UK Emergency Services Network: Is there an alternative? (Part 1)
The continuing privatisation of public safety & the destruction of social value
Tangible, measurable economic value feeds off a less tangible, but deeper social value that has been accumulated over decades or even centuries by a particular society. This deeper social value generates the wider values, principles and cultural representations that underpin societies and economies. Social value without economic value leads to stagnation, insularity and insufficient wealth creation for the defence against poor harvests and foreign aggressors; economic value without social value leads to hubris, vanity projects, marketing hype and the destruction of the environment, public services; and eventually, if not remedied, social and economic inequality that can threaten the very fabric of a society if not properly addressed by its elected or unelected representatives.
However constrained we are by initial conditions (i.e. constitutions), we always have a choice: bad legislation can/must always be changed in the course of time, if/when public opinion turns against it and it becomes obvious to everyone that we have become lazy and just accepted the received wisdom of the ghosts of the past without questioning it or the privileged few it sustains.
At those rare historical and geographical moments when both social and economic value are equally prized, we witness extraordinary successes such as the creation of the social welfare states of Western Europe following the calamity of World War Two that washed away the inequalities and social injustices of the 1920s and 1930s.
Surely nobody can deny that we need to protect and cultivate both social, economic – and yes, even political - value, working together, embracing the best of the technologies of our age, to create and maintain successful, thriving, sustainable societies. All Governments are elected based on a vision of the society we want to live in. Difficult choices must be made by those chosen to represent us. We expect these people to defend our interests, act properly and decently, passing laws that will create the conditions for future growth and prosperity. We want to maximise our economic potential under the constraints of Pareto efficiency (i.e. leaving no-one behind), but we also want to cultivate the longer-term goals of social value and the protection of the environment that gives us life and our ultimate means of sustenance. Perhaps short-term – or even fixed-term – Governments that maximise short-term gains and are captured by a narrow group of economic actors need to be reviewed by the next Government (i.e. we need more political turkeys to vote for Christmas for the rest of us!)
Modern capitalist societies have become exceedingly complex: increasingly centralised governments make decisions that affect the lives of tens of millions of people at a local, regional, national and global level. This degree of complexity is a long way beyond the threshold set by Plato and Rousseau (tens of thousands in Athens or Geneva) and modern-day game theorists (maybe, three in a Prisoner’s Dilemma, including the jailor) for workable governance.
Such a large, complex system is inherently unstable and open to capture by a well-organised elite with strong global connections and historically favourable initial conditions of inherited wealth, access to education, a stable upbringing and the right contacts in the City and Whitehall. Thomas Piketty has explained this process very well in his recent book “Capital in the 21st century” so there is no need in this short blog for me to repeat how social and economic inequalities can perpetuate themselves through the generations, unless exceptional conditions can be created for a true “Government of the people by the people for the people” - the true definition of democracy that we have recently started to stray so far from again, with the inevitable catastrophic consequences for large sections of humanity.
Thatcherism is the classic expression of a clearly defined group with rapidly expanding economic power feeding off the social value built up by millions of social and economic agents over previous generations. Because the social value wrapped up in valuable public services is so difficult to quantify and because it does not appear directly in GDP figures, global investors ignore it when making their investment decisions and simply focus on the monetary return on their investments, adding a nice, juicy discounted cash-flow to make sure the returns increase exponentially in the future as compound interest wreaks its usual havoc. The benefits of privatisation are exaggerated and the costs to society of a steady erosion of the public sphere are discounted away. We are comforted by the increased choice of economic goods and services available to the majority of the population and the perceived – and generally, genuinely real - improvement in average living standards, but we also feel uneasy about having to pay more for almost everything – including services that were previously provided free-of-charge - as inflation eats away at our salaries, savings and pensions.
Initiatives are under way within international organisations such as United Nations, OECD, Eurostat (hardly a hot-bed of radicals), central banks and Governments (the Sarkozy-Stiglitz Commission comes to mind here) - as well as within the perhaps more radical, youthful, social and political movements challenging the status quo - to develop new measures of wealth and well-being that address these concerns and provide a better guide to the true state of nations. These measures need to be clear, transparent and free from manipulation by individual Governments and their spin doctors, managed globally by independent, highly respected authorities who are funded and agreed to by all nations. Surely, in the 21st century world of mobile broadband, hyper-connectivity and social media, our collective mind can produce better measures of value than the ones we use today.
I will not repeat my criticisms regarding the current UK Emergency Services Network procurement process, which has now reached a critical stage. I have already written enough about these in my earlier posts. This is not the time or place for another lengthy article, as there is work to be done and time is not on our side.
The argument from our Government is that, in the current economic climate of austerity, we cannot afford to build a separate next-generation emergency services network. We can no longer provide basic public services at low cost to our population. We have to pay our way in the world. We must sell off public assets to raise the money to pay back the holders of national debt such as global investment banks, insurance companies, pension funds, sovereign wealth funds, so that they can buy and control more public assets and be guaranteed a healthy rate of return on these assets from the Government through proper regulation - in a mind-blowing, circular process that is very hard to understand and explain accurately, but very easy for people to feel in their day-to-day lives.
When calculating the true long-term costs and benefits of a dedicated, state-of-the-art, publicly-controlled, fully functional, ubiquitous public safety network, we need to take into account the massive social value that will be generated by a communications network that will save lives, improve the operational efficiency of our emergency services users, reduce the massive insurance claims following natural and man-made disasters, keep the trains running on time, keep the lights on in our homes and offices, keep clean water flowing through our taps, allow future Governments to keep all of its citizens safe from attack or at least, greatly reduce the options open to terrorists and other nutters who would attack our way of life. In project management jargon, this means taking into account the total costs and benefits of ownership during the full life-cycle of the project. When this is done properly and objectively, we get very different results from short-term Governments selling off the nation’s social “gold and silver”.
When Governments massage the numbers to justify awarding juicy contracts and handing over large sums of taxpayers’ money to the usual suspects and titans of British and global business; when Governments accept billions of pounds from mobile phone operators in exchange for monopoly rights over certain swathes of spectrum and valuable services whose costs are passed on to customers and who complain when clever technical people find ways around paying excessive rents; when Governments work closer with large multinational corporations than the public they are supposed to represent. Then we realise how much we are still captive to the old hierarchical ways of thinking of the 20th century.
When Governments start allowing local communities and valuable public servants to take control of their own resources in a totally transparent way for the benefit of their communities, guaranteeing that the benefits of such initiatives are shared across the country; when Governments decide to award spectrum free of charge to emergency services organisations and lay down fair and reasonable terms and conditions for suppliers and operators wishing to provide connectivity services over this spectrum; when Governments start to listen to the citizens who elected them and work in their best interests; when the financial system finances truly valuable social and economic projects that benefit customers and improve our well-being. Then we will realise that we have finally freed ourselves from the shackles of Thatcherism and 20th century globalisation based on hierarchies and privileges. Then we will be able to build the real Digital Economy where social value and economic value work in unison, and public services are restored to their rightful place within society.
You may not have noticed, but there is a General Election taking place in the United Kingdom in a few weeks’ time. This should be the perfect time for us to have a serious debate about what we value most and how we want to make the most of the digital revolution that we are living through. Do we want to continue the process of privatisation of our public services until there is nothing left and we all have to pay for our own private security guards to protect our gated communities? Or do we want to create a new open, transparent digital public space – our equivalent of the agora in Athens – where Governments are dragged kicking and screaming before the people to explain the choices they have made and are held accountable and made to fall on their sword?
Whatever we are told and made to believe by the plethora of smiling, photogenic candidates pushing leaflets through our doors, appearing on our TV screens, tablets, smartphones and social media, and telling us how wonderful life could be if their party forms a majority in the next Parliament, please remember that the choice is still ours. We are the sovereign.
To be continued…
