Empowering the people
Oliver Letwin, MP for West Dorset and Chairman of the Policy Review and of the Conservative Research Department, talks to the RSA’s Matthew Taylor about why helping people to help themselves is the way to deal with social issues
MT: What do you think motivates people in terms of how they behave?
OL: People are motivated to behave in certain ways in their ordinary lives by many different things. It has to do with family, friends, affections, ambitions, culture and social norms. In our ordinary lives we don’t have a mechanistic view of these things. We don’t imagine that the only reason somebody does something is because there is a police officer who arrives with some warrant who tells you what to do or otherwise you’ll go to jail.
Most of the time we all live in a space that’s within the law and yet we behave in very different ways depending on all these other things around us. In politics we are beginning to think about the things, which are blindingly obvious, which we were distracted from by being overly concerned with government and not enough with citizens and how they react.
MT: To what extent do you adhere to the kind of classical, ‘rational man’ view of human motivation? Or do you think that has become discredited and, if so, what are the new elements one has to include in one’s analysis of what motivates people?
OL: Most people most of the time are pretty rational. But rationality among humans as opposed to computers is not a simple and straightforward matter. It’s bound up with desires, concerns and fashions and all sorts of things that help to alter people’s conceptions of their own ambitions. So they may act rationally in such a way as to fulfil their ambitions, but their ambitions themselves are very complex. It’s only extreme rationalism that’s given rationality a bad name.
I’m prejudiced on the subject because I’ve written a book about emotion which argues that emotion is not a separate thing from reason, but is a sort of non-instrumental aspect of our reason. So I absolutely don’t accept the idea that rational man and emotional man are separate. I think people come whole. Oddly enough, politicians are normally quite good at addressing people in the round because politicians are used to audiences and audiences come in the round. You don’t get people walking in with half of their brain and leaving the other half at home. They come with their emotions and their logic intertwined.
When we talk about policy there is this huge tendency to forget that the people we’re talking about are the same people we meet at meetings and in our surgeries. They are real human beings in the round. And policy only works if it addresses people as they are.
MT: What is the difference between Hazel Blears’ attempt to empower people through all sorts of strategies and the Conservative approach? Isn’t it the case that the whole political class is inviting citizens in a way to step up to the plate, but ending up with unconvincing accounts of how to do it? And this government is currently outsourcing more and more things to the voluntary sector. Isn’t it arguably entering into a kind of Animal Farm process whereby the voluntary sector becomes so involved in service delivery that it ends up looking like the public sector?
OL: The second part of your question answers the first part. I don’t doubt the goodwill of Hazel Blears and others who think that if they create contracts which specify processes and determine investigations, monitoring and reports and impose them on a group of people called the voluntary sector, they will then be able to get what they call results.
But this does resemble Animal Farm because it changes the very people that you’re trying to get to do things, because of their capabilities and capacities, into something you wanted to avoid using in the first place because it wasn’t capable of achieving results. So there needs to be a revolution in the way in which the government conceives of its relationship to communities, neighbourhoods and voluntary bodies. It is not about specifying, within an inch of its life, a contract with everything written down that will determine the processes that I, some bureaucrat sitting in Whitehall, have determined are the right processes or identifying an outcome that I would like to achieve.
Of course, it’s a big political risk because people will accuse you politically if it goes wrong, and there’s a big public accounts risk if you give them a grant and let them get on with it. And there’s a big bureaucratic risk that all the bureaucrats will be cross with you because you’re not specifying in enough detail.
We say, let’s take those risks. If there’s a group that thinks it can do some good and which contains some human beings who are not out to make a fast buck, but are just trying to put some things right which are wrong, we’ll help them. We’ll take the risk that perhaps some of them will work and some of them won’t. But we won’t try to specify what will happen.
