Ordinary Hope: Closing the Gap

This essay was first published in Ordinary Hope: A Mission to Rebuild.

For those of us who love political speeches, there are few moments in the calendar as exciting than a keynote from the 44th President of the United States, Barack Obama. Unlike his peers, Obama always seeks to combine emotionally resonant storytelling with deep reflection on the challenges of the time. And this year, at the Democratic National Convention, he did not disappoint.

The theme of this speech was one to which Obama has returned throughout his political career: the disconnect between our experiences in everyday life and the nature of our politics.

Politics, Obama was clear, is broken. “We live in a time of such confusion and rancour. Politicians and algorithms teach us to caricature each other, troll each other and fear each other.” But for all of the economic hardship of the moment, this is not because our actual lives are broken. When we step away from politics, things are profoundly different. “All across America, in big cities and small towns, away from all the noise,” he continued, “the ties that bind us together are still there. We still coach little league and look out for our elderly neighbours. We still feed the hungry, in churches and mosques and synagogues and temples. We share the same pride when our Olympic athletes compete for the gold medals. Because the vast majority of us do not want to live in a country that is bitter and divided.”

To cynical commentators, Obama announced, such ideas will appear “naïve”, little more than the sort of mawkish sentimentalism that is so often characteristic of Presidential Conventions. But he insisted that the idea was far more profound than that. And to anyone who has followed Obama’s arguments more closely over the decades, it is clear why the theme resonated. Twelve years ago, in 2012, the then newly re-elected President, had shared the same question with the novelist, Marilynne Robinson. “There’s all this goodness and decency and common sense on the ground, and somehow it gets translated into rigid, dogmatic, often mean-spirited politics,” Obama said back then. “The thing I’ve been struggling with throughout my political career is how do you close the gap?”

For all of the accusations of sentimentalism, most people in our own country today agree with Obama’s central observation. Over the past year, opinion polling and focus group work conducted by the researchers at More in Common with the UCL Policy Lab have made that abundantly clear. For all of the difficulties of the present time, most people still treasure their families, their neighbourhoods and their communities. They trust people in their own area, look out for them when they can, believe that they have the knowledge and kindness necessary to make a difference. But precious few think the same of civil servants in Whitehall or politicians in Westminster, irrespective of their ideological allegiance. The public at large thinks that those people put self-interest or party-interest before national interest; pursue their own advantage rather than serve the common good. Just as Obama said, there’s a gap between the ordinary and the political, between life as lived in our own communities and as played out on the screens of our smartphones or on television news. And you don’t have to be a President to see it.

In my own way, I have spent the past decade grappling with precisely this issue. I have published two books, Out of the Ordinary and England, the latter with Tom Baldwin, each of which argue that Britain’s politics would be better -- and would achieve more -- if it was less weirdly disconnected from the rhythms and concerns of everyday life.

When I was close to completing the first, I went to Cambridge University to give a talk about it to academic colleagues. There I was told that I was wrong to be concerned. Politics, the wise and world-weary scholars told me, is always dark and depressing, the playground of the unscrupulous and the hypocritical, and it would be mad to expect anything more. The response to England has been much the same. The hope that our political life could ever respect the same norms, virtues and rhythms of our ordinary lives dismissed by one critic as “pure centrist erotica”.

There is, of course, some truth in the pessimism. Presidents and Prime Ministers do not fully share the everyday experiences of normal citizens. Their lives are cloistered away, with security details and special advisors. When Obama says that “we still coach little league”, in all likelihood he means that other people do. But if we dwell only on the inevitable differences between politics and the everyday, we miss the potential points of connection, and the reasons why they matter.

The Ordinary Hope project of the UCL Policy Lab and the Joseph Rowntree Foundation is comprised of people who believe that the gap Obama identified can be closed. More than that, they believe it must be closed if we are to have any chance of grappling with the profound injustices that many people face right across our country today.

These inspiring people have experienced first-hand how local initiatives, driven by people in communities themselves, drawing on their own ideas, can often outpace the big programmes drawn up in political backrooms and run out of London. Working together, those leading the Ordinary Hope project have developed a new understanding of how to close the gap between politics and everyday life. There are three parts to this.

First, they implore our politicians to abandon the grand abstractions in which they appear to find comfort and to place emphasis instead on real, tangible, practical progress in people’s everyday lives. People don’t hanker for a “shining city on a hill”, at least not in this life, they are looking for improvements that speak to their own experiences: getting a GP appointment in decent time, being able to feed their families and still have something left over for the nice things in life, being able to look to the future knowing that the next generation will be able to afford a roof over their head.

Second, those who believe in Ordinary Hope also demand that our politicians acknowledge there are many heroes in the story of social change, not just those at the top. Improving the country in tangible ways means mobilising the talents of everyone and every place, not just of the established elite in the conventional corridors of power. Their experiences show that the most imaginative solutions to the challenges of the health service are just as likely to come from the minds of patient groups and clinical practitioners as they are from the legions of public policy experts in London. Plans for regenerating housing across the UK will require the insights of those in local authorities, mayor’s offices, the transport sector and of the young people who are currently locked out, as well as targets from the top and interventions from Whitehall.

The third lesson of Ordinary Hope is that as we seek collectively to deliver the change we need, we also need to recognise the fundamental role that human relationships and social connections play as well as the effectiveness of our plans on paper. It is the sentiments of affection, the bonds of trust between us – “the ties that bind”, as Obama put it – that will enable us to work together, not just the incentives written into remuneration systems or the effective enforcement of inspection regimes.

As our UCL colleague, Dan Honig, shows in the next essay, those who work in the frontline of our public services are driven not by self-regard, but by their sense of mission, and that sense itself is fostered and facilitated by the human experience of working alongside both others who care and those who are cared for.

All of this has immediate political resonance today. In his very first speech after the general election result became clear, amidst party supporters in the echoing gallery of London’s Tate Modern, Keir Starmer soberly outlined what he saw as the primary challenge facing the country today. “The fight for trust is the battle that defines our age,” he said. And in searching for that trust, he continued, the first move must be on the part of the powerful towards the rest of us. “Respect is the bond that can unite this country.”

The secret to such respect surely lies in closing the gap that Barack Obama identified so powerfully in his speech. In practice, that means it is time that our politics was less rancorous, less haughty, less inauthentic, less weird. For some people, that will involve drawing on technical excellence and “real time data”. But vital though expertise is, it is not by itself enough. No kind of imagined “mission control” at the heart of power will sort everything out. Instead, the solution can be found much closer to our non-political homes. The answers to the problems we face lie in a government that is more ordinary.