Talk:Geoff Mulgan

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The Guardian (London) - Final Edition

June 5, 2008 Thursday

Public: Thinktanks: Big ideas at the heart of the East End: Under Geoff Mulgan's direction, the Young Foundation is a hub of social thinking and action, following in the footsteps of its founder

BYLINE: David Walker

SECTION: PUBLIC; Pg. 22

LENGTH: 1350 words

The Young Foundation practises what it preaches. Enthusiastic about social enterprise, it's entrepreneurial, the begetter of myriad schemes and spin-offs. On a tiny budget, £4.3m this year, it is the epicentre of social enterprise, the great hope for both the political left and right. As much a "do-tank" as a thinktank, the charity is led by an intellectual and organisational buccaneer in the person of Geoff Mulgan. He wears, metaphorically speaking, no bandana nor pirate's earring; his style is cool and correct, almost professorial. Yet the former Downing Street insider has a star to guide him who was unconventional, institutionally bohemian, a born mould-breaker: the main who gave his name to the charity, Michael Young. Young, of whom a full biography would be welcome, was a propagandist, sociologist and Labour party activist who died in 2002. His empirical social research with Peter Willmott in the East End in the 1950s remains a benchmark in understanding the dynamics of cities and communities. He established the Institute of Community Studies in Bethnal Green which, under Mulgan, has transmuted into the Young Foundation and, on present trends, is fast establishing itself as a global not just a British brand on the boundary where ideas meet practice. Firework Young was a firework and is credited with pushing for the formation of what became the National Consumer Council, the Open University and the Economic and Social Research Council, among other organisations. (There were near misses and failures, too.) Young's famous book, The Rise of the Meritocracy, captured the postwar fear that in becoming the sole currency of social success, examinations and credentials would exclude and oppress. For the generation moving on and up in the 1960s and 1970s, the attainment of students in schools and colleges did seem to be outweighing the pull of their social backgrounds; now we know, however, that parental income and education count hugely. We don't live in a meritocracy after all. Able children from poor backgrounds are handicapped. You don't have your base in Tower Hamlets without being intensely aware of social class and power, yet the Young Foundation is also inflected by an optimistic sense of possibility and emancipation. Mulgan, by background, is a man of the political left. His CV touches the unions, the Greater London Council under Ken Livingstone, Gordon Brown (in an earlier incarnation as Labour's bright hope) and, since 1997, the very closest connection with New Labour, as a policy adviser in No 10 and subsequently as a civil servant founding the Prime Minister's Strategy Unit. Glorious descent Mulgan's descent from heaven (to use the Japanese term) was always likely to be glorious when he left Downing Street three years ago. He could doubtless have chosen corporate wealth or academia - his scholarly outputs include Good and Bad Government and, later this year, a footnoted study of strategy. Instead, he came east to pull together the threads of Young's institute, relaunch it and brand it as the place for thinking and action under the headings of innovation and enterprise, prefixed by the key word "social". It is a rare beast, Mulgan says proudly. He simultaneously, and not without irony, recollects the foundation of the Institute of Community Studies 50 years ago "during a period of Tory hegemony, when Labour had run out of steam", and casts forward in time. He and colleagues travel the globe running seminars in North America, South Korea and, on the subject of innovation and enterprise, at a school for senior cadres of the Communist party of China in Beijing. The foundation's activities embrace what Mulgan calls classic research. In collaboration with a dozen other philanthropic foundations it is in the midst of a project to capture changing patterns of social need. Then there is local stuff. Young is an instigator and promoter of the neighbourhood agenda being pursued by Hazel Blears at the communities department. It thought up such schemes as fix my street; it is helping refashion public policy to take better account of wellbeing; and is seeking to insert innovation in the school curriculum. In addition, the foundation is heavily involved on its doorstep, with what is called the London collaborative. It recently organised a 24-hour retreat for London borough chief executives and will branch into more detailed thinking, and doing. "It's not classic thinktank stuff," Mulgan says, "we're bypassing the publications stage, to network ideas, to help the public sector make better use of 'intelligence'." A consequence, he notes, is that the Young Foundation is less visible than it perhaps deserves to be. New enterprises The foundation is itself creating new enterprises in education and health. It is negotiating the creation of five or six schools for 16-19 year olds; it has venture capital backing to set up a new online marketplace for teaching and learning; it has social care and workplace health schemes and has been helping with Lord Darzi's review of the NHS. And so on: leadership development schemes for the white working class and for ethnic minorities, action learning sets for British muslims. Internationally, in association with the National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts, Nesta, Young is building "innovation" as a field of study and exploration, with partners in Australia, Spain, Portugal and beyond; the foundation is involved with the commission of the EU but seeking to push innovation up and away from the traditional association with scientific research and technological development. The trip to Bethnal Green has become a must for ministers and moguls, Cisco and electric company, Philips among them, for finance as well as social capital has to be in the mix. Mulgan's Whitehall connections are multiple; Young is involved with the Department for Innovation, Universities and Skills as white paper proposals, such as innovation in public services, roll out. And Mulgan, savvy, is broadening the foundation's offer, bringing Tories in - "most of our local authority work is with Tory-controlled councils", he points out, "so we are relatively protected against political swings". Mulgan's list of activities is vertiginous as he moves seamlessly between dense practice and high theory - few have thought as intensely as he has about knowledge for police and how government, researchers and intermediaries might be more fruitfully configured. "How do societies think," he asks. Or take the problem of taking innovative practice from its local context and bringing it to scale, applying experience in other or wider contexts; there's an intense practicality to Mulgan's thinking which may stem from those years of having to distil and present suggestions to busy and often distracted government ministers. It's hard to discern the management model for what is now a fair-sized operation: is Mulgan, unconsciously or by design, replicating the chaotic style of Michael Young? He says there is a strong team in place that mixes wisdom, age and creativity. While he eschews a "try anything" approach, that last quality - being original and interesting is what he wants the Young hallmark to be. "In government," he says, "I ceased to be surprised by the thinktanks; they had stopped carving out new space." Straddling bodies But the best thinking is also doing. He talks of "straddling bodies", simultaneously inside structures of power and outside. Wholly out and you can't access power and money; wholly in and you lose creativity. Governments need bodies such as the foundation, able to think and do in useful ways but offering governments "plausible denial". And that, presumably, will be the foundation's calling card if, as the chatterers now assume, Labour's era is over and a version of liberal conservatism and/or intra-UK nationalism colours politics. Mulgan already has lines out to the right. David Cameron and colleagues say they are keen on community self-help and social enterprise and the visitors' book in Bethnal Green shows they know where to turn both for ideas and examples.

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The Observer (England)

April 13, 2008

Business & Media: Business: MAMMON: The colour of money just got greener: The only way to save the planet is to help big business to make a profit from it, the founder of eco-dealmaker Cool NRG tells Nick Mathiason

