Ratio Talks

Richard Galpin works at Pembroke House, the settlement described by Mike Wilson in the previous episode. Richard leads a classic settlement project, a conversation that connects local people, local government officials and central government policy makers. It is known as We Walworth after the neighbourhood of which Pembroke House is a part.

As Mike Wilson explained, settlements facilitate students from private schools or universities coming to live alongside people living in economically disadvantaged communities. This experience transformed the outlook of many students, including Clement Attlee, leader of the radical post-war U.K. Government and William Beveridge, author of the report that laid the foundations for the Welfare State.

In settlements, these students are described as ‘residents’. They are from a school or academic institution but they reside in the settlement. They live alongside residents in the community.

We Walworth extends this idea by creating a context for civil servants to spend time alongside and get into conversation with the people they serve.

As Pembroke House is just a few miles from Whitehall, home to most U.K. Government departments, We Walworth includes both central and local government officials.

I am interested in this work for what it can tell us about the future of civil society organisations. But Richard also brings to light many of the weaknesses of the state, its propensity to colonise civil society, the systemic imbalance between state and civil society, and the low level frictions that, I would argue, contribute to declining trust in the state and its institutions.

Ratio Talks is available on Substack, on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

Get in touch with us any time by messaging us on the Substack

Ratio Talks is produced with the help of sound designer Nik Paget-Tomlinson.

Mike Wilson is the Chief Executive of Pembroke House Settlement in Walworth, South London. That single line alone demands lots of explainers.

Pembroke House was established as a mission by the students of Pembroke College at Cambridge University in the 1880s. The students built the mission -it looks like church- and gave their time to live and work in the community.

Walworth is a neighbourhood of about 40,000 people in the London Borough of Southwark. It features in Dickens Great Expectations, an indication of its economic disadvantage, also reflected, as Mike remarks, in the maps of poverty drawn by Charles Booth at around the time that Pembroke House was built.

Despite being a mission, Pembroke House functioned more like a settlement, more secular and more orientated to social reforming. Mike explains the difference, and the transition in the podcast.

What does all this history have to do with contemporary challenges of by now gentrifying Walworth, never mind the future of public policy? That is Mike’s expertise, and the subject of the conversation we had in the turret of the settlement building last year.

When talking about his experience as central government policy maker, Mike picks up similar themes around the Troubled Families model explored by Gavin Jones and Geoff Little on earlier editions the podcast.

In his reflections, Pritpal S. Tamber refers to Jennie Popay’s work on de-radicalisation of community empowerment. In fact, in the article Power, control, communities and health inequalities I: theories, concepts and analytical frameworks published in Health Promotion International in 2021 (Vol 36, pages 1253 to 1263), Jennie and her colleagues use the word ‘depoliticisation’.

Pritpal also referred to this publication from the Shelia McKechnie Foundation in which civil society leaders call for a new settlement between their sector, government and business.

Pritpal referred to two articles dealing with what he describes as ‘deaths from despair’ First, Rising morbidity and mortality in midlife among white non-Hispanic Americans in the 21st century by Anne Case and Angus Deaton published in PNAS in 2015 (Vol 112 (49), pages 15078 to 15083). Second, They're not mentally ill, their lives are just s**t, a provocatively titled article by Timothy Price and colleagues in Health and Place, Volume 90, November 2024.

Finally, Pritpal refers to Clare Wightman at Grapevine who has appeared in the podcast and Chris Dabbs at Unlimited Potential who has not appeared on the podcast, but hopefully will!

Ratio Talks is available on Substack, on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

Get in touch with us any time by messaging us on the Substack

Ratio Talks is produced with the help of sound designer Nik Paget-Tomlinson.

Jason Stockwood co- owner of Grimsby Town Football Club was my guest on the last episode of Ratio Talks.

Consistent with the format, I invited Grimsby Town supporter and teacher Adam Howard to reflect on what Jason had to say. But it soon became clear that Adam had much to offer that a short commentary. As a Grimsby resident, highly committed to his town and region, he identified a lot of the missing ingredients and wrongheadedness of public policies to rescue so called left behind places.

It wasn’t a difficult decision to give Adam a full episode of his own. The first, by the way, that required no editing whatsoever.

I found Adam from the View from the Findus podcast (available on Apple, Spotify and other podcast hubs), to which he contributes.

Football club podcasts are proliferating. They are revealing. Radio stations have been begging football fans to contribute to phone-ins for well over a decade. They are designed as a sort of entertainment. A couple of hosts ridiculing each other, and encouraging their guests to make outlandish claims -sack the manager, buy a player the club cannot afford, or welcome the billions that comes with State sponsored owners (never mind the annoying human rights issues).

