The Future of Conservative Thinking
On the 15th of July Snook attended The Future of Conservative Thinking at the Institute of Government. There is now a podcast available on their website, and a write up of the happenings. The panel was made up of Lord Bichard, Nicholas Boles, Phillip Blond, James Forsyth and Jonty Olliff-Cooper.
Jonty Olliff-Cooper kicked off and made it clear he genuinely believes design is a new important direction for our new government. Examples such as Nesta's Big Green Challenge and a Wiki that has been set up for people serving in Afghanistan were highlighted questioning what role the government plays in such things.
Something that really struck a cord which us was Jonty's admission that the public hate politicians, the new government is sensing the extent of distrust and apathy. It seems we have two types of problems in society; expert problems ( such as laying roads and performing heart surgery ) and human problems ( such as obesity and asbo's ) Jonty proposed we need an expert approach to human problems, the future is all about soft knowledge and tacit understanding. But creating a society that can deal with these human problems will be no easy feat!
So what does the big society even mean and does it matter? Do people want to help themselves? This talk hasn't given us the answers, but it did show us that the politicians are asking the same questions. Jonty echoed one of our main messages in our recent involvement with the Coten Project, where we talked about designers designing themselves out of a job;
"It's not really about what we think, it's about how we can design ourselves out of a job"
James Forsyth talked about localism being made much harder by the BBC culture and in his eyes the Big Society is all about dissolving power. The key question from James;
"Can you take ideas from think tank reports and implement them in the government?"
Nick Boles talked about the the culture of our country and reinforced the whole point of the big society is that people make it for themselves. Phillip Blonde told a simple truth that a 'non state civic grouping just means folk chatting having a cup of tea!' His focus was on relationships and networks, referring to Zappos and Ebay and the levels of trust in a community.
Our ears pricked up when a member of the audience from the University of Edinburgh raised the notion that the whole event had been a "terribly English conversation"... we were satisfied with Nick's answer that infact this whole thing started in Scotland with the Scottish Enlightenment, so let's hope they "can show us how to go back to that way." The panel seemed a bit flummoxed by "The Big Scottish Question" as they dubbed it...
So the conclusion is our government want to reduce the demand for the state, not the supply of it and this panel seemed to get the importance of light touch, simple services such as 'I love lewisham'. The session ended by the panel telling us they don't want to be in the news in the Sunday times, or in the politics section, they want it to be in the society section.