BYLINE: Nick Mathiason

SECTION: OBSERVER BUSINESS PAGES; Pg. 9

LENGTH: 1253 words

Spending an hour talking about light bulbs and energy efficiency was not a thrilling prospect, but then I hadn't met Mr Cool NRG. Tall and rugged, dressed in jeans, boots and a leather jacket, Nic Frances MBE is a messianic whirlwind with a formidable track record. He makes a pile of money from bringing fast-acting energy-efficiency programmes to the masses. His moment has come. Once a high-flying stockbroker who gave it all up to become an Anglican priest, Frances today plays the carbon-trading markets to achieve impressive reductions in CO 2 emissions. The 47-year-old brings together newspapers, leisure industries and - crucially - energy firms to make it happen. What's more, he takes a handsome cut of the action to incentivise his 14-strong team, which includes former Boston Consulting and BP executives. In America, China, Mexico and Europe, his year-old firm Cool NRG is brokering deals for the rapid roll-out of hundreds of millions of energy-saving light bulbs - bulbs that, once installed throughout the home, can cut overall household emissions by 8 per cent. The idea is that energy firms buy the bulbs then claim the investment as carbon credits, which they can in turn trade on world markets. Until recently, however, they have been unable or unwilling to make any meaningful effort to distribute the light bulbs themselves. That's where Cool NRG comes in. Last January, the company secured its place in the Guinness Book of Records for achieving the world's biggest single energy-efficiency undertaking. On 19 January, the Sun gave away 2.5 million light bulbs. That day, along with a green-tinted masthead, its front page had Gordon Brown urging readers to change to eco-friendly lighting. Some 400,000 extra copies of the paper were sold - a 15 per cent increase in sales. The exercise was a triumph, and there will be more to come. Firms are beginning to queue up to distribute bulbs. A major bingo chain is close to agreeing a deal. But why light bulbs? 'We need action on climate change quickly. We believe energy efficiency is the thing to deliver the planet the short-term gains it needs to explore clean coal and other things,' says Frances. 'The quickest change is lighting because it's cheap and we can all do it.' Also, because light bulbs can represent significant expenditure for households in the developing world, 'if we can get billions of them out there to households free of charge, particularly in developing countries this is [also] a poverty reduction strategy, and that's exciting'. Frances is a founding father of the British social enterprise movement and will shortly have a new book out about it, The End of Charity , with a foreword by Tony Blair. Social enterprise is today a sector endorsed enthusiastically by both Brown and David Cameron as a 'third way' solution to intractable social issues, which fuses business savvy and innovation with public policy objectives. In his book, Frances damns charities that do not harness the market, saying they perpetuate the status quo. Big business also gets it in the neck: he says Bill Gates, for instance, could solve poverty in the developing world far more effectively if he wound down his foundation's distribution of life-saving drugs and made Microsoft software open-source, kick-starting a technological revolution. Although the book focuses on Frances's business career, it also details a spectacular life story. Born into a rich, hotel-owning family, he bombed at school because his dyslexia was not diagnosed. However, he made it to Portsmouth College, where he chaired the Conservative Association, thought Margaret Thatcher the greatest thing on two legs and went into the City after the family business was listed on the stock exchange. He was desperate to prove his worth to his father, but his fast-living world collapsed when the stockbroker that had floated his father's company, and for which he worked, went under. Frances was involved in the subsequent investigation and it forced him to reappraise his values. He ended up becoming ordained and setting up businesses to help the underprivileged. He made his name founding the Furniture Resource Centre in Toxteth, Liverpool, where he trained the long-term unemployed to recondition furniture and electric appliances to sell to landlords renting to benefit claimants. The success of FRC, which has diversified and is a multi-million-£ business, got him noticed. Geoff Mulgan, who was then Tony Blair's director of policy, arranged for the heads of four Whitehall departments to assess the project for themselves - the first time so many senior mandarins had taken a trip out of the capital to view a single case study. What took him to a new level was being selected to attend the Davos World Economic Forum as one of the world's 30 leading social entrepreneurs. He attended four forums and witnessed how climate change went from a fringe issue to centre stage. Davos inspired Frances, by now married with two children and based in Australia, to devise a way of a rapidly reducing CO 2 emissions. The creation in New South Wales of a carbon market provided the opportunity: by persuading power firms to buy bulbs, he won them carbon credits. The distributor, as the Sun proved, also benefits commercially. In four weeks during 2006, Frances's former business, Easy Being Green, gave away 250,000 energy-efficient bulbs, amounting to 1 per cent of new tradeable carbon on world markets that year. 'That is a figure that got to me,' he recalls. 'So I go to Davos. I hear [climate change report author] Nick Stern saying we've got to act quickly but everyone's saying "We do it with renewables and probably nuclear" - but that's 20 years away.' His breakthrough came when he sensed his work was done in New South Wales and it was time to go global. He sold his stake in the Australian firm to his partner. It turned out to be the partner who had taken a bigger risk by not following Frances, because the firm subsequently fell into financial difficulties. Once it has achieved a mass roll-out of energy-saving bulbs, Cool NRG will move to insulation and solar power. His flatly structured business, in which the 14 other employees hold a 20 per cent stake, stands to gain huge revenue. This year, Cool NRG is on track to turn over £ 200m. As he develops the market, revenue could grow exponentially. 'Our job is to take extraordinary risks,' he says. 'To - as much as we can - punch above our weight, to create markets that are profitable that force others to change their game to a carbon-focused world, because there's obviously money in it. 'Stimulate the market, show them there's a profit and [the business mainstream] will follow. It doesn't matter whether they do it because they think they should or because it's profitable. I don't care. It's action on climate change. If we left that to the not-for-profit sector we'd do 1 per cent. We need 90 per cent - and tomorrow, please. And the market is the only place that touches 90 per cent. Now, are you ready for the champagne?' It is an offer that's hard to refuse. These days, few of his suggestions get turned down. THE CV Name Nic Frances Born April 1961 Education Embley Park school, Hants; Portsmouth College, HND in business Career Before 1988: hotel manager, singing telegram, stockbroker, priest; 1988-1998: founder, Furniture Resource Centre; 1998-2004: head of Australian charity Brotherhood of St Laurence; 2004-07: co-founder, Easy Being Green; 2007-date: founder, Cool NRG Family Two children. Separated from wife

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The Guardian (London) - Final Edition

May 26, 2006 Friday

G2: The power of influence: Geoff Mulgan is the ultimate New Labourite. He used to be head of policy at No 10 and founded the Blairite thinktank Demos. But now he's out of the political cockpit and intent on radical social change - and making some surprising, if guarded, swipes at the government, hears John Harris

BYLINE: John Harris

SECTION: GUARDIAN FEATURES PAGES; Pg. 14

LENGTH: 1669 words

When someone finally gets round to making the definitive New Labour movie - and you can imagine it: Our Friends In The North meets Primary Colors, with the inevitable Britpop soundtrack - they will have to base at least one character on Geoff Mulgan. The PR at his publisher emails his CV to me the day before we meet, and it is so packed with the stuff of recent history that you wonder how he has found time to fit it all in. From the top, then: "Between 1997 and 2004, Geoff had various roles in government including director of the government's strategy unit and head of policy in the Prime Minister's Office . . . Before that, he was founder and director of Demos, described by the Economist as the UK's most influential thinktank . . . chief adviser to Gordon Brown . . . (and) a reporter for the BBC." On top of all that, Mulgan is apparently "a World Economic Forum Global Leader of Tomorrow", and was ranked in 2004 as "one of the UK's leading 100 public intellectuals". Oh, and somewhere at home, he has a CBE. To start, though, I want to know about a role that mysteriously is not mentioned his resume: the time he spent in the 1980s with the Labour-supporting collective of musicians and comedians known as Red Wedge. According to Billy Bragg, the young Mulgan drove their van. True? He laughs, slightly nervously. "I did drive the van. Not very well, sadly. It wasn't one of my more heroic moments. I'd forgotten all about that. Who did I have in there? Oh, all sorts of musicians. Paul Weller, Dr Robert (of the Blow Monkeys), Jimmy Somerville from the Communards. But I wasn't in charge. I was only the driver." To some extent, this humble claim crystallises Mulgan's multifaceted career. One of his ex-Labour associates claims he is "a bit of a cold fish", but two hours in his company suggests that his initial stand-offishness is actually down to a slightly academic style of modesty. Some of his one-time contemporaries - the Miliband brothers are a good example - might have gone on to public office, but for Mulgan (who is 44 and married with one child), the political bright-lights never had much of an allure. "I knew I wouldn't be very good at being an MP," he says. "I have a lot of admiration for people willing to face the public, but I'd prefer not to." Instead, he has spent the past 20 years amassing a reputation for quietly staking out ideas on the outer frontiers of politics. The fact that the prime minister's enthusiasm for some of this stuff (stakeholding, communitarianism, not to mention the long-forgotten Third Way) has proved strangely short-lived might give the impression that Mulgan's speciality is a Blair-esque dilettantishness. But fair play to him, he has plotted a fairly consistent course through the last two decades, focusing time and again on themes that, with the arrival of the Cameroons, have recently become very fashionable: the work-life balance, the political impact of the digital age, an ongoing fixation with reshaping the supposedly top-down state so as to make it that bit more responsive. In his own guarded way, he remains commendably enthusiastic. If the public face of the New Labour project is embodied by the grim countenance of John Reid or the functional tedium dispensed by the likes of Ruth Kelly and John Hutton, here is a mind in which the boundary-pushing, confident spirit of 1997 is just about intact. Two years ago, convinced that he had "been there too long" and was in danger of turning "stale and unimaginative", Mulgan exited Downing Street and became the director of the Young Foundation, founded in 2005 to carry on the work of Michael Young (Mulgan's political hero, the founder of the Open University and the Consumers' Association) and work on "the kind of radical social change that happens outside government", in areas such as housing, family breakdown and crime. I meet him at their HQ in Bethnal Green, east London, where bright-eyed young researchers scuttle up and down the stairs, and the office space is shared with a handful of Quakers. Next week, having already written such books as 1998's Connexity (strap-lined "How to Live in a Connected World") and Life After Politics (1997), he will publish what might be his most definitive work so far: Good and Bad Power, subtitled The Ideals and Betrayals of Government, whose jumping-off point he sums up in a question: "Can you do good through government, or is it inevitably bad, compromised and dirty?" At first, it is a dizzyingly dense read, hopping from John Locke to Confucius, through a raft of Islamic scholars, and occasionally into the gritty stuff of everyday policy, from Asbos to immigration rules. Soon enough, however, it jumps into life, throwing forth a flood of aphoristic thoughts that, given his time spent working in cahoots with Blair, you cannot help but project on to the government. Having spent two days jotting down the highlights, my notes read like New Labour's version of Mao's Little Red Book. "All leaders are vulnerable to the trap of confusing fictions and truths," runs one passage, "believing that if only they can find the right turns of phrase or explanation they will solve the real-life problem that lies behind it." When it comes to the prime minister's fondness for war, a section advising that "hatreds ratchet up in the heat of battle and turn limited engagements into unlimited disasters" takes on a doomy resonance, though Mulgan claims it is unintentional (for the record, he claims to be a "liberal interventionist", but says that he thought Iraq failed to measure up to a convincing case for invasion, and that "internal government processes proved to be less reliable than the UN Hans Blix method, which was much more open. There's an important lesson there about truth.") In large swathes of the book, there is also an underlying concern with the precarious balance between governments' duties to both lead and serve - to always be mindful of public opinion, but also try to nudge it somewhere new. On this score, Mulgan is too bound into the New Labour family to reach for any metaphorical knives, but for a while now, he has been gently bemoaning the Blair government's failure to decisively shift the terms of British politics. And so, with regular apologies for being "evasive" and a habit of carefully phrasing his criticisms of the government in the past tense, it proves today. "On the environment and climate change," he says, "I suspect that future generations will think there was too much timidity, too much fear of upsetting business. Basically, New Labour was very nervous about regulating business, or requiring it to do anything, even when there was a very clear social or environmental case for doing so." Ten minutes later, he is musing on the domestic effects of the "war on terror". "I think there have been quite a lot of occasions when there has been too little concern with civil liberties, and too much with going along with the arguments of the security forces, who always will want more powers and be less attuned to the risks. You should always keep in mind what the state looks like from outside. I think I say in the book, from the inside it tends to look cool and rational and sensible, and from the outside it usually looks pretty inefficient, capricious and dangerous. And the more powers you give to the state, the more danger there is of those capricious and dangerous abuses really damaging people's lives." To finish, we alight on one of Mulgan's pet concerns: the much-discussed prospects for New Labour's semi-mythical "renewal". When I ask him when he thinks Blair should go, he characteristically ducks any specifics but makes the point that "there's certainly a fixed rule about how long any leader should go on - it's hard to maintain vitality after 10 years". As against the idea of a smooth post-Blair transition, he suggests that the best examples of that process often turn out to be "rough" and "irreverent", as Blair's first years as Labour leader perhaps proved. He also recommends an openness to the kind of voices that governments have a habit of shutting out. "Democracy isn't solely about polite conversations in parliaments," says the book. "It needs to be continually refreshed with raw passions, anger and ideals." I read him another example of the book's advice: "Wise leaders encourage private argument and criticism among their advisers. They seek loyalty not sycophancy, and loyalty sometimes has to mean being honest about unsettling truths." In that context, what did he make of Blair's recent reshuffle - Jack Straw and Geoff Hoon cast as borderline seditionaries, and even Ruth Kelly apparently considered off-message? He laughs. "Oh, I don't know about the reshuffle, really." The thing is, I tell him, it seems to represent a classic example of long-term strategy being sidelined by short-term panic. He remains quiet on that point, but does think that the recent spurt of casting the Blairites' opponents as thick-headed Old Labour throwbacks was a similar case in point. "I don't think that sent the right signals about a party ready for renewal," he says. "If you get too hedgehog-like and bunkerish and defensive, it may make sense in terms of the news agenda of that day, but in a medium- and long-term perspective, it's a really disastrous thing to happen to a governing party. There's a risk of that, certainly." Just as we finish, a quote from Michael Foot springs to mind: "Men of power have no time to read; yet the men who do not read are unfit for power." Is he going to send Tony and Gordon copies of the book? "I haven't sent anybody one yet," he says. "A lot of people in government don't really read books at all. But some of the leaders who are most remembered from the past, like Gladstone, did read a lot, and that's one of the things that kept them refreshed. "So I hope some people will read it," he says. "And learn from it, too" * Good and Bad Power: The Ideals and Betrayals of Government by Geoff Mulgan is published by Allen Lane on June 1 at £20.

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The Age (Melbourne, Australia)