Podcasts like View from the Findus have a different flavour. The hosts are football fans. The conversation is intelligent, ranging from tactics, the economics of the sport, the culture of the club, and the emotions of winning and losing. They comprise conversations not sound bites.

If you want to know something about Grimsby, you could do worse than listen to episodes of View from the Findus. Or, for understanding Doncaster, check out podular STAND. (Apologies to Grimsby fans for mentioning Doncaster).

At the end of this podcast I bring the conversation back to David Goodhart’s book, The Road to Somewhere, published by C Hurst & Co. and mentioned by Jason Stockwood last week.

I am grateful to Chris Mills and Paul Savage at View from the Findus for introducing me to Adam, and of course to Adam for his contribution.

Ratio Talks is available on Substack, on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

Get in touch with us any time by messaging us on the Substack

Ratio Talks is produced with the help of sound designer Nik Paget-Tomlinson.

These days, when people talk about civil society they mean civil society organisations. These are important. And we will get to them as this series develops.

But then there are the relationships across society facilitated by social infrastructure, expressed in conversations about how to live peaceably with each other, and generating a shared moral order and mutual aid.

A football club is a significant part of the social infrastructure. Each fortnight, in Grimsby, a town of 130,000 people, between four and eight thousand people will gather. Next week’s episode with Grimsby Town fan Adam Howard will give listeners a good sense of the shared meaning and belonging football brings to a place.

Jason Stockwood is a tech entrepreneur, social entrepreneur and a Grimsby fan. So he knew the value of the football club to the town and surrounding area. Together with current Chairman Andrew Pettit, he became a major shareholder. It was an investment not only in success on the pitch, but the revitalisation of a community ravaged by the collapse of the fishing industry.

In describing the story, Jason references David Goodhart’s book The Road to Somewhere published by C Hurst & Co. Jason’s decisions about how to support his hometown were strongly influenced by the work of Robert Putnam, and in particular his book The Upswing written with Shaylyn Romney Garrett and published by Simon & Schuster. Jason’s decision making reflects the evidence presented by Daniel Kahneman in Thinking, Fast and Slow (published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux).

The English Football League -or EFL as it is commonly known- one of football’s governing bodies in the U.K., has published a series of reports on the impact of the sport on English life.

For those who want to know more about Jason’s work with Grimsby Town Football Club, he has published a series of articles in the Guardian newspaper.

In the last episode Gavin Jones, Chief Executive of Essex, reflected on his experience of and learning from working with Hilary Cottam, and the Family Life project, one of a series of experiments that paved the way to a more relational approach to public policy.

In this episode, my brother Geoff Little picks up the story. Initially I asked Geoff, as a former local authority Chief Executive, to reflect on what Gavin had to say in the round. Which he did. But it turned out Geoff was also heavily involved in similar work to Gavin and Hilary, about which he has a lot to say. Hence a full episode of reflection, not just a 10 minute postscript.

A lot of this episode is about the U.K Government’s Troubled Families Project. As Gavin said in his podcast, Eric Pickles the Government Minister responsible for Troubled Families -and Louise Casey the official responsible for national delivery- rejected Family Life as too expensive. Geoff describes a later similar Government rejection of the Manchester approach.

I realise having listened to the episodes that I don’t explain Troubled Families to the international or non policy listener.

After the Global economic crash, English government, national and local, focused on a small group of families with multiple problems. These families swallowed up disproportionate amounts of state funding. Individual services were no match for them.

Places like Swindon and Manchester sought to innovate.

Both places took a relational approach. The work rested on the relationship between a single worker and a family, a tonic for families used to seeing half a dozen agents of the state regularly knock on their door. It centred on relationships within the family, and with neighbours, often resolving years of conflict and disputes. The work focused on the potential of families more than their needs, on what Hilary Cottam -after Amartya Sen- would call their capabilities. One objective was to keep family members connected with the world, with school, with work, and with play.

The national programme has a mixed reputation. The language of ‘turning around families’ didn’t accord with the known complexities of family life, troubled or untroubled. The commissioning incentivised local authorities to tell the Government what they wanted to hear. Evaluations were pilloried in the media and there was an investigation by the Public Accounts Committee in Parliament.

But in Manchester, as Geoff describes in this episode, they took evaluation very seriously, and the results were extremely promising.

Writing this I can see how some readers and listeners might see this as an interesting but largely irrelevant side show. But I take some messages about the prospects of a relational social policy from these conversations.

First, there was a moral agent, Hilary Cottam, going against the grain long before anybody else was thinking about the problem let alone a different kind of solution.

