George Osborne
Shadow Chancellor George Osborne describes his understanding of open source politics.
Transcript:
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Q. My questions will not be included.
A. Okay.
Q. And also I would like to go into some of the challenges why you think this is difficult for government to implement and the tests -- to start with it would be good to get a succinct version of the main points you were making in your speech I am not doing a very good job of remembering the name of. What was your argument about the relationship between technology and government now?
A. Well, I think the interesting thing about the internet is it is a new way for people to communicate with each other. If you think of television or radio or newspapers -- that is a one-to-many medium, ie someone is the editor of the newspaper someone, is the producer or the editor of the television programme and they decide what the viewers watch. The interesting thing about the internet is it changes that relationship and everyone can take part and create their own content, whether it is on a blog or uploading a video on something like Youtube. So it is changing that relationship. It is a much more democratised form of communications and, of course, for government and politicians that is a profound challenge to the way politics is normally done, which is we communicate from on high from parliament from Whitehall and only once every four years and five years is there a general election where the public are brought in. Now I think that it is a good thing that this change is happening but I think it will shake up British politics and indeed politics around the world in a way that people probably have not anticipated yet.
Q. What sort of changes are you expecting or proposing in some ways what needs to change?
A. Well, if you look at -- look what politicians are doing at the moment generally, they are taking what used to be a manually handed-out press release and putting it on a website or they are recording a television programme or a radio interview. They are also doing a podcast but, in a way, those are new ways of doing fairly traditional things. You have not yet seen political parties really experiment with engaging lots of people, the public, in coming up with collective solutions to problems in the way that to think the most obvious model available on the internet at the moment, Wikipedia, enables everyone to contribute to a particular encyclopaedia entry. That is if you think about it -- think of the Wikipedia concept -- that is so unexpected to the world I grew up in. I grew up in an world of encyclopaedia Britannica. You have some expert who filled in an entry in an encyclopaedia and then you bought the encyclopaedia. We now live in a world where anyone can contribute to the encyclopaedia entry on Wikipedia so that challenge to the monopoly of knowledge and wisdom is as I say a very good thing in our society and a good thing in our politics.
Q. What about decision making? Could you say something about this being a good thing to change hierarchical decision making process do you say that as positive thing? Perhaps more people could become involved?
A. I think you would increasingly get -- maybe I will start again. I think you will increasingly get a form of open source politics. Open source software is the idea that there is this software programme on the internet and anyone can write the code for it and it can be used in all sorts of different applications. Open source politics is a similar idea and here our some problems in our society. Instead of relying on different policies government Ministers, Whitehall civil servants, to have a monopoly of wisdom, on how to solve that problem, you would engage through the internet, through the technology available these days in the getting the whole of the public, as many of the public as are interested in solving a particular problem. You could start at a very local level. You might have a particular community problem, crime in a particular street, a problem in a particular school and engage the community in finding a solution to that problem but you could also envisage it in at a national level. For example we have just had debates and votes in the house of commons on complicated issues around human embryology and abortion and so on. Well those are issues which many people in the public understand just as well as any politician. Why not engage them in a decision like that?
Q. So you do think there is a opportunity for the internet to enable people to become more directly involved decisions?
A. Well I think the internet is doing several things in terms of the relationship between the citizen and the state. First of all it is giving the citizens much more information than they ever had before. So on your PC at home you now have access as much information as a whole government department would have had access to 30 years ago.
But it is also at least opening up the possibility of a more open approach to government decision-making. So just like open source software is something put together by people across the world on the online community so open source government decision making could engage people across the country in some difficult decisions about how we are governed.
We should not just assume that MPs sitting in Westminster or government ministers and civil servants have a monopoly of wisdom. In the past it has been quite difficult to reach the whole public but actually the technology allows that to happen now.
Q. How do you characterise that shift in the relationship between citizens and state?
A. I think in the past, if you think about the relationship between citizen and state it was often that the state would hand down information -- we have a monopoly of information in Whitehall and you, the citizen, should be grateful that we let you in on some of the information. It is, I think, best summed up with the phrase that the gentleman in Whitehall knows best, which was actually uttered by a Labour cabinet minister 50 years ago or so. So that attitude I think doesn't apply in the modern world and now, through the internet, you have access to as much information as a government department would have had 30 years ago and there is no reason why government can not engage people across the entire country in solving some of the collective problems that we face as a society.
Q. I do not know it is very exciting to hear you say this stuff and I think, I don't feel like many other politicians are saying this to the same extent or so clearly as you do. What do you feel the challenges are to people agreeing with this... the way you present it is quite straight forward. Why is it not more popular this type of ethos you are talking about?
A. I think it takes a while for government and politicians to get used to big changes in technology.
It took a long time for parliament to adapt to the television age. It was decades before they allowed television cameras into the house of commons which, now that we watch it every night on the news, you would find extraordinary that there was even a debate about that two decades ago.