September 28, 2002 Saturday Late Edition

The go-between; PROFILE

BYLINE: ROD MYER

SECTION: SATURDAY EXTRA; Pg. 3

LENGTH: 1690 words

JANE TEWSON HAS NETWORKED BRITAIN'S BEST AND BRIGHTEST TO RAISE MONEY FOR HER CAUSES. NOW, SHE IS DOING THE SAME HERE, WRITES ROD MYER. Jane Tewson, committed, well connected, passionate, and glamorous, hit Melbourne in 2000 as a woman with a big reputation. A reputation built over 20 years in Britain as a philanthropic activist or, as she would have it, catalyst. She had helped launch Comic Relief from a refugee camp in Sudan in 1986 (where she had volunteered) with Richard Curtis (who wrote Four Weddings and a Funeral). The idea was to make philanthropy fun and, through the intercession of television and high-profile names such as comic Lenny Henry, the organisation has raised more than £100 million ($A283 million) for causes in Britain and Africa. Then there was her involvement in the creation of the volunteering facilitation outfit, Timebank, in 1999. With its online presence and links with the BBC, Timebank encouraged 18,000 Britons to give their time to community causes in its first year of operation (2000), many of them first-time volunteers. Tewson has underwritten her career with networking among the best, the brightest and the "in" crowd. She likes it, she's good at it and in Britain it enabled her to attract patronage from the City and Whitehall for her signature brand of philanthropic activism. Chancellor of the Exchequer (treasurer) Gordon Brown hosted functions and Virgin chief Richard Branson paid her wage as she established PilotLight UK in 1998, a polyglot creature synthesising the roles of the activist, lobbyist, PR outfit and social architect. All that was behind Tewson when she landed in Melbourne after her husband Charles Lane's appointment as CEO of local philanthropic group the Myer Foundation. So she set up an Australian version of PilotLight in 2000 and looked for projects. What stood out was Victoria's new and dangerous love affair with poker machines. "I was really shattered," she says, "after arriving in Melbourne and seeing the pokies and the stats about the effects they were having on people." They are, it has to be said, dramatic reading. From a standing start in 1992, according to the Productivity Commission's report into gambling, pokies were providing $1 billion, or 12 per cent of revenue to the State Government's coffers. Australia had 20.4 per cent of the world's pokies (or high-intensity gaming machines) and 0.3 per cent of the world's population. Nearly 43 per cent of pokie revenue is derived from problem gamblers, of which the government gets $420 million. And the average revenue earned per machine jumped from $56,100 to $86,200 in the four years to 2000-2001 as machine speeds increased. Tewson's approach to her philanthropic activism is to find a problem and bring together a disparate group of often highly skilled and well-connected people to get involved and look for new approaches and solutions. "PilotLight," says the organisation's online blurb, "acts as a catalyst sparking ideas, projects and alliances to tackle issues of social injustice in creative and unexpected ways." To address the problem-gambling issue she called together a group including film and television producer Andrew Knight and campaigning cleric Tim Costello and, in the process, came up with some possibilities. One included getting the various stakeholders together to talk about the issue, another involved developing an advertising campaign to show the huge impact problem gambling was having on the community and to highlight government dependence on gambling revenues. But gambling had its hooks into Melbourne and Tewson had trouble finding an ad agency not conflicted by gambling promotions. Eventually, Sydney groups Radical Media and Whybin Lawrence came up with a TV, Web and press concept on a pro-bono basis. PilotLight and the community gambling activists who, partly through Tewson's work, had formed Communities Against the Pokie Plague (CAPP), convinced the State Government to sponsor a round-table conference on the issue. On August 7, two ministers, Bronwyn Pike (community services) and John Pandazopoulos (gaming), sat down with some movers and shakers from the community and the gambling industry, including the Salvation Army's John Dalziel, then Tabcorp chief Ross Wilson, Tim Costello and human services bureaucrat Jennifer Westacott. Things went relatively smoothly until Ross Wilson clashed with the community sector over forming a working group to look at the various ways the community is affected by gambling - the sensitive area of who wins and who loses from the pokie phenomenon. With some intercession from Pandazopoulos, an agreement was reached and six working groups set up. Now, interested parties are dealing with the business end of the process, the mechanisms by which the working groups will report and make recommendations. PilotLight has left the picture, leaving the process to be pushed by CAPP and the community activists. The problem-gambling ad campaign is, however, being kept in reserve in case political battles emerge down the track. But Tewson has other balls in the air. Her modus operandi is pricking the consciences and liberating the good intentions of the well placed and the well-to-do to get them involved in healing what she sees as weeping social sores. To this end, she runs site visits to a range of organisations needing support. The list includes former footballer Jim Stynes' Reach Foundation, which aims to empower young people with life and communication skills; programs with asylum seekers and victims of torture; children abandoned by drug-addicted parents; and Costello's Urban Seed Foundation, which feeds homeless people. Tewson says her strategy is about consciousness raising, giving voice to those who are powerless and silenced and developing new solutions in the process. "I'm beginning to see in Australia there's an ugly silence around pokie addiction, especially among middle-aged women. We've got one of the world's highest suicide rates. Emerging homelessness, disaffected young people, and all of us have a responsibility to fully air these conversations." But what is the outcome of the airings and the consciousness raising? Sometimes it's simply about the chequebook. At a recent Reach Foundation visit, a group of 10 or so opinion makers, philanthropists and activists participated in role-plays with teenagers. At the end, one came up with a cheque for $40,000. And Tewson estimates her site visits have raised "a six-figure sum" for Costello's Urban Seed. Paris Aristotle, director of the Victorian Foundation for Survivors of Torture, says an 18-month association with PilotLight has "produced lots of tangible benefits for us". Money raised, expertise offered by the corporate sector and even a new management committee member, former St Margarets girls' school principal Virginia Henry, have been among them. "It's also opened our minds on how we might approach things," Aristotle says. "In the past two months, 60 Australian opinion formers have been out on project visits. I suspect if you measured that, in a year's time the impact for the philanthropic sectors would be huge. But it's quite difficult to grasp as it's all about `catalysing' and connecting, pushing the boundaries of thinking," Tewson says. Out in the philanthropic sector not everyone buys the line. One community worker said she couldn't see what was so innovative about "taking rich people out on the streets". Another described Tewson's ads for volunteering for Timebank in Britain as "very creative" but said policy outcomes resulting from her work were not clear. Tewson is a regular lunch-time speaker for the big end of town and is "regarded as fairly hot property in philanthropy", said another observer. On the lunch circuit she seems to be riding the emerging wave of "caring capitalism" in the business world. She has recently spoken to gatherings at National Australia Bank and broker J.B. Were, where former investment banker and Tewson supporter Christopher Thorn heads up the newly established philanthropic services division that aims to help manage and administer charitable funds for successful clients. Her networking ability shows up on her own board. Coles Myer director and former UBS Warburg chairman Bill Gurry, a board member until recently (he joined briefly to help her set up), says PilotLight is an "unusual organisation. It attempts to act as a go-between - she says catalyst, I say go-between - for support and getting people involved (in philanthropy)". BP chief Greg Bourne, painting entrepreneur Gerry Higgins and e-philanthropy pioneer Ricci Swart also sit at the board table. St James Ethics Centre chief Simon Longstaff brought Tewson on to his own board because "she's good at imagining things: naming things others don't". Also, it seems, at introductions. On a trip with Tewson to London, Longstaff describes sitting down with Lord Joel Joffe and policy research guru Geoff Mulgan. Andrew Knight adds Mick Jagger and Bob Geldof to that list. "I think she finds it hard in Australia as she had so much clout in Britain," Knight says. Tewson agrees, saying finding the 10 or 20 "social investors" prepared to fund PilotLight's $200,000 annual budget is hard to do. Nonetheless, those who have supported her have earned high social dividends. She claims that an operating budget of less than $200,000 has turned into nearly $1 million annually for the causes she supports through donations, gifts in kind and expertise over the past year. The Salvation Army's John Dalziel says PilotLight makes a valuable contribution by helping mobilise "the brainpower so often lacking. People get into organisations like ours because they want to help. That doesn't mean they're the best at understanding and operating in the political system". CV JANE TEWSON, FOUNDING DIRECTOR PILOTLIGHT BORN 1958 in Oxford, England. CAREER Founding four continuing charities - Charity Projects 1984, Comic Relief 1986, PilotLight UK 1998, Timebank 1999. Named by The Times as one of the top-10 innovators of the 1990s. Awarded a CBE for innovation in charity in the 1999 New Year's Honours. LIVES Malvern, with two sons aged 9 and 7.

LOAD-DATE: June 18, 2007

LANGUAGE: ENGLISH

GRAPHIC: Photo: Jane Tewson, riding the wave of ``caring capitalism in the business community. PICTURE: MICHAEL CLAYTON-JONES

PUBLICATION-TYPE: Newspaper

Copyright 2002 The Age Company Limited All Rights Reserved

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The Guardian (London)

February 23, 2002

Rise of the advisers: The players: Spinners, fixers and the prince of wonks: Blair's reforms have created a new breed in Whitehall

