Having Second Thoughts
A puzzled pilgrim’s progress
It’s not that I haven’t thought about it. Quite the opposite in fact; but that’s the thing about puzzles — they churn around in your mind like some demented washing machine stuck forever on the rinse/spin cycle.
So now I must, in part, thank Covid-19 for breaking the cycle, for ending endless iterations, for reaching out to some sort of conclusion. Not, of course, that these second thoughts arrived by any direct route. The journey was littered with diversions, umpteen replacement services and several changes of driver — but those details matter little. Arrival matters — even if the destination turns out to be a stopover on an even longer pilgrimage.
Relaxing by the fire after a satisfying supper, encouraged perhaps with another glass of red, the temptation to relive the journey must, for once, be banished. There is too little time and, now, almost too much to share. All the clues were there. It just needed a pandemic to press this pilgrim’s perception. I’d stumbled through umpteen variants of local social and economic development, none of which ever seemed to gel — and some, like Municipal Enterprise, were even dismissed by Thatcher’s latter-day disciples as oxymoronic. But now, with all our Social Foundation systems further weakened under the intense spotlight of Covid-19, the chasm between the monetised transactional centralisers and the more-Keynesian mutualised localists is almost impossible to bridge.
The evolution of resilient leadership in the context of Municipal Autonomy
We don’t have Municipal Autonomy — not even a lingering shadow of it — and without it, we don’t have the capacity for local leadership learning. Across the UK, and especially in England, we’ve mostly forgotten any such notion might ever have existed. Even five decades ago it was fading and, anyway, ’twas never an absolute. There was always some balance — a variable divvying-up of local or larger leadership. The fade or drift, some would say slide and others ‘downward spiral’, was driven by many factors. We could spend many happy academic hours, charting the causes of decline, but readers are impatient and prefer to look forward.
The absence of a clear constitution is no accident. Value-free muddling through is a great opportunistic adventure until we hit a proper full-blown crisis; not some manufactured self-made mess, like Brexit or a ‘bonkers bankers’ financial crash, but a thorough-going existential challenge like Climate Change or Covid-19. Then, suddenly sobered, all bets are off, the emperor’s new clothes are blown away and all the old shortfalls (the pre-existing/underlying conditions) are exposed.
You can understand the reluctance to codify. Who needs endless aggro over literal interpretations of constitutional codicils or recipes for motherhood and apple pie? No Externality, please — we’re Brit-ish, well, ‘sort of’, in this land of ‘make it up as you go along’.
The naked reality is that we are exposed but our leaders have no shame. This, they’d have us believe, is some higher creative calling — a tremendous opportunity for innovation and ingenuity. Place your bets now, for life is but a lottery — and those on the inside track will surely beat the lagging losers. Never mind that they have further to run — ha — they probably lack motivation or skimped breakfast.
But it was not only Covid-19 that nailed it. Covid was just the story telling for those who’d not caught up on Comparative Constitutional Studies (CCS) — a course rarely studied in English universities. And it was entirely accidental that a case study from some distant land floated across my desk — and that paper needed, incidentally, to explain the leadership context for something entirely not to do with CCS but more environmental. Accidents. Incidents. Or were they? My journey had already taken me to vital clues that only now added up and became clear. The challenge now is to unpack all this into bite-sized bedtime stories for tomorrow’s leaders.
It’s not so difficult, now, to understand how misconceptions become entrenched. How false assumptions are so sticky. How, what we assume are ‘truths’, are rarely questioned. Now the pandemic has stripped bare the realities, whether we like it or not, there is no turning back. ‘Changing your mind is one of the best ways of finding out whether or not you still have one.’ — Taylor Mali.
More will follow.
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Editorial note:
This text serves as an introduction to a projected series exploring the scope for re-energisation of Local Leadership across the UK.
Future episodes may reference: · Atomisation, Proportional Representation, Local Authority, Community Wellbeing, and Climate Policy — but probably not in that order!
