The problem with paranoid leadership

Ed doesn’t have it. Gordon Brown probably did. Some of the Parliamentary Labour Party do. It makes the difference between a bad and good council leader. In local government it is (I think) on the wane, but it’s still far too rife. Over the next few years, it’s the greatest potential block on a successful Labour government.

I mean paranoid leader syndrome. You know it when you see it. Even when a leader’s heart’s in the right place paranoia creates an obsession with political tactics, a constant manoeuvring to stay in power which gets in the way of doing anything useful. It produces a tendency towards suspicion, and a dynamic where authority is centralised in the leader’s office. Without anyone to trust, you end up making terrible decisions. You’ve all see it.

This is week 2 of my series on how Labour should govern. In the run-up to the election, I’m going to outline what Labour in power should mean in practice. As I said last week, Labour’s big theme needs to be liberty, to build a society where people have the freedom to shape their own destiny. Labour’s idea of liberty starts with the fact we have free will but are always dependent on others. Labour should rebuild the institutions that support us make our way in life.

This week I was going to write about housing – that’ll come next week.

But there’s a danger that keeps plaguing me – that ‘how Labour governs’ just becomes a list policies. Too often in politics we forget that how we act, and how we treat each other often matters more than what we do. We can make a particular change by involving and energising, or we can demand and dominate– we all know the difference from our work lives.

Behaviour matters.

The hyper-rationalism of our policy world sometimes allows us to forget the importance of our conduct and attitude – whether someone is consensual or domineering, overly-assertive or overly-cautious for example. The inhabitants of the Whitehall village imagine instead that politics is a list of actions without people or processes. Electors aren’t stupid though. Most of us vote on the basis of personalities not programmes. When we do that, we are using the gauge what of someone would be like in power we have. Do we want to elect people who are good down the pub? No, but we need people who’ll listen, can be bold but not bossy, who are confident and not paranoid, and none of that can be communicated by a manifesto.

The paranoia of our leaders seriously endangers our liberty. The paranoid leader isn’t comfortable unless they control everything. They’re constantly anxious about things happening outside their sight, worried that things are going wrong or, worse, that someone is plotting to diminish their power. They meddle and micro-manage to show they’re in charge.

The problem of course is that leaders can’t control everything. In practice the exact opposite of power: a mess where no one knows what’s happening, because the leader can only know so much; but no one has the freedom to be creative. The only projects that get authorised are those where managers can check on from the top. That means a crude one-sized fits all approach, and no space for creativity.

Paranoid leadership isn’t new (Nero, anyone?). Its latest form is a consequence of the limited real power political leaders have now, coupled with a media circus which puts their every action in the public gaze. It stems from the way politicians and commentators together misunderstand the nature of political power. Political authority cannot do anything itself. Politicians create incentives and institutions that channel and convene the action of others, but then, they have to deal with the chaotic freedom of the people they rule. They have no choice but to rule free peoples.

Nonetheless, our political imagination and metaphorical language creates an idea of direct unmediated political action, whether it’s the idea of ‘policy levers’ or ‘delivery’. The result is a gap between the real world and our imagination that creates tension and, eventually, anxiety.

How do we stop it? It’ll be a long and difficult to process, to turn away from politicians’ current paranoid inaction to the humble creation of real power. We’ll need institutions that train potential leaders in the politics of collective action not individual command. We’ll need a Labour party that, throughout its branches understands the real nature of power. I’m talking about a big programme of political education, and a reshaping of the local role of the constituency party.

First though, it’ll take leaders at the centre of who get the need for a change, who refuse to play by the old rules and forge a new language and different way of acting. A good start would be a lot more use of the second person pronoun. Talking about ‘we’ not ‘I’ won’t change the world, but it’d set us on the right track. Fixing on oneself as the central point for all action is, after all, the real cause of paranoia.