BYLINE: Profiles by Nicholas Watt and Patrick Wintour

SECTION: Guardian Home Pages, Pg. 11

LENGTH: 1401 words

Alastair Campbell, director of communications and strategy
As one of the few people who thinks nothing of shouting at the prime minister, Alastair Campbell is the most powerful figure in Downing Street alongside Jonathan Powell.
The former Daily Mirror political editor, who joined Mr Blair's team after his election as Labour leader in 1994, has played a pivotal role in shaping New Labour over the past decade and selling the Blair revolution to Britain's tabloid press.
After last June's election, however, Mr Campbell withdrew from the frontline on the instructions of the prime minister who feared that his high profile was damaging the government. Mr Blair felt that Mr Campbell's confrontational briefings with journalists allowed the press to depict the government as being obsessed with spin. He has been replaced as the prime minister's official spokesman by the civil servants, Godric Smith and Tom Kelly. 
Despite retiring from the frontline, which he did with some regret, Mr Campbell remains a formidable force in Whitehall. In his new role he closely monitors the work of Mr Smith and Mr Kelly and masterminds the entire Whitehall communications system.
Mr Campbell, 44, is using his lower profile to spend more time with his children. He has also taken up running and has lost weight.
Lady Morgan, director of government relations
A former secondary school teacher, Sally Morgan completes the trio of political advisers who head Downing Street's three departments.
As director of government relations, Lady Morgan is in charge of liaising with the Labour party, the devolved administrations in Scotland and Wales, the trade unions and business.
Lady Morgan, 42, suffered a blow in June when she was removed from her post as political secretary to the prime minister to become a Cabinet Office minister after losing a power struggle with Mr Blair's long-standing friend, Anji Hunter. But Ms Hunter then moved to a highly paid post with BP, leading to Lady Morgan's immediate recall.
A former Millbank fixer, Lady Morgan is the least powerful of the trio of political advisers at the top of the Downing Street tree. But she plays a pivotal role in improving relations between Downing Street and the Labour party, which were poor during the last parliament.
Sir Richard Wilson, cabinet secretary
Regarded as the smartest mandarin of his generation, Sir Richard Wilson, was handpicked by the prime minister to be his new cabinet secretary in 1997.
Sir Richard, 59, was a ministerial private secretary by the age of 27 and became permanent secretary at the Department of the Environment at 50.
Sir Richard, who is to retire in October, made his mark at the Home Office, where he served as permanent secretary between 1994 and 1997. In a sign of his skills as a Whitehall fixer, he won the confidence of both the last Tory home secretary Michael Howard, and his successor Jack Straw.
With a Cambridge education and impeccable CV, Sir Richard succeeded Lord Butler in 1997. The prime minister, who interviewed the three finalists for the job, was deeply impressed by Sir Richard's Blairite language about reforming Whitehall.
Since his appointment, however, Sir Richard has failed to impress the Blair circle. Most of the recommendations in his landmark 1998 report on reforming Whitehall were ignored. The establishment after the last election of the delivery unit, which monitors frontline departments such as health and transport, was seen as a vote of no confidence.
The prime minister's circle gave a taste of their view of Sir Richard when they let it be known that Mr Blair wanted him to act as Downing Street's "chief whip in Whitehall". This was seen as a humiliating put down to Whitehall's grandest mandarin who should not be expected, as the chief whip does, to soil his hands.
Jeremy Heywood, prime minister's principal private secretary and head of policy directorate
The high-flying Treasury mandarin is arguably the third most powerful figure in Downing Street after Campbell and Powell.
His proximity to the prime minister, coupled with his close working relationship with Mr Powell, ensures that Mr Heywood is more influential than Sir Richard.
Critics of the politicisation of Downing Street believe that Mr Heywood's post has been downgraded because many of his traditional powers have been taken over by Mr Powell. But the Oxford and Harvard-educated Mr Heywood, 40, has made himself a force in Downing Street through sheer strength of personality.
The prime minister showed his high regard for Mr Heywood, a former principal private secretary to Norman Lamont at the Treasury, when he made him head of the new policy directorate after the election. Critics said it was wrong to make a career civil servant head of the newly branded policy unit which is traditionally headed by a political adviser.
Michael Barber, head of delivery unit
The Liverpool football fan has won widespread praise for his skilful leadership of the delivery unit, which is designed to improve Whitehall's implementation of the reform of public services.
Traditionalists are uneasy, believing that Professor Barber is usurping the roles played by individual secretaries of state. One old Whitehall hand complained: "It is wrong to work around secretaries of state. If Downing Street is unhappy, it should follow the example of Margaret Thatcher and put the fear of god into secretaries of state, rather than set up new structures."
The appointment of Prof Barber, 46, after last year's general election also alarmed critics of the politicisation of the civil service. Although Prof Barber is a civil servant, he stood for Labour against Michael Heseltine at Henley-on-Thames in 1987.
Prof Barber is making his presence felt in Whitehall and particularly impressed David Blunkett when he was chief adviser on school standards.
Wendy Thomson, head of office of public service reform
A former chief executive of Newham council, Labour's favourite local authority, Wendy Thomson has three main roles in improving public services.
The Canadian yoga fan, 48, has been charged with making public services more customer focused, persuading civil servants to be more focused on delivery and introducing innovative ideas.
Dr Thomson was seen as the ideal candidate after she spent three years in draughty halls in Newham trying to persuade people that they can have a role in turning round their neighbourhoods.
But the former audit com mission official has to tread carefully as she attempts to persuade departments that she is not parachuting in as an outside consultant to dictate new ways which they have been implementing for some time.
Geoff Mulgan, director of the performance and innovation unit and the forward strategy unit
The softly spoken former special adviser to Gordon Brown is another Labour supporter who has been appointed as a civil servant.
Dubbed New Labour's Prince of Wonks, who co-founded the Demos think tank in 1993, Dr Mulgan has been charged with looking into the future, a process known in Downing Street as "blue skies thinking". His forward strategy unit, which was set up after the last election, includes the former BBC director-general Lord Birt.
Other outsiders who work for the unit include Adair Turner, the former director-general of the CBI, Penny Hughes, a former UK president of Coca-Cola, Nick Lovegrove, a McKinsey partner and telecoms specialist and Arnab Banerji, the chief investment officer at F&C Management.
The Oxford-educated Dr Mulgan, 40, is also head of the performance and innovation unit. Set up four years ago, this produces reports across the whole range of government. Its most recent report, published on Tuesday, looked at ways of improving the economic performance of Britain's ethnic minorities.
Andrew Adonis, policy directorate
The former Observer columnist runs the No 10 policy directorate with Mr Heywood, although Dr Adonis is technically one rung below him.
A former Oxford don, Dr Adonis, 39, is Roy Jenkins' official biographer. His relationship with the former SDP leader, who has acted as a mentor to the prime minister, is so strong that Lord Jenkins put Dr Adonis on standby to finish off his biography of Churchill when he underwent heart surgery last year. His services were not needed in the end.

LOAD-DATE: February 24, 2002

LANGUAGE: ENGLISH

Copyright 2002 Guardian Newspapers Limited

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The Guardian (London)

September 11, 2000

Comment & Analysis: Fine words, flawed ideas: Economist Hernando de Soto is hailed as a saviour of poor countries. But he is nothing of the kind

