Why it is important you come – An Outsider’s Perspective
Thursday, September 20th, 2018
When I was asked to help organise the JUC’s Centenary Event the facts I considered were these; could I organise events, could I brief speakers and could I help structure, and facilitate a participatory decision making process? I did not put a lot of thought into who the JUC were or why this conference might, in any way, be important, never mind to me.
However, over the months I have been involved it has become important to me and here’s why. We live in a Country in which is transfixed by BREXIT. A political event which has divided the whole nation, not least those who claim the authority to lead us as to how best to respond to the ‘will of the people’. An opinion expressed through a democratic process which everyone now accepts to have been, at best, swayed by promises of cash to favourite causes which cannot now be realised and, at worst, the result of misinformation which polluted social media at the behest of the Russian government. A country led by a government which is so preoccupied by the need to carry out this ‘will’ that parliamentary and main stream media time is hardly ever focused for very long on the slow collapse of our social and public life.
What is it I mean by that phrase? It is everything in the realm which makes society more that what can be, easily, bought and sold. Those services which respond to what you need rather than who you know, how much you have or how ‘deserving’ you are. It is the provision of those things that can’t be easily quantifiable, like care, kindness and connection, in a world which, increasingly, focuses on those things that can be seen to be delivered, or at least promised, perhaps on the side of a bus? So that the notion of public and social service has, in my life time, been reduced from something heartfelt to that which can more easily be marketable. And yet many of those in the private sector who have taken up the responsibility of delivering ‘public’ services from prisons to schools have not proven in practice to have been any better in delivering better tangible outcomes. Our voluntary and charitable sector too becomes increasingly professionalised so increasingly it is difficult to differentiate them from the third and private sector organisations with whom they need to ‘compete’. In such a world it becomes more urgent, not less, to understand what we mean by public and social service and what, seemingly without us realising it, we are busy giving away.
So it matters to me that people who do and study these things are, in practice, being increasingly undervalued. It matters to me that those who are in practice doing what appears to them effective struggle to find links with those in fields of study which could provide them with an evidential language for that which they institutively know to be true, or challenge them to look again. It matters to me that the interface between research and practice is being impoverished by the lack of investment in the people and programmes that make such things possible. So where does this leave us and why should you make the time and effort to come on the 18th of October? The JUC was established by the great and the good in the aftermath of the First World War. Its purpose to investigate what skills, capacities, support, training, education and focus those who were to serve as public and social servants required and what policy makers needed to do to make that happen. Is that not, in our fragmented times, what is urgently needed now? A conversation between people who care about what matters now and at the very least you will have an interesting day, be in like minded and like hearted company for a good lunch and a glass or two and some new contacts to make at the end? So if you care, have something to say, please come?