Second, there were politicians and officials in Swindon, Manchester and other jurisdictions ready to take a risk on a novel and unproven approach.

Third, it is ideas that change the world. Hilary’s idea turned up in Manchester without her even visiting. Manchester applied, delivered and evaluated the idea differently, but the core was the same.

Fourth, effective policy demands precision. I have failed because the idea was wrong. Too often I have failed because the idea was lazily applied. In England, we are prone to lazy application of good ideas. Think population level public health. Think place. Think community power.

Fifth, the evaluation in Manchester was not designed to show success, it was designed to identify what didn’t work, and inform the correction of mistakes. And, thanks to the local government researcher Sarah Henry, backed by her policy and political bosses, it was done rigorously.

Sixth, the lasting learning and impact was designed and managed not at the centre of government, but by politicians and officials in local government who knew the people delivering and experiencing the policy change, and the places where they lived.

Interest in relational social policy appears to be growing again. If we are exploit its potential we have to learn from Hilary, Gavin, Geoff and others.

The how will be just as important as the what.

Gavin Jones is this week’s guest on Ratio Talks. Gavin is the Chief Executive of Essex County Council -one of the biggest local authorities in England- and Chair of Solace, the network of local authority chief executives. Early on in his local government career, Gavin worked with Hilary Cottam who was thinking about, experimenting with and developing relational approaches at least a decade before anyone else (as summarised in her book Radical Help).

That was the impetus for the podcast. But we were recording just before this years U.K. general election. Gavin was in the mood to chat. And I was in need of guidance. So the conversation shifted quite naturally into Gavin helping me with my work on Inclusive Statecraft to inform the new government.

For the postscript I had invited my brother Geoff, a former local authority Chief Executive, to reflect on what we learned from Gavin. Geoff was very engaged, particularly in the way that Gavin and Hilary’s work informed U.K. Government policy from 2010 onwards. In fact, he was so engaged that we talked for longer than anticipated and we decided to publish that conversation as a separate, short episode next week.

One of the joys of the podcast is discovering the gifts and interests of my guests outside of their working life. Gavin Jones is a musician, with a significant following in the United States. He plays us out of the episode. If you like what you hear you can find his work by searching GibsonGav on Apple or Spotify.

Join us next week for Geoff Little’s reflection on today’s episode.

Ratio Talks is available on Substack, on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

Get in touch with us any time by messaging us on the Substack

Ratio Talks is produced with the help of sound designer Nik Paget-Tomlinson. The show’s theme song is by Luca Picardi.

Chine McDonald is Director of Theos, a think tank established to explore the role of religion in modern society. She is author of God is not a White Man and, this year, Unmaking Mary: Shattering the myth of perfect motherhood.

In this conversation, recorded shortly after the U.K. election, Chine draws on Theos research into the voting intentions of those with and without strong religious beliefs. She refers to the Ipsos Veracity Survey and the British Social Attitudes Survey to explore the declining trust in politics and politicians, and its implications for democratic reform. Chine also refers to Robin Dunbar’s recent book How Religion Evolved: And Why It Endures.

Social activist and politician Katherine Zappone joins me at the the end of the conversation to reflect on what we learned.

Ratio Talks is available on Substack, on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

Get in touch with us any time by sending an email to [email protected].

Ratio Talks is produced with the help of sound designer Nik Paget-Tomlinson and creative director Richard De Angelis. The show’s theme song is by Luca Picardi.

This week I am joined by leading civil rights activist and politician Katherine Zappone. We are in conversation with Aoife Gallager from the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, an international not for profit resisting attacks on democracy. Previously, Aoife was was a journalist with the online news agency, Storyful. 

In this episode Aoife discusses the rise of the populist right in Ireland, a country that has prospered thanks to both emigration and immigration. In the last 18 months, fuelled in part by a spike in Ukrainian refugees, Ireland has suffered riots and indiscriminate attacks on immigrants. Online conspiracy fuels the unrest.

Aoife’s work is forensic, not only uncovering conspiracies, but also forewarning communities about impending trouble. She describes her collaboration with civil society activists and organisations like the Hope and Courage Collective that make the hard yards of finding consensus in divided communities.

Aoife’s latest book Web of Lies: The Lure and Danger of Conspiracy Theories was published by Gill Books in 2022. 

Ratio Talks is available on Substack, on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

Get in touch with us any time by sending an email to [email protected].

Ratio Talks is produced with the help of sound designer Nik Paget-Tomlinson and creative director Richard De Angelis. The show’s theme song is by Luca Picardi.

Over the last few months I have been interviewing moral agents, people like Maff Potts, Srdja Popović, Joyti Mhapsekar, and Simon Duffