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 Tom
Tom is a member of our Reading Citizen Jury and is writing a blog for us whilst the jury meet and discuss the different issues with regards to "respect".
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This is part of a national conversation, but like any conversation it has to take place somewhere.
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Ìý
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Thursday 6th October 2005
Yesterday I left quite a negative message about the ending of the jury process. I stand by everything I said, but it is not how I want to finish my blog. Whilst I believe what I said is true, it is not the whole story.Ìý Something has begun. The members of the jury are beginning to talk of this as the start, rather than the end. We have spent a month considering the issues that affect the local community and now we want to act upon that. People are discussing future dates for meetings; the council will be approached for funding; jurors are considering how best to pursue what we have recommended. The Reading Citizens' Jury is very far from over. Watch this space.
Wednesday 5th October
Here's how it was meant to go. We were to decide upon an issue to discuss. For the three weeks after that we were then going to listen to experts in that area. We were going to question them and learn from them. We were going to become experts in our issue. In the final week we would use our knowledge to provide recommendations for improvements in our local area. Because of our understanding of the subject these would be relevant, pertinent and they would carry authority.
Here is what actually happened. We chose a topic, anti social behaviour. For the next three weeks we discussed everything and anything remotely related or tangential to it. Somewhere in the process, just to make things even vaguer, the word 'respect' crept onto our agenda. We didn't just lose focus. We lost it, then we tracked it down to its hiding place, chopped it up into little bits, burnt it and spread what was left over a huge area.
The result was our last three meetings. In those meetings we have provided recommendations on, in no particular order: the breakdown of social structures, homelessness, the human condition, values, citizenship, mental health problems, capitalism, acceptance of responsibility, more relevant teaching, the rich/poor divide, bureaucracy, media pressures, corporal punishment, the taxation system... the list goes on.
At university I used to (and this is not something I am especially proud to admit) do competitive debating. We were taught a set of rules for proposing arguments. Number 1: Never propose that more money should be spent on something unless you can say specifically what should have less money. Number 2: Never propose that a body should be set up to do something - that is not a solution, it simply says someone else should find a solution. Number 3: Never, ever, propose an argument that is merely the retention of the status quo.
Many of our recommendations fall into one of those categories. Some recommendations actually sounded quite sensible. But we had not had any time to consider or research them - the whole jury process has never extended beyond brainstorming. Since it would have been impossible for us to become experts on all areas of UK social policy, that is an inevitability.
But it also makes our conclusions an irrelevancy, and also a disservice to those who actually are experts. As Assad, another juror, put it when we left "When we say things like a particular group should be abolished, we do them a great injustice. This whole process merits far, far more research." To be listened to we needed to speak with authority. Not only will we not be listened to but, frankly, we should not be listened to.
Tuesday 4th October
"A**e. No, wait - you can't say that on the ´óÏó´«Ã½. I mean bum." Darren, our first witness, is trying to act as naturally as possible, but it is difficult to act naturally when there is a large microphone waiting expectantly in front of you. I am not sure any of us have yet got completely used to the ´óÏó´«Ã½ presence. Polly and Nik, the two reporters, scurry around, Gollum-like, with their equipment - the mini disc players which demand eloquence. As I inevitably get flustered and descend into banality the large microphone sits, a malevolent presence, reminding me that I should be more entertaining, more relevant.
Yet they also help keep us civil. The microphones act like the conch in Lord of the Flies. We now know we can't speak until one has reached us and so arguments can't get heated; interruptions are pointless. At the beginning things were different. On the first day I made a point whilst Polly was still scuttling across the room. "Can you just repeat that Tom" she said "Just as before?" I reply "Yeah I don't want to interfere with your natural flow." Right-ho. Now though they do feel like honorary members of the group - our chroniclers. Nik disappears off with us on fag breaks. Polly, who has edited all the witness's speeches for the show, will occasionally stop recording and help us by clarifying points we can't remember.
And then there's the show itself. I would like to claim that we all listen, waiting to hear our voices in a speech we are proud of. Sadly for many, egotism takes second place to lethargy. After all, 7.30am on a Saturday is very, very early.