BYLINE: Madeleine Bunting

SECTION: Guardian Leader Pages, Pg. 20

LENGTH: 850 words

Hernando de Soto has pulled off a remarkable feat. You may not have heard of him, but governments around the world are apparently queuing up to hear what the Peruvian thinker has to say. Egypt, Romania, Haiti and Mexico, as well as his home country, are seeking and implementing his advice in a bid to transform their economies. Geoff Mulgan, head of the Number 10 policy unit, had him in to Downing Street. The World Bank is pouring huge sums into his projects. The Economist ranks his Lima-based institute as the second most important thinktank in the world. De Soto is pitching himself as a third way guru and it's working. With the launch of his new book, he's flavour of the month.
The third way needs him. The weakest assertion at the heart of the bundle of ideas lumped together by a loose alliance of Tony Blair, Bill Clinton, Gerhard Schroder and other left-of-centre leaders such as the Brazilian Fernando Cardoso, is that capitalism can distribute wealth widely. The evidence is to the contrary; recent history seems to be proving the Marxist claim that, inevitably, a capitalist system concentrates wealth in fewer hands, thus sowing the seeds for its collapse. 
Walk on de Soto. His appeal lies in large part because he doesn't challenge the status quo; he accepts capitalism is the only economic system on offer. What he focuses on is the huge black economy that operates outside the legal system in all countries, particularly in the developing world and former Soviet bloc. In the extralegal economy, the poor accumu late huge assets in their shanty homes and small businesses, but because they have no legal protections, they cannot access credit nor can they safely invest. Their assets are thus "dead capital" as opposed to "live capital" in the west. The big idea can basically be summed up as: "It's property law, stupid."
De Soto has made a useful point. The underground market in Russia and Ukraine accounts for 50% of GDP and 62% in Georgia. According to his institute's inventory, as much as 90% of Cairo's economy is extralegal. In his emphasis on the enormous entrepreneurial energies of the poor, and that they know better than any policy-maker how to improve their lot, de Soto should be shifting the minds of politicians and donor governments in the right direction. Perhaps he can help uncouple the ideas of poverty and laziness that still lurk behind some compassion fatigue towards developing countries. After all, in many countries it is the entrepreneurial resourcefulness of some of the most marginalised - women traders in west Africa for example - who ensure that millions of people are fed and clothed.
But what this most certainly does not amount to is a big idea to solve global poverty. Gathering around de Soto is a semi-hysterical spinning that ludicrously compares him to Adam Smith and Karl Marx. His book, The Mystery of Capital, is breathless, grandiose, and claims to have fathomed "secrets" and "mysteries". But if that's what it takes to get a book that baldly states that globalisation is not working for five- sixths of the world's population on to the US bestseller charts, then more power to his elbow.
Governments do need to devise ways to hook the extralegal economy into the formal economy. Opt into the system and you get access to credit to invest in your home and business, and you don't have to pay bribes to the mafia. De Soto claims his theory is backed up by what happened in the fast-track scheme he designed for small business under President Fujimori's government in Peru, when 276,000 businesses voluntarily opted for legalisation.
But what de Soto doesn't acknowledge is that the balance of benefit between staying out of the system and opting in can be delicate or even tipped firmly against. Perhaps for shanty dwellers in Brazil or market stall holders in Kiev, the local mafia has far more clout than any government. To them, legalisation only doubles their burden, adding taxes to the bribes they will have to carry on paying.
The laws a country makes and how they are enforced reflect the disposition of political power - and that is determined by who has economic power. De Soto's work is an elaborate smokescreen to hide the uglier truth. The power, political and economic, lies with the globalised elite in developing countries who are often em ployed or bullied by western multinationals, and who run those countries for the maximum extractive benefit of the west. We import their raw commodities at rock bottom prices, and export back to them manufactured goods; we restrict their manufactured exports and we charge high levels of interest on their debts. None of that, of course, gets a hearing in de Soto's work, which is no doubt partly because his CV includes a stint as an economist for Gatt (the precursor of the WTO) and as the chief executive officer of "one of Europe's largest engineering firms". This is touchy, feely capitalism with a heart. Handle it with care.
The Mystery of Capital by Hernando de Soto is published by Bantam Press. madeleine.bunting@guardian.co.uk

LOAD-DATE: September 11, 2000

LANGUAGE: ENGLISH

Copyright 2000 Guardian Newspapers Limited

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The Evening Standard (London)

July 12, 1999

In search of the real world (in which none of us is actually living); The Government has been criticised for employing too many young advisers who know nothing about 'the real world'.

BYLINE: Christopher Hudson

SECTION: Pg. 13

LENGTH: 1034 words

I WONDER what it's like to be somebody who lives in the real world.
All we know, because we read it every day, is that the real world is not inhabited by Mr Prescott's faceless wonders who advise government ministers.
Nor, as far as I can tell, is the real world lived in by the Royal Family, by the stinking rich, by London Underground drivers or other public-sector workers who ask for too much money, or by intellectuals (who live in ivory towers).
But I can think of all kinds of other people who claim to live anywhere but in the real world. Talk to teachers, who, after all, have been in classrooms from the age of four, and they will tell you that the real world does not consist of teaching cartoon-book Shakespeare to classes of indifferent kids. Talk to journalists and they will point out that their job is not to live in the real world but to write about it, preferably from a safe distance. Talk to any one of a million workers in this city and they will explain that they look at the real world through a plate-glass window, several air-conditioned storeys up. 
The fact is that the real world is a chimera - like one of those fantastical islands described in the Dictionary of Imaginary Places where the animals hop on one leg and all the trees are upside-down. It is a romantic throwback to the days when people were knocked about a bit in the university of life, gaining the kind of experience and knowledge of their fellow man which came from sailing round the world before the mast, or storming a redoubt on the Khyber Pass under a hail of Pathan bullets.
Perhaps what Mr Prescott had in mind for government policy wonks - rather than Oxbridge and a think-tank, interrupted by a spell of parliamentary research - is the kind of CV that the novelist Jack London could have produced at the turn of the century: trapping and fishing for food at the age of 10, then slaving in a pickle factory 12 hours a day, an oyster pirate at 15 before joining the Fish Patrol against pirates and smugglers along the Barbary Coast, then taking the wheel of an 80-ton sealing vessel in the tumultuous seas of the Bering Strait, returning to ride the rails as an unemployed hobo and spending time in the Erie State Penitentiary - all before the age of 19.
If Jack London in a suit and tie, was miraculously transposed to late 1990s Whitehall as an Ed Balls, a Geoffrey Norris or a Roger Liddle, would his real-world exposure make a difference to the way he operated? The answer is that it might give him the inside track on rail travel and the fishing industry, but otherwise it would affect him the same way it did the real Jack London driving him to extremist views, alcoholic binges on malt whisky and severe depressions, which he could only overcome with a liberal use of morphine.
YES, I know Jack london is an extreme case, and I accept that ministerial advisers who have worked all their life in politics, or in journalism or lobbying, might bring an edge of impractical idealism to the formation of government policy. But to imply that they don't live in the real world makes no sense, without a clearer idea of what we mean by it.
The Tories, when they deplore the rise of a new political class, always identify the real world with commerce - getting to know what people want by selling things to them. It was always a mark in Stephen Dorrell's favour (as opposed to Michael Portillo or John Redwood, for example) that his family ran an industrial clothing and overalls firm, of which Dorrell was a director.
The fact that about two-thirds of Labour's new intake of MPs at the last election came from the public sector - lobbyists, consultants, lecturers, councillors, white-collar union workers and the like - enabled the Tories to argue that they didn't live in the real world, because their lives have been about spending public money rather than creating wealth.
Yet there were plenty of lecturers, lawyers and lobbyists in the new Tory intake as well; they have almost as few employers or industrialists in the Commons as Labour have, and that splendid breed of gruff-voiced military men from the shires has long since retired. Their wartime experience certainly counted as the real world, but did that make them any better politicians? For every Willie Whitelaw there were at least three red-faced, apoplectic blatherers straight out of an Osbert Lancaster cartoon.
The truth is that the ability to sympathise with ordinary voters and understand their needs can spring from sources which never find their way onto a CV. It might be wisdom gained in weekly surgeries with constituents, or it might depend on a politician's formative experiences.
Margaret Beckett or Jack Straw have been involved in Labour Party work since their twenties and, as professional politicians, would never pretend to the kind of "real world" credentials that John Prescott earned as a trainee chef and a steward on the Cunard Line. Yet Margaret Beckett was the daughter of a carpenter and married an ex-fitter, and Jack Straw, who was raised in an atmosphere of Labour folklore, had plenty of exposure to people's needs as president of the NUS and an Islington councillor for seven years.
THE danger comes not from politicians like these but from people, a small minority of the 68 faceless wonders Prescott was talking about, who deliberately insulate themselves from the real world by creating a parallel world of their own. I refer to the Blair cronies who live in the same neighbourhood, play tennis together, eat at the same restaurants, read the same book by Geoff Mulgan and even, come to that, intermarry.
This is the nexus we should worry about, not the fact that 16 of the Government aides are journalists, and 26 of them are career Labour officials or spin doctors.
Jack London, when at 18 he started looking round at his contemporaries who had enjoyed a normal childhood, declared himself possessed of "a sadder and more terrible wisdom". Rather that, than the smug self-assurance of these young policy wonks who have created their own world to protect themselves from the annoying, stubborn, illogical realities the rest of us face daily .