I think the internet is changing the relationship between citizen and state in quite subtle and far reaching ways. So for example the citizen has access to all this information that previously would not have been able to easily get hold of and politics and government is only slowly waking up to that fact. Not just in Britain but around the world politics and government is quite a hierarchical business and I guess the point about the internet is it is a very democratic business -- a very flat structure.
Everyone with their PC can up load a video on Youtube or join Facebook or set up their own blog and comment on anything they like and so it challenges that idea, basically, in the media and in politics that there is someone, the editor or the government minister, who knows best.
Q. So there is an shift in power going on, is that itself a threat to the way government has worked?
A. I do not think -- it is a threat to the way way that government has always worked but I do not think it is necessarily a bad thing for governmental politics.
I think the more you engage people in a decision the more they are likely to agree with it and the more you are likely to have a good decision at the end of the process. So if you look, for example, at the way that social networking sites have been very effective at creating communities that are not tide necessarily by geography, they are not all people living in the same area, but nevertheless express themselves in a very strong and collective way I guess the easiest example of that in British politics recently was the enormous public hostility to national road charging organised there by partly on line communities getting engaged in that. Partly people Emailing the Downing Street website and that had a changed government policy. Now in the past it would have been quite difficult to have garnered that type of public reaction. You could have commissioned opinion poles. You might have been able to organise a commission using paper and pen but the internet allowed a much quicker and I guess much bigger public reaction to be expressed.
Q. What do you think it is that stops that becoming... more formal ways that... people can directly affect politics?
A. I think government is just waking up slowly to the implications of this.
Obviously I am in opposition. I think government could go much further in doing this.
Some companies have been very innovative at having particular commercial problems they have got such as -- there is a famous example of a gold mining company in Canada of having a plot of land but was not sure where the gold might be buried or mined and put it on the web. All the amateur geologists around the world came up with their own view and it helped the company find gold. In a similar way you could engage thousands, hundreds of thousands of members of the public in solving some of the big challenges we face in the health service or the delivery of education in our state schools. There are all sorts of ways that the public could be engaged and the public have some front line expertise in the use of public services that is simply not available to civil servant or government ministers.
Q. With all that evidence that you are talking about you are saying that it is, sort of, people need time to learn about this and to learn to trust them. I suppose it is an scary thing even in my work to say to everyone "normally I make this decision but now actually I should probably ask everyone else who works here and listen to what they say" do you think.... Do you think there is something in that? that politics is to do with power it is difficult for people to make that leap, I am going to trust the outcome of this to a group of people?
A. Well I think it is about having the confidence to engage the public in making decisions and you know trusting their judgment as well as your own. I guess the relationship between the internet and government is a bit like the relationship between a child growing up and a parent. A child, of course, keeps pushing at boundaries as they get older and the temptation from the parent, who has been the authority figure, is to push back and say no you can not do this and you can not do this but every parent knows, in the end of course, you have to allow the child to make their own decisions and become an adult and so the temptation from government of internet is to push back -- to say actually all we will do is take information we have previously put on a piece of paper and called it a press release, we will now put it on a website but that is not enough. Government has to understand that the internet is growing up and changing the way that citizens and the state interact with each other and also changing the power relationship between citizens and the state because citizens now have access to all sorts of information they did not before. Citizens can organise in a way they were not able to do before and citizens can engage in government decision making in a way they could not either.
Q. Is that scary for politicians?
A. Well it should not be scary for politicians. I think politicians we are democratically elected and we do put ourselves to the popular vote when general elections come or when you get local elections so the difference with the internet is it allows a much more regular engagement with the public, a day-to-day engagement with the public, and not just through focus groups or opinion poles, which, of course, has been the way many politicians have sought to gauge public opinion, but here with the internet you have actually got the technology that allows the public to be engaged in decision making in between elections and that I think will lead to better decisions because, after all, the best people to often make a decision about how a community should be governed are the people who live in the community themselves and it does mean that politicians, particularly in Whitehall and Westminster need to trust the public trust the people and use the technology to as I say create a better country.
Q. Have you tried any ways of doing this in your constituancy? are you finding ways of trying to implement...
A. I have tried things as an MP. Like many MPs, I have a web site now and I have certainly noticed even in the 7 years that I have been in parliament a dramatic increase in the number of constituents that contact me by email and I have sought to launch consultations on local issues on line but also as a political party the Conservatives have tried various things. We have web Cameron which is an constant video diary with David Cameron going for a couple of years now. We have sought to create a Friends of the Conservative Party which goes beyond the traditional party membership boundaries. We have engaged with the blogosphere, and arguably on the right of British politics now, the Conservative Party of British politics, there is a really active on line community. So in all sorts of different ways we are trying things. Not all of them work but at least we are trying.
Q. Again those things sound slightly more like what you were talking about with doing similar things in a different way. What I am interested in is what you are talking about this decision making being distributed, and formally... feel that you might be experimenting with those sorts of things things, like participatory budgeting is very interesting because it is actually handing out that sort of responsibility.
