Choice or Power?

24 July 2009

At the launch of Open Left on Monday night we talked a lot about equality, but one of the other interesting – and I think important debates for the future of the Left – was about choice and power.

Over the past few years the issue of choice – particularly in public services – has been a polarising one within the British Left. This is partly because it has been seen as emblematic of a wider set of political goals and methods. Are you for individuals or the collective? Are you for markets or the state? Are you for solidarity or atomisation? We covered all this ground at the event last night.

Elements of these distinctions are real and meaningful. They speak to genuine differences that can’t be argued away. But in truth, some is more rhetoric than reality. If we think about choice as being fundamentally about power, and in broadening our understanding of how this power is distributed and exercised, there is a different way of approaching this debate.

There are probably two central types of objections to ‘choice’ on the Left. The first is that it promotes (and is based on) the values of marketisation, commodification and individualism over solidarity and the broader common good. And in so doing, corrodes something of value about our public services. This is essentially an ethical complaint.

The second is more empirical. It argues that the particular kind of choice policies pursued are deleterious or, overall, ineffective at achieving particular goals (raising standards, narrowing gaps, improving the experience of using a service etc). Lots of this, it seems to me, revolve around whether choice is perceived and then operationalised in too narrow a way.

For example, that one parent’s ability to choose a different school for their child can affect the choices (and potentially the outcomes) of other parents and children. Or that allowing one person to choose a different GP negatively might impact on the health care received by others (perhaps because the consequence isn’t that the less good doctor stops practising, it’s just that someone else gets stuck with them).

So, what difference would it make if we thought about choice as power and broadening our conception of how power operates?

Our starting point has to be that we won’t tolerate poor public services, not least because it’s invariably the more disadvantaged who are most poorly served. This has to be our first principle – and its one we can probably all unite around. The difficult question is, what should we do about it? Put crudely, two perspectives are often heard: “we should be aiming for good services for everyone, not offering choice to some” and in response “how long do we wait for that to happen and how many people do we allow to be poorly served in the meantime”.

This is a classic dialogue of the deaf. The real question is how is effective and enduring change brought about? There is a lively debate about how to improve public services, but its pretty clear that accumulating power in the state and hoping this will sort things out is not the totality of the answer. Inspirational leadership, high quality professionals and sustained investment are also crucial. As are citizens who can have their voice heard and have power and control over the services they use.

This is a notion of power which if thought about in the context of, say, the political process or the workplace, most people on the Left would endorse. We want radical democratic reform precisely to give voters greater power over political decision making. We value trade unions because we want workers to have power in the workplace. There seems to me to be no reason for not thinking of power in public services in exactly the same way. Especially when we know that a) sometimes people don’t get well served, which is intolerable, and b) involving people who use services (as well as those who produce them) in their design and delivery is likely to improve them through knowledge, experience and ideas.

So, if we thought about choice as being about power, how might we broaden our thinking about how power operates? First, we’d have to think about the impact of one person exercising power on other people, because public services are one of the domains where we come together and care about more than just ourselves. Second, we’d have to take seriously the way power is distributed and, specifically, how to design policies which increase the power of the powerless (not amplify power inequalities). Third, we’d be able to broaden out from just individual power to think about how people acting together could exercise their collective power. And fourth, we’d need to develop a set of principles to judge where power should reside within particular services and how people should be able to deploy it (and base such decisions on good evidence, which we are only just starting to build up).

The next question is what does this mean for policy? I don’t pretend that these are all new thoughts and there are already some examples of these ideas about power in our public services. At Open Left we want to think through what further could be done. My main point is that this is potentially a different way to think about and talk about what has become a pretty tired debate.

Comments
  • michael_green
    Choice is power as long as you are not forced to choose. What I mean by that is that if you don't want to choose a service in the private sector, you are guaranteed something in the public sector, and you can instantaneously move from the private sector to the public sector. Ideally you should have the opportunity to exert democratic influence over the public sector wherever possible.
  • ratshackman
    "Our starting point has to be that we won’t tolerate poor public services, not least because it’s invariably the more disadvantaged who are most poorly served."

    I may be misreading this but the fundamental argument about "better public services" is flawed in so much as it is where the Public Services sit in society and the kind of society they sit in which makes them cumbersome, inneffective and (as you rightly say) badly designed for serving those who need them most.

    There are MANY services provided by local and central government which the family with an income of above £50,000 (random figure) has no need for or can afford to pay for independenlty.

    If, as a policy, it were decided that such a family - while still contributing to such public services - would not be eligible for all of them, the disadvantaged would benefit. Of course, the £50,000 plus family would squeal "I'm paying for something I'm not getting, why should I support the scroungers?"

    It is THAT which is wrong in the way we veiwe choice. Choice has to be tempered by a responsibility.

    To my way of thinking, the left view of this should be exactly that. You can afford to live yur life and you have a responsibility to help those less fortunate than yourself.

    Sorry, that rambles a bit: I'm disabled, live below the poverty line and I pray for soemthing to come of movements like Open Left.

  • michael_green
    A way to empower citizens to be better co-operators and co-producers (and choosers where necessary) would be to provide accessible comprehensive information and data on public services about each school, hospital, doctor and all related processes. This way citizens can be more informed and thus more effective co-operators and co-producers (and choosers where necessary).
  • AidanWard
    Michael, I agree with this and am working on delivering along these lines. But citizens need to be listened to in their own terms, not educated. The citizen's view of what constitutes crime is usefully different from the police's view, the Home Secretary's view and education's view. We have to stop trying to manage problems by defining them out of existence, it undermines everything we believe in.
  • michael_green
    Secondly, citizens with more power over public services are not necessarily more powerful citizens. Giving citizen's too much control over public services can jeopardize the quality, and make citizens less educated and less healthy and less powerful in the labour market, thus at greater mercy to their employer and the rich.
  • michael_green
    The choice is between co-operation and competition in giving users more power over public services.

    Co-operation allows users to distribute resources more efficiently and fairer. But Competition has the potential to drive up quality in the long term by sacrificing the needs of the needy in the short term.

    There's different types of competition: markets v.s quasi-markets. Quasi market's can exist within universal free of charge public services. Market's cannot exist within universal free of charge public services.

    There's also co-production, which happens at the point of delivery, and requires citizens to be educated.

    People on the left should never advocate markets. Co-operation and co-production should be the left's priorities as they distribute power most equitably. Quasi market's should only be advocated when co-operation and co-production is impractical and clunky.
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