LOAD-DATE: July 13, 1999

LANGUAGE: English

GRAPHIC: DIFFERENT WAYS OF LIFE: BUT IS A TOUGH DAY DOWN THE MINES ANYMORE REAL THAN A HARD DAY AT THE OFFICE COMPUTER?

PUB-TYPE: Paper

Copyright 1999 Associated Newspapers Ltd.

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New Statesman

December 4, 1998

The wonks are coming of age; Rarely have think-tanks had such an opportunity to influence policy, writes Caroline Daniel

BYLINE: Caroline Daniel

LENGTH: 980 words

They thought they had got over the worst once they had struggled through their eight-minute presentations on 'Can there be a Third Way in foreign policy?' But there was one more hurdle. 'Would you go ahead and publish a report if the No 10 Policy Unit and the Foreign Office didn't want you to?'
This was the awkward predicament faced by candidates applying for the position of director of the new Foreign Policy Centre. With luminaries such as Tony Blair and Robin Cook on the letterhead, and with Cook's special adviser and an adviser from the Policy Unit acting as chief inquisitors, such a blunt question about political allegiance should have come as no surprise. 
The centre is not the only think-tank where you can detect high-level political 'interest'. Demos is seeking a new director to replace Geoff Mulgan, who resigned in October to spend more time with the No 10 Policy Unit. There are concerns that Mulgan is having a tough time severing his umbilical link to the organisation he helped found, and is lobbying hard for his chosen successor.
At the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR) meanwhile, a new Blairite director has recently been appointed to replace Gerry Holtham, a clever, Eeyorish man, who resigned in June to re-seek his fortune in the city. Early applicants received a quickie interview, taking less time than it would to hire a new secretary. A shortlist of three was drawn up. Then nothing for a month. Candidates waited for the second round. It never came. In October Matthew Taylor was anointed.
Taylor is seen by many as an Identikit Blairite: shorn hair, sharp suit and quivering bleeper. He has the CV to support the image: assistant general secretary of the Labour Party and director of policy during the election. It is a whispered secret that he was offered a post inside No 10.
Taylor's appointment may seem to confirm No 10's footballing tendency to delineate the world into on- and off-side factions, ousting awkward types, such as Holtham, and replacing them with the tried and trusted few.
But the reality is somewhat different. Realeconomik as much as Realpolitik influenced the selection of Taylor. Although some trustees were unhappy with the candidates, there was financial pressure not to grind through a further round of interviews: the IPPR needed a cash injection after the fund-raising lull left by Holtham's departure and Taylor, among his other skills, looked best able to deliver.
The biggest headache for think-tanks is that they offer a salary of only GBP35,000 or so but want to attract people with an unusually wide range of skills: political savvy, academic credibility, ideas and the ability to hustle for funds. Chatham House had to call in headhunters to find a new director. The increasingly influential new Centre for European Reform was lucky to attract Charles Grant as its director, after he took a pay cut from the Economist. The Foreign Policy Centre appointed 24-year-old Mark ('Cool Britannia') Leonard, formerly a Demos wunderkind, only after a trawl through the foreign policy community had failed. Many of those rumoured to have applied for Demos are already associated with it, such as Tom Bentley, a 25-year-old researcher, Helen Wilkinson and Ian Christie, the current deputy director. Demos hopes to appoint someone by Christmas. (Put your money on Bentley.)
Once in place, though, there is a real opportunity for think-tankers to become highly influential by engaging with a government whose thinking is still relatively inchoate on many issues. A tone of constructive criticism is more likely to pay dividends (and internal wages) than desultory shin-kicking.
In their pursuit of influence, the various think-tanks are adopting very different approaches. Though he passed the political loyalty test, Leonard thinks that 'trying to second-guess what the government's agenda is may confer short-term influence, but ultimately this influence is limited because you are not changing the public debate. Think-tanks often work best by being outrageous, not second-guessing.'
Leonard hopes to use the media as a 'battering ram' to force through new conventional wisdom in foreign affairs, and wrestle influence away from the leather-armchair elites of Chatham House.
At the Fabian Society, the general secretary Michael Jacobs argues that 'influence cannot be the criterion for how you choose what work you do'. Jacobs, an environmental economist who landed the post last year after fighting off younger, newer Labour contenders, is some way from being an Identikit Blairite. Instead he recognises that he must tickle his members' ideological tastes as much as the government's, as they provide one-third of the society's cash. He describes his relationship with government as a hokey-cokey, 'half-in and half-out'.
Matthew Taylor, however, is keen to move the IPPR to the heart of political debate; he wants to shift the focus away from micro-policy on to bigger-picture projects, such as new technology, and to raise the institute's media profile.
The danger, as Eamonn Butler of the pro-free market Adam Smith Institute sees it, is that the IPPR will go the way of the Centre for Policy Studies (CPS). 'It became so close to the government that it in effect became part of the Policy Unit and disappeared.' As for his own think-tank, it does not seem to be suffering from a similar identity crisis: 'We have the same relationship with this government as we had with the previous one,' he claims.
Over on the right, the Institute of Economic Affairs is equally dismissive of all this talk of repositioning.
'We never position ourselves according to what the government is doing,' explained David Green, the director of the health and welfare unit. 'We want to encourage discussion about liberty and the market economy. We keep ploughing that furrow.'

LOAD-DATE: September 13, 2001

Copyright 1998 New Statesman Ltd

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The Independent (London)

October 29, 1995, Sunday

GRAY MATTER; Left, Right, Left ... the progress of John Gray, thinker and political pundit, might carry a moral for our times

