Guest Blog 9

The Morality Play

I admit to feeling a bit stressed today as we wait to see what the Judicial Review brings after this long campaign, and my feelings are a bit polarised. So I veer from hoping against hope that justice will prevail, and taking consolation and some pride in the view that we have fought as far as could, and at the very least have not made this privatisation easy. But this makes me think of another polarity that has been evident throughout this privatisation episode and that reveals a fault line in our whole political system. 

Over and again I have been thinking that the Probation Service has become a symbol of the split between two completely different types of public servant: the Tory minister who shamelessly spouts propaganda about serving the community while really representing his shadowy corporate backers, and the Probation worker who is still motivated by the idea of public service. 

Broadly the split corresponds to two visions – orientated to social good or to the market - that used to be easily identified with the two main political parties, but Labour is still struggling to regain a moral vision of community, and in any case appears not to have the conviction or nerve to seize the moment, however much one can sense people’s disgusted readiness for something other than the prevailing market ideology that holds the parties, and the media, and even now the charities and the BBC in thrall… 

For me, without hopefully sounding too pious, probation has always been an example of citizens caring about each other and taking both personal and social responsibility to act on that care. The basic moral values are empathy and responsibility for oneself and others. I connect this to a view that government has moral, as well as civic, duties of protection and empowerment for everyone equally. From this it follows that we must respect and value public services, and there is no sense of a civilised life for all people without things we have provided together.

This government, on the other hand, thinks that citizens should be guaranteed liberty to follow self-interest freely regardless of the well-being or interests of others. The basic moral values (admirable until distorted by an ideology of greed) are discipline and self-reliance. This leads to a view that it is natural to compete when there are scarce resources, and that it takes discipline and enterprise to succeed in a competitive world. On this view, government is mere interference, and a means of disguising people’s responsibility for their own poverty and indiscipline. On this view, public resources should be privatised, since no one should be forced to resource anyone else. 

One notes of course that for all the talk of private enterprise, the market and competition that model for these companies is a guaranteed monopoly income paid for by the taxpayer: public spending is fine so long as it ends up in the pockets of shareholders, CEOs and the politicians who end up with a consultancy, or with campaign funds indirectly funded by the taxpayer, though destructive of their interest.

What is the appropriate response to this divide that confronts us all on a daily basis? Moralistic indignation at the kinds of lies, underhand tactics and bullying involved, and of which our justice minister offers daily proof? I cannot forget the grotesque comedy of the occasion when I met him when with all the gravity of his office, he tried to stare me out like a 70s skinhead. 

Closer to home is the question of what has happened to the moral values of those members of our profession who have reached the dizzying heights of senior management? These are people who must feel enormous daily tension between their moral outlook and the needs for compliance. People’s need to follow orders must not be underestimated, and I remember from my social psychology training how automatically most of us follow orders, with all obvious references to My Lai and Milgram’s experiment. 

But we need to consider how so many senior managers in Probation have done what they are told, knowing full well what the effects would be, in order to hold on to their jobs in the new dispensation (as well, according to reports, receiving up to £250,000 hush money). So I feel so sorry for all those who have stayed on, doing their jobs heroically as well as possible in the current chaos, and forced into silence in another way, by stick rather than carrot… At times I have felt that giving up my job was perhaps the easier option.

So what sense to make of all this? At times I have fallen back on the very plausible idea that people like Grayling are to be thought of as psychopaths with no moral values, while the values and courage that one hoped for in the Lib Dems just came out in the wash, as soon as they sniffed power. After all, it's a well known generalisation that, if you’re poor and a psychopath you end up in prison but, if you’re rich and a psychopath you end up as a CEO, banker or justice minister in this case... However, if it were this simple, of all the people in the whole world who should have been able to outsmart Grayling, it was us: we have always worked with psychopaths, though it is unfortunate that now we work for them. 

So, we’ve actually been fighting a far wider battle for the moral heart and soul of society against an opposition that barely bothers to disguise its distaste for those it feels are not morally disciplined enough to become rich like themselves. After all, Cameron said this week that lowering taxes was a moral duty. We may wonder who is going to pay for schools, health, public infrastructure, all of which are used by millionaires and private corporations and without which they would never have made a fortune. 

But less tax means less money for social programmes and more chance of bribing the electorate, although someone could have told him he needn’t bother as rich people avoid taxes anyway. For these people the end justifies the means, and the end is an Establishment and a socially unequal network that must be maintained at all costs. As the L’Oreal advert says, it’s because they’re worth it. To them our new star couple is a marriage made in heaven.

At this point I confess I got the gag about the advert from Owen Jones, whose book on the establishment I am drawing on here. Another writer whose books I now have time to read while all of you are struggling with the new IT systems, is George Lakoff, and his core idea is that Left parties need to fight back against the ways that the neo-liberal right has hi-jacked political discourse, which is to say (and this is one of his key ideas) that they have moralized political discourse according to a view of right and wrong that strips out social and communal responsibility, and identifies us purely as self-interested agents riding the high seas of the market (or skulking in the lifeboats offered by privatisations). 

So in short, we need to reframe, as he would put it, political language by offering a different moral perspective, perhaps even by reviving the one that we all started out with when we started in this job, before budgets, and management and Tory opportunists got their piratical hands on the whole she-bang.

However, with one union and its legal team, the power of the people, a deeply felt set of moral values by which we live our lives and do our work, and more empathy in one Probation worker than the entire Tory party, we may well win a historic victory. If we do, I for one will feel that it is also a victory for a new moral vision of our society.

Joanna Hughes