At 24/01/03 02:44 -0800, you wrote:
Yes, surely.> "Are you really suggesting that any management system > [slight pause > searching for meaning], business enterprise, does not > need targets?" Paul > Boateng bright black lawyer in New Labour government, > relaxed yesterdayOf course, when targets are targets for social equality, they are called "quotas" and become bad. dd
I was wondering how to express the difference.
New Labour does have targets in certain circumstances that look like that. It has just run into serious trouble because one of its targets in higher education is to make that more available across the board to people who are socially disadvantaged. This in turn has run into conflict with a target of of increasing the total numbers in higher education, which in turn shapens the contradiction with a target that national expenditure on higher education must be kept within limits. There is also a target that the best of British Universities must be able to compete globally with the best of US universities.
As a result it is going to allow British Universities to raise a premium on tuition fees, which will be socially regressive, only partly covered by the provision of some scholarships. These "top up fees" will help Cambridge and Oxford to remain competitive with Harvard and Yale, etc. at the cost of becoming more privileged. One of the not so subtleties is to let the student add this to their debt to be paid off from their higher salary, if daddy has not paid it already.
The essence is of the New Labour management system is to run the government and government departments as if they are massive finance capitalist enterprises. The main overall target is the relative share of the vote in opinion polls rather than the share price. But the assumption is that it is necessary to take a long term as well as a short term view of managing a big corporation, riding out fluctuations in the business cycle, and managing image and quality control in a sophisticated way.
If social equality became a valued goal in the focus groups that the government organises regularly, then it could include that as a target. They have tinkered around the edges of making enormous salaries for directors, transparent at annual general meetings. But there is quite a lot of research that people tolerate inequality, and consider that too much envy is destructive. They are likely to want what they can see as equality of access for their children to education, while of course most of them think their children are above average.
The point you are making I understand to be this: New Labour and centrists of its ilk will absolutely not impose a target of social equality in disregard of good business management principles of the sort used by modern finance capital. Any political party that does so will have to decide how it is going to win power and perhaps more importantly, how it is going to keep it. Without keeping power any egalitarian advances are likely to be swept aside at the next election in a wave of vindictive reactionary contempt. Of course political parties can have social equality as a target for many years without any real hope of winning power, perhaps hoping only marginally to affect the balance of forces in civil society. In fact becoming a sort of home for identity politics of people who at least believe together in social equality.Unless they are a truly revolutionary party, and then once having come to armed power, they can impose restrictions on the financing of other political parties, and even their existence. But there is always the problem of people complaining that there is no choice, and needing to be kept under control, if necessary by force. With the danger that the revolutionary idealists who are in favour of imposing equality, come to be gossiped about as the new self-interested corrupt and brutal elite.
Chris Burford
London