BYLINE: BEN ROGERS

SECTION: SUNDAY REVIEW; Page 32

LENGTH: 2140 words

ON the face of it, John Gray seems to be one of the best examples we have of a public intellectual - someone who is able to bring unconventional philosophical ideas to bear on the urgent issues of the day. He has been a lecturer in political theory at Oxford for almost 20 years, and has just published his eighth book. He writes for national newspapers a couple of times a month, and pops up on TV or radio almost as often. In the last two weeks he has been in London arguing about the end of history with Francis Fukuyama and about "the culture of complacency" with Melanie Phillips, debating communitarianism with Amitai Etzioni and "post-humanism" with Geoff Mulgan. Why then do so few people know what he stands for, or even who he is? Perhaps it is because he is a loose cannon, who has moved from Left to Right to Left again; perhaps his thought defies our tired political categories. 
Gray, it is evident, does not want to talk about his personal life. Asked about his background, he rattles off a quick cv: "I was born in 1948 and I am 47. I was brought up in South Shields; I went to a grammar school and then Oxford." Prodded, he reveals a little more. His family was working class - his father was a carpenter - and loyally Labour.  There were no boyhood intellectual models, but he had some exceptional teachers at school.
It is only when we begin to talk about his work that he offers any detail.  He began as a student on the Left, and wrote a thesis on John Stuart Mill at Oxford, which later became his first book. He taught at Exeter University, before returning to Oxford in 1976 and has been there, at Jesus College, ever since. It was his supervisor Steven Lukes who first suggested he should look at the right-wing liberal F A Hayek, and this rapidly lead to a conversion to a Thatcherite free-market conservatism. "I take responsibility for directing him to Hayek, but not for anything else," Lukes pleads.  This was the late 1970s and Gray, with more ink inside him than a cuttlefish, was quickly a much sought-after commodity on the right-wing think-tank circuit in both the US and Britain. His collections of essays contain papers written in association with the Institute for Economic Affairs and the Centre for Policy Studies in this country, and the Liberty Foundation in the US, among others.
Towards the end of the 1980s, however, Gray began to have doubts. In a series of papers published as Beyond the New Right he attempted "an immanent critique" of Thatcherite ideas and championed a strongly communitarian and "green" conservatism. "In retrospect," he reflects, "I stayed in too long." His new book contains an essay which - perhaps a little faint-heartedly - describes Thatcherism as "a compelling response to otherwise intractable dilemmas". But it sees conservatism as a bankrupt force: in its love affair with the unlimited market it has undermined the very communities and hierarchies it existed to preserve. So have the circumstances changed, or has he?  "Both. I don't think conservatism has always been incoherent, but it has become so." And, as he admits, the causes of the change were as much personal as intellectual: a close relative became seriously ill, and it brought home to him the importance of a National Health Service. He makes no secret that he is now placing his hopes in Tony Blair.
While we are talking he reminds me that Oscar Wilde's famous dictum was once adapted for another philosopher, Alasdair MacIntyre: "To change your mind once is a misfortune, to change it six times looks like carelessness".  It is tempting, although Gray seems unaware of it, to say the same thing of him. This would be a little unfair. Certain themes run through the writings which make his changes of mind deeply interesting. For one thing, he has always been a oppositional anti-establishment thinker (like many of his former friends on the Right, he saw himself as a radical); to that extent, he has remained true to his marginal, borderland origins. Beyond this, his work has tended to circle around a small cluster of big ideas: the importance of customs as a guide to life, a hard-headed emphasis on the diversity of these customs, and a conception of the political task before us as a search for ways in which they might coexist in peace.
Throughout his career his most vehement criticism has been reserved for what he calls "the Enlightenment project of universal emancipation and civilisation". As the new book stresses, this project has its roots in classical and Christian ideas, but it took on its modern form in the 18th century, above all in the French Enlightenment. Put simply - but not more simply than Gray is willing to put it - Enlightenment thinkers wanted to displace customary ways of life by a purely rational and secular morality.
In the 1980s Gray argued persuasively that Soviet communism should be seen not as continuation of Russian traditions but as a variation on this Enlightenment project. Now, with the collapse of Marxism as a historical force, he is directing his fire at what he claims is the resurgence of liberal complacency. Francis Fukuyama is his favourite target. If Fukuyama had not arrived to proclaim that the victory of democratic capitalism over communism marked the end of history, even Gray would not have dared to invent him.
According to Gray, the problem with the new liberalism is that it fails to appreciate how much our moral reasoning - even Enlightenment reasoning - owes to our specific culture. Arrangements that appear just in one society will be completely alien to another. Beyond this though, Gray insists, doctrinal liberalism is dangerous - dismissive of, and so unprepared for the "militant religions and resurgent ethnicities" sweeping the world.  Witness, for instance, the West's surprise when Yugoslavia erupted into civil war. At home, according to Gray, the premium that liberals attach to rights over community is undermining our traditions of civic life.  In American politics, ideas about non-negotiable "natural" rights have led, over issues like abortion and religious education, to "a low-intensity civil war". (Gray insists that he himself is an "ultra-liberal on these sorts of issues".)
So what does he suggest? First of all, he insists on the importance of cultural identity - what he calls "the primacy of cultural tradition in political life". Local and national customs make us who we are and shape our notions of right and wrong. In his right-wing phase, Gray argued that the real threat to local traditions came from the socialist state. He was impressed, in particular, by an argument of Hayek's - that where centralised economic planning sought to rationalise local economies out of existence, the market encouraged their adaptation to new circumstances. Now, though, he believes that as contemporary conservatism has hardened into a fundamentalist free-market ideology, it, rather than socialism, has become the real enemy.
The concept that Gray's new book advocates is that of "the social market" - a pragmatic recognition that while only the market can secure prosperity and preserve civil liberties, market institutions, like political systems, need to be adapted to local needs. For instance, the introduction of Western- style free-market reforms will only further impoverish and destabilise Eastern Europe and Russia. At home he is critical of the "hollowing out of social institutions". What, I ask, does that mean ? "Well, the way, for instance, in which the application of market thinking to institutions like the BBC and National Health Service is undermining their distinctive ethos and expertise." I wonder what his old friends in the Thatcher Foundation would make of that.
This concern for moral order, local knowledge and established ways of life puts Gray firmly in the communitarian camp. Yet on a personal level he feels no strong allegiance to one particular community. "Like most people, I am made up of a variety of sometimes competing identities." He argues that it is wrong to suppose - as traditional liberals, conservatives and communitarians all do - that one might ever feel entirely at home in a single way of life, which provides all the answers on how to live.  His pluralism is perhaps underlined by the fact that his first wife was Czech, his second wife is Japanese. He is particularly critical of conservatives like Roger Scruton who dream of returning to the "seamless" communities of the past - he feels no great regret at the passing of the working-class communities he knew as a child, where there was solidarity but also "a lot of suffering". He thought Major's attempt to return the family "back to basics" was "farcical", and quotes Wittgenstein's remark that trying to salvage damaged traditions is like trying to mend a spider's web with one's bare hands.
In the last essay in the new book, he takes his emphasis on diversity of values one stage further, and claims that liberal ideals and institutions - human rights, freedom of expression, representative government - have no special status. There are standards of fairness and virtue which all societies must meet (and which, he admits, most around the world do not).  But this minimum moral code can be met in very different ways and there are no grounds - apart from established practice - on which to choose between them. Gray insists that liberalism is right for us and that he himself is a liberal of sorts; yet, he argues, it is just arrogant to say that all other forms of government are illegitimate. The way in which East Asian societies refuse to tolerate mass unemployment, for instance, has something to teach the West.
It strikes me that there are no other thinkers around willing to think of our liberalism in this way, as just one tradition among others. Even fellow pluralists like the American philosopher Richard Rorty end up according liberal democracy a special privilege. When I put this point to Gray he seems slightly nervous at the thought: "I suppose I am ploughing a lonely furrow." But there is a sparkle in his eyes, and I get the impression that deep down the idea appeals.
Inevitably some of Gray's associates have been angered and alienated by his political conversions. In the 1980s there were dark accusations that he had been "bought"; now many of his old friends on the Right think of him as an apostate. But colleagues at Oxford are broadly sympathetic.  "The thing about John," says David Miller, a political theorist at Nuffield, "is that he likes to take ideas to their logical conclusion. He is a sceptical thinker, always working through the weaknesses in his beliefs." Liz Frazer, a politics tutor at New College, is happy to give him the benefit of the doubt: "The generous interpretation is that he saw with his own eyes the effects of the ideas he advocated and so changed his position - no one should be blamed for changing his mind." She rather admires anyone brave enough to say our way of life has no unique foundation in human reason - a view for which she, like David Miller, has some sympathy. Gray's emergence as a political pundit is, she adds, quite new: "What we know about here is someone who has written some important books and is a brilliant lecturer.  Students come away saying they have understood the issues for the first time."
One to one, Gray is a rather shaggy canine presence - soft-spoken, hesitant and slightly vulnerable; worried, I thought, about what people would make of his intellectual odyssey. His essays, on the other hand, are combative, acerbic and full of drama. He can be generous about the great old men he has known and admired - Hayek, Michael Oakshott, Isaiah Berlin. But, as with Fukuyama, he is unsparing on his enemies.
Hard questions remain, however - and Gray never really examines the case his opponents make against a position like his. His work remains a salutary warning against Western conceit, and against the threat posed by individualism to the common culture on which liberal life depends. Yet Gray has become so concerned - almost obsessed - with the importance of community that he can barely bring himself to acknowledge that established ways of life can be oppressive and unjust as well as enabling. We talked about some of these issues towards the end of an afternoon spent in his rooms in college. He agreed that they were difficult, but clearly my qualms were alien to him. "You see," he said, and as if at the very end of our meeting some gesture of confidence was due, "I am a partisan." And it is true that he loves to push ideas to their extremes. For a moment the light caught his wire-rimmed glasses, making them go white.
! 'Enlightenment's Wake: Politics and Culture at the Close of the Modern Age' (Routledge pounds 19.99)

LOAD-DATE: October 30, 1995

LANGUAGE: ENGLISH

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