A. I think we as an opposition have tried various things to engage people in coming up with policies which we would home to implement after a general election. Our policy groups operated on line in a way that previous policy organisations have not. I have certainly tried to consult people as widely as possible using the internet on tax proposals that we have but I think there is still a long way to go. I mean we are learning too as a party. We don't for a second pretend that we have understood all of this and are doing everything that we should be doing. We are learning about open source politics but there is a willingness to learn. I mean that is the good thing about my party at the moment. You know we are engaged in a knew frontier of British politics which is the relationship between citizen stage and the internet age.
Q. I still I still feel there is something in this idea of the challenge that we have not quite defined yet I mean, just like, something about, that it is not specific to you particularly, but to could be anyone's life, maybe saying it is scary for me to distribute decision making, can you say something about that the difficulty of shifting your... letting go...?
A. Well I think the concern that politicians have and government has is that if you just hand over decisions to the public then you will get some form of mob rule or majority rule and of course democracies must have protection for minorities and we can not have mob rule and there is also a concern that if you only do things online you will only be reaching a certain section of the population -- of course an growing section of the population -- but there is still a significant minority, often an underprivileged minority, who don't have that access to the internet.
So these are concerns and they are perfectly reasonable concerns for government to have but that should not be a barrier to at least trying to engage the public more in a kind of open source form of decision making and saying, look let's accept that we have to have protections against mob rule, let's understand that we cannot reach everyone but that is not an excuse for not doing anything and for example if you look at the house of commons, in the last couple of weeks we have been debating complex issues around abortion, around the use of add-mix embryos and so on -- why not engage the public more in those decisions? The public were certainly interested. I got many Emails and letters from members of the public about those debates and those issues. They don't require some extraordinary technical level of expertise because after all members of parliament are just lay people who don't have that expertise and are making moral judgments. So why not? There is a classic issue. As a country, we could have actually, I think, engaged with the public in a much more ambitious way than was attempted.
Q. What would your perfect sort of process be for that if best use was made of technology in trying to make a decision about something, to what extent would you involve people in that, how would that this is an difficult question but?
A. I do not think it is simply a question of having an online vote because you can have an opinion pole today and you could have had an opinion pole 50 years ago. It is more about trying to create an online debate in which opinions are genuinely forged and people change their mind if they listen to the argument. Now you can. I think the internet allows that kind of thing to happen. You get a kind of wisdom of crowds, to use a popular phrase from a book written about this sort of thing. You can get a kind of collective view where people have been exposed to all the evidence and the arguments and it is -- I am not saying it is a particularly easy thing to do but I think it is possible and the internet makes it possible in a way that was not the case before and this open source approach I think is worth trying. Now, maybe it won't work. Maybe Britain is too big. Maybe the decisions are too complicated for people. I do not think that is the case. I think it is worth trying and, you know, let -- there is so much potential out there from the internet to make citizens more engaged with their government because, after all, they are not particularly engaged with their government as it is at the moment and I think we would be crazy to pass up that opportunity.
Q. Do you think it is a shift in the role of the politician as well, as someone perhaps who was thinking of an idea, persuade people it is a good idea, and then work out the way to make it happen.
A. I think in the past there were big collective efforts to try and engage in the public in debates. We have had big debates in our country in the past about key issues like votes for women 100 years ago ago, suffragette movement or repeal of the corn laws in the 19th century gave rise to all these associations across the country that engaged in.
Now these days -- I can tell this from my own experience, but it is also true if you look at any kind of national survey -- people are very disengaged from their government. They don't feel particularly attached to the decisions that are made on their behalf. Now I think that is a great shame and we should do more to engage the public and these days the technology could make that more possible than it was in the past. So you know my experience is the public are keen to have a say on how their community is governed but they find Westminster politics rather off-putting and difficult to engage with and something they find difficult to relate to. Okay well it is therefore encumbent on democratic politicians to try other means and I think the technology available through the internet gives us a chance to do something that we have not been able to to do before in our country.
Q. Can I have one more question? Why do you think you are sort of at the fore-front of this in terms of politics, why is it you, why are you saying this more than other people?
A. That is a very difficult question to answer. I think it is the case that there is now a younger generation in British politics who have grown up with the computer, with the internet. You know I was about ten when I got my first home computer and I guess we are much more comfortable with the technology and we use it in our own private lives. So this is not something we are having to learn. This is something we have grown up with and is part of our experience as people living in this country. So that new generation of politicians are probably more comfortable around the issue of technology. That is not to say there are not politicians who are older than me who also understand it but but I think it is the case that I guess to put it as simple as this: the Google generation of politicians understand the impact that Google and all the other things happening on the internet is going to have on the relationship between the citizen and the state.
Thank you very much. Is that all right?
Q. Yes.
A. Good.
