Just read another political book and found it a rather decent read that at least, from an ex-politician and person somewhat still involved in societal matters of meaning, acts as a working manifesto that hopefully is (and has been since publication in 2021!) contributing and engaging in the wider political conversations about really just getting on with things that will help everyone and massively reduce and realign market values through stronger and more life-assistive approaches.

So as to preserve a little space, limit the scrolling required in a small way and avoid duplication, all quotes shown below are from the book, Go Big, by Ed Miliband.

An unrestrained market society is not only deeply destructive but fatalistic. It believes that market forces are so much more powerful and wiser than we are that it is a fantasy to think we have the power to shape our world more effectively and fairly than they can.

Decentralising UK government (and lessening the power(s) of the market) would be good and with competent, adaptable and decent regulation and oversight should empower and involve citizens more so as to engage and be heard proactively – through things like citizens’ assemblies, for all sorts of issues – for the betterment of society (and so that citizens and campaigners don’t feel, or have to do, the state’s job for them) would be a breath of political fresh air and actually help society – wouldn’t it?

[…] In the 1970s state involvement in industry got a bad name in the UK as it became synonymous with bailing out failing companies. There is also the danger that public-sector support is not rewarded with a fair return when companies or products succeed. But there is rightly now a growing consensus across most of the political spectrum that we have been prisoners of that history for too long. As a country, if we are to succeed, we need to learn from other nations which have been implementing successful industrial strategies for decades, while we in Britain have been sitting on the sidelines.

The experience of tackling Covid, in which government and business have had to work hand in hand, and the potentially even greater challenge of fostering a long-term economic recovery from it, only reinforces this imperative. The truth is that we face such serious challenges, the state cannot abdicate its crucial role in being an active partner with business in creating economic success, and business cannot ignore its responsibilities to society. In other words, we need a new social contract between government and business. Meanwhile, up and down the country many businesses are showing that they can generate jobs, innovation and wealth without subscribing to a Friedmanite view of the world. Many, many businesses want to contribute to our society, and at the moment we have institutions that stand in their way.

Indeed, there are people in every sector of society – from business to government to civil society – who want to be part of building something better, but too often their values are at odds with the way our country is run.

It was good to come across the gardening mindset that really is a good one to have, use and approach thinking, planning and doing. It's an attitude we need to have with our politics (and in business, whatever trade it is) and empowering more citizens, local and regional powers through that act of involvement, growing and learning from what happens and what can happen. It'll mean state systems and processes are better run and focused on their citizens and central government can be reduced over time by the effectiveness and progress of a bottom-up approach to life and living, fairly and collectively.

[...] they all embody what Sue Goss calls a ‘machine mind’. As she puts it: ‘Techniques borrowed from industry turn hospitals and schools into factories while in job centres and benefits offices the “computer says no” without human interaction. The search for private-sector style efficiency has down-graded and diminished human contact... The cost has been the crushing of autonomy and the removal of judgement from front-line teachers, social workers and nurses.’⁷ Goss argues that we need to replace the machine mind with a ‘garden mind’: ‘We need politicians and civil servants, and public service managers to become ... caretakers, guardians and facilitators. Instead of struggling to control and “drive” our economy and our society – we ask them to become “gardeners”.’⁸

Full disclosure: I am not a gardener. But there are two reasons why I think this is a powerful idea. Gardeners nurture the growth of living beings but recognise that not everything is under their control. They play a major role by structuring and tending – they plant seeds, provide water and remove weeds – but solutions to the countless daily challenges of growing and surviving come as much from within the plants themselves. Second, gardening involves experimentation: ‘Gardeners don’t make a perfect garden and leave it alone,’ says Goss. ‘We try things, we fail, we learn, we move things around.’⁹ In other words gardeners need to be flexible and humble.

There are lots of examples of local authorities and public services trying new ways of working, but more than anyone else I know in the UK, social entrepreneur and author Hilary Cottam has experimented with the kind of relationship between citizens and the state that I have in mind. She aims to redesign the public sector around a true relationship of equals. Hilary's book Radical Help explains her work, and her insights are invaluable.¹⁰

The UK government behemoth is the one that needs to wake up (and smell the roses by having a gardening mindset and attitude) and really recognise that its practices (and history and arrogance) in our twenty-first century are really not helping matters, merely perpetuating privilege and holding back legitimate progress for all; the less administration and bureaucracy (or at least have that spread and not centralised so practice of it will probably show what is and isn’t needed) the better so the need to massively reduce centralised Westminster (and London and south-east) power (bases) to really get out of the collective way so good things can happen, even including the lessening of outsiders and campaigners to have to raise their issues most of the time (essentially doing the government’s job for them) to get fair and reasonable changes to happen for, you know, the very citizens that the system(s) like to think they empower and allow to live despite the flipping obsession with the economy, the market, GDP and near-endless (no doubt spreadsheet-based) data to show meaning and continue the self-justifying ‘insight’ that doesn't really help anyone except if you gamble with money, sorry, work in finance (or even just project manage).

The long-standing argument against devolution – that it risks creating postcode lotteries, meaning the luck of where you live determines the services and resources you have access to – doesn’t hold water. Regional inequality in the centralised UK is among the worst in the rich world, and government investment has consistently been concentrated in one corner of the country. There is no guarantee that even with more powers, local and regional leaders would successfully reverse this, but they would have the chance to do so – and would be accountable to their citizens if they failed. Centralisation isn’t just bad for democracy; it’s a barrier to building a more equal country.

Turning this around won’t be easy. Hoarding power runs deep in the veins of the UK government. Perhaps one thing that has slowed our progress is that the UK has been a single political unit for much longer than somewhere like Germany, which was a collection of different states until its unification in 1871; England in particular lacks the tradition of regional power that we see in other countries. This is made worse by the lack of a codified constitution, which means that we have no constitutional constraints on the power of central government. They can hand down responsibilities to other levels of government or take them away at will.

They’re all just good and sensible ideas that are put forward and should be part of and helping to propel the conversations UK society needs to have, despite not really a lot happening politically in the ways suggested (or even an admittance that the UK's centralised government really does need to let go of its privileges, have less bureaucracy and actually empower and, with good and worthwhile regulation and oversight, allow regions to run and look after these things).

Since the book was originally published in 2021, has there been or is there any serving politician espousing anything like what is suggested by Mr. Miliband?

If it doesn’t come from within the system, what hope for real change, beyond the typical and expected ways of things happening over many, many years (maybe within a generation) within the predominately sclerotic UK state and its insititutions?

Still, we can vote and that at least is a starting point, alongside being involved and part of meaningful and important organisations that are daring to break the mould for the better of life and the living.