Thursday 29th September
Last week I wrote that I was concerned about where the process was going – about how it will produce results. Yesterday we were given the answer. The jury will produce results if we have the enthusiasm to let it. After the meetings end it is our responsibility to follow through on our recommendations and ideas.
I am still worried though that we might end up being little more than a discussion group. The ´óÏó´«Ã½ wants us to talk about respect. We initially decided to solely discuss anti-social behaviour and homelessness but, for understandable journalistic motives, this word has been quietly slipped in – performing a barely noticeable coup upon our agenda. Unfortunately, as useful as they are to Tony Blair’s policies, abstract nouns are not the best means for getting focussed discussions. Last night we had a brainstorming session – discussing community problems, causes and solutions.
But ‘respect’ is a meaningless word. It is a panacea. We might as well say we want people to be nicer to each other. So we ended up spending a little over two minutes on each of 25 ‘problems’, from diet, to homelessness, to family breakdown, to capitalism, to bureaucracy to poor parenting. With so many issues and so little time, our solutions inevitably became platitudes and our opinions could only be to a small degree informed by the past weeks’ witnesses.
If we don’t focus on a small area, in which we can genuinely make an impact, then I am concerned we will achieve nothing. That said, there is a lot of enthusiasm in the jury. There are a lot of people who will – I think – be willing to spend more time trying to help. If we can find that focus, if we can produce ideas that amount to more than just saying ‘the council should spend more money’, then there is a good chance that the last month will not have been in vain.
Thursday 22nd September
John Wilkinson writes in to the Today website: " I don't trust any jury chosen by the ´óÏó´«Ã½. It has too many politically correct motives and elements." He continues "You only have to look at the audience in...the equally fixed Any Questions ...to see the ´óÏó´«Ã½ is dedicated to social engineering." Wilkinson is not alone. The message board is full of people questioning our credentials. The implication is clear. We are ´óÏó´«Ã½ plants, hand-picked to propagate their pinko agenda.ÌýÌý
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I find this rather flattering. Not only must the ´óÏó´«Ã½ have me on file as a local prominent liberal, but it must have also done so when, at the age of seven, I appeared in the Any Questions audience. I always did show remarkable promise.
Of course in reality the people on the message board are the kind of raving conspiracy theorist loons who inhabit message boards everywhere; my presence on Any Questions was because my mother applied for free tickets (as could John Wilkinson) and my presence on the community jury is largely down to pure dumb luck.
But that is not to say we are entirely random - there is a serious point here.
Even if we accept that, as the organisers claim, we were largely taken from the electoral role (and I have no reason to doubt them), we are still a self-selecting bunch. They told us they sent letters to 2000 people, and randomly selected us from the respondents. The problem is, the respondents were those able to give up two entire evenings a week for four weeks. We are people with a lot of time on our hands. We have time to spend discussing local issues and next week a lot of us have time to spend a day visiting a youth outreach programme. And at least one of us has time to regularly email Radio 4 his rambling political musings to post on the internet. Maybe the people on the Today message board have more in common with us than they think.
Wednesday 21st September
Last night we met Mr ASBO, the father of the anti-social behaviour order. Bill; Ìýwho is the man responsible for what every right-thinking, Guardian-reading (surely the two are synonymous?) member of the chattering classes such as me considers an illiberal infringement upon people's human rights. I was all set for an argument, but there was a problem. He seemed distressingly normal. No maniacal bad-guy laugh, no disfiguring facial scars and a deeply worrying tendency to sound like a reasonable man.
He also isn't a politician; he is a former housing officer. Of course, after justifying his scheme to so many journalists, he has picked up a few bad habits - the semantic nonsense of his description of ASBOs as an order "Uniquely not about the offender, but something owned by the community" is probably something that would be lost on most offenders.
However a lot of my prejudices about ASBOs, particularly about the legal processes involved, were challenged.
