My point is that we need to learn from the long history in which these localist arguments have been defeated. India in the 1950s is a good start. Nehru’s community projects didn’t take off for three reasons: ‘localism’ was run by bureaucrats; change didn’t look like it was happening quick enough for impatient leaders; and real local power depends on the possession of assets which the poor don’t have.

The result of failure was that the Indian government started, instead, to believe only massive projects could be effective – steel plants, dams, ending up with the current wave of massive infrastructure projects, all carefully measured with finely calculated short-term financial returns, and photographs of the politician cutting the ribbon at the opening to boot. The consequences have been catastrophic: an economy in which the resources of the poor are drained to pay for vanity projects which a big winners for private firms these days but from most people lose.

Driving the history of failed localism is one simple thing: the desire of politicians at the centre to look like they’re responsible for everything. Our political idiom – still – imagines voters need them to fix all their problems, to say ‘I made your life better’. They want to stand in front of the levers of power. But real leadership is about convening, coordinating, brokering, organising – getting people who have their own ways of doing things to work together. The big machine is the recourse of the failing politician, just as big industry was in India. These days, as people get more alienated from politics, politicians get more anxious and the scale of the project gets bigger – HS2 in Britain, Narendra Modi’s ridiculous project to build 100 smarts cities which will make everyone happy without human intervention in India. As Jon Cruddas puts it, we end up in a world full of ‘big bang’ policy announcements that practically achieve little.

As Jon argued yesterday, digital technology is one part of the answer, making it easier to network lots of small actions, allowing power and energy to be dispersed, and people to be connected to each other without the mediation of a central machine . But it’s not the only answer. Renewal will only come from a dispersal of real assets, from a breaking up of big corporations into far smaller firms which can be better held accountable by people in communities. As Liz Kendall argued in a speech on social care today, small organisations are often better placed to care.

But the biggest shift is the need for a different kind of politician, who sees their job as to guide and broker, to challenge where necessary and conciliate where possible; whose aptitude is to persuade and direct, not command, who start by listening and then ‘use their power to bring people together to help them find solutions to the problems they face.’

Too many politicians imagine they are bureaucrats, thinking their role is just to make laws without talking to the people they apply to. They don’t notice how badly the traditional policy-making system is broken, and don’t care how estranged they are from society. The result – in a word – is that tweet, Emily Thornberry, and its dire consequences.

But there’s a good bunch of the 2010 intake who get the kind of changes that are needed. I think the tide has turned, and the old route of policy advisor to cushy seat to minister is on the way out. More and more of our new MPs understand this convening and organising role, and see localism as an opportunity for them and their constituencies not a threat. They need help from the rest of us; the party needs a stronger push and bigger reform; it needs people to be trained and to learn; it there needs to be new centres where ideas about how politics in a decentralised polity might work. But I’m optimistic Labour can learn to do politics after the big machine.