Sure, we all want to save the world. But fiddling and tickling won't do it

By Alice Miles (THE TIMES, 29/03/06):

LAST MONTH in India I sat cross-legged (uncomfortably, I am not a hippy) on the floor of a sort of tent thing in a yoga resort — all bamboo huts and no toilets — waiting for a long-haired, long-skirted lady from Brighton, hugging a guitar, to begin singing. I had only been persuaded to go in by my daughter who thought that music meant nursery rhymes and was about to be very disappointed.

Before she could start, the woman had an essential question to ask of the 100 or so tourists perched at her feet. “Has anyone here”, she stared at us earnestly, “ever worked in an office?” My friend and I were the only ones who had —or the only ones who admitted to it.

“I worked in an office once,” she continued, “and this is the song I wrote when I left.” You can imagine what followed: misery and typing and capitalist evil and do you think you’re my boss, there are chains on the chair, and “I’ve esCAAAAAAAYYYYYYped”. And the audience, who had just been charged £3 for a compulsory cup of fruit punch by the enterprising local Indian capitalists, nodded meaningfully along.

I always want to ask those hippy types whether they walked to India or wherever it is they are eating banana pancakes that week, because it seems to me that you cannot profess a deep concern for the environment and then fly to Asia for a holiday. You can, like me, worry a bit about the environment then fly to India and offset your carbon emissions as a conscience salve, but you can’t claim to be an eco-warrier and do it. Just as you have to be a bit dim to sit and chant anti- capitalist slogans without noticing that the “wonderful” local people around you are the most enthusiastic capitalists in the world.

And all this came back to me yesterday as I listened to Bill Clinton speak about the challenge that globalisation presents for progressive politics. Here in Guildhall, at an event organised by the Smith Institute, which is pretty much Gordon Brown’s personal think-tank, were MPs and former ministers and Lords and Ladies and City types, all swaying in time to the progressive message. Was this the moment the progressive baton was passed, by Tony Blair’s mate Mr Clinton, to Gordon Brown?

In fact something bigger was under way. The former President of the United States roamed the world with the questions and challenges posed by global interdependence: health, security, opportunity, global warming. It was a good speech (read it at www.smith-institute.org.uk) and it went on and on. And on. Mr Brown’s fingers began to tap slightly impatiently along to the tune.

Across town, Margaret Beckett was being harangued from TV studio to TV studio about the Government’s failure to meet its own stringent target on carbon emissions, which yesterday it appeared to dump. The reason? High economic growth and the rise in global energy prices (which persuades industry to switch from gas to coal). Emisssions have actually risen by 3 per cent since 1997.

The trouble with great ideals is that they can be hellish hard to see through. A lot of government targets are falling by the wayside at the moment: child poverty dropping too slowly, fuel poverty (the expenditure of more than a tenth of household income on heating and powering the home) rising, not falling. The number of households in fuel poverty has actually doubled to two million since 2003, as a result of high domestic energy prices. Bit of a bugger, that: prices go up and both fuel poverty and carbon emissions increase.

You can tickle and tackle the system all you like, but events and human behaviour will always break through. I chanced upon a small report beneath a pile of papers in the House of Commons last week. It was called Impact of Sanctions for Lone Parents: Findings from Qualitative Research. This was about the policy whereby lone parent benefits are docked if the recipient fails to attend her Work Focused Interview. The report said this: (a) sanctions are often not imposed; and (b) when they are imposed, lone parents either don’t notice or simply believe that their benefit has been reassessed. “Few impacts of sanctioning on lone parents were noted,” it said.

Now just think of all the thought, the meetings, the memos, the manpower, the argument, the worry that will have gone into that change of policy, the imposition of sanctions on lone parents. Imagine the paperwork sent out to all frontline staff. Think of all the meetings missed, the warnings issued before somebody lost a tenner. And in reality, it makes not a blind bit of difference. First, because frontline staff, being human, do not like docking benefits, and secondly, because even when the benefit is docked, the recipients don’t notice or understand why. So complex is the system now that no one understands it.

The Chancellor has always believed that where admonishment fails, the tax system can be used to micromanage individual behaviour: look, for instance, at all those new categories of vehicle excise duty he has introduced.

But the greater the complexity, the likelier a person is just to give up or to ignore it altogether, be it a tax credit or a home insulation subsidy. The most effective messages in energy saving, for instance, are simple requests: turn your heating down a degree, switch your telly off overnight, turn the tap off while you brush your teeth.

Great ideals cannot be achieved by hectoring and micromanagement. Releasing the power of globalisation as a force for good must be about unleashing potential and creativity, about letting an Indian charge £3 for a plastic cup of punch if he can get away with it, not singing anti-capitalist songs at him or asking him whether he has ticked the correct box for non-glass utensil rebate. And in Britain, as in India. It sounds self-evident, but I’m not sure that to Mr Brown it is.