Our second speaker, who works in Oxford with many of those on the receiving end of ASBOs was meant to disagree with him. We were promised a bruising confrontation. Which would have been great fun. However, probably more usefully, there was a lot of agreement. I left the meeting with a fuzzy, warm feeling of New-Labour-style consensus.
Tuesday 20th September
The jury continues and we are learning a lot. We are learning about different ways of dealing with social problems. We are learning about the different organisations trying to effect these changes. Yesterday we heard from domestic violence counsellors and from a woman dealing with anti-social families in Dundee.
What I am worried about is whether we have skipped a necessary stage. I feel we are a little like a criminal jury which is busy deciding the sentencing appropriate for a murder, but which still hasn't established whether the defendant committed the murder or, indeed, whether there was a murder at all.
At the end of this whole process we will hopefully chat to local politicians and present them with proposals for policies to combat anti-social behaviour in Reading. If we are going to achieve more than a condescending smile and a nebulous promise of future action then not only do we need to describe a solution, but we need to present evidence of a problem. We also need to show that that problem is currently being dealt with ineffectively. But we only have anecdotal evidence for supposing that one of the most pressing issues in Reading is anti-social behaviour.
To get a politician to act, and spend money, we need to know for certain that an increase in funding for our area of interest will do more good than the harm created in removing that money from somewhere else. I am concerned that instead we will simply say "We heard talks from some nice people doing good things; we feel we should do similar good things". They have a finite budget and it will take a lot more than that for them to take money from other worthy areas.
Essentially, I have yet to be convinced that the end result of our jury's deliberations will not be "Anti-social behaviour is bad, Something Must Be Done." But I will be delighted to be proven wrong.
Thursday 15th September 2005
The jury is getting restless. Our most recent witness was not well received.
The idea was, we decided upon a topic for discussion and then questioned experts in that field. But for the first two sessions the witnesses were organised before we had begun the process. Our first witness, a youth worker, was very informative.
Our second was Gita, an Indian-born filmmaker, who talked to us about inter-community relations and the notion of a British identity. Unfortunately, this was largely irrelevant to the route we had chosen to take. What's more, some people objected to the political nature of the discussion; for the first time the group was arguing. I suspect other people just objected to the politics - she began her talk by saying she is an atheist and a republican.
By the end I was feeling sorry for her. It wasn't her fault she was chosen before we had a topic. Other people were very angry that they had wasted their evening though "How is this relevant?" David, another juror, asked "We are going down a blind alley, this process is no longer being led by the jury. Darren has questions, Peggy has questions. They are not being heard".
It was a stirring speech. The facilitator was obliged to ask Darren, a younger member of the group, if he had anything to say "No" said Darren, shaking his head glumly, only partially undermining David's point.
Tuesday 13th September 2005
Ìý
It is difficult not to be sceptical about the idea of a community jury. ÌýA collection of local residents discuss an issue such as homelessness or youth crime. They meet and grill expert 'witnesses' and then decide upon possible solutions.Ìý It all sounds a bit like the pet project of a social science graduate with too much funding and too little cynicism.Ìý But twenty of us put aside scepticism, had a little faith and decided to undertake the process.Ìý It is too early to tell whether we will make any difference at all. But even if we don't, I already feel like I won't have been wasting my time. The idea of a jury is that it is comprised of a collection of one's peers. However, it isn't really. Peers are people like you, the friends you go to the pub with. The great thing about the jury is that it seems to have every sort of person, of every age. It really feels like a slice of Reading . Where else would I, a white 20-something, get to chat with a middle-aged Muslim woman or a 16-year-old from one of Reading 's housing estates?
I suppose, like everyone, I have prejudices. It is particularly wonderful to see how this programme demolishes them. Everyone seems fundamentally decent. That this is in any way a surprise reflects badly on me and, I suppose, on the level of mixing in Reading as a whole.
Yesterday we were discussing teenage crime. I chatted to an elderly member of the group, fully expecting some tabloidese about the deterioration of Britain and about the evil of the youth of today. Instead she talked about how she goes out at night regularly and doesn't feel threatened. She passes by groups of hooded kids hanging around the shopping centre and they say hello to her. "It's about respect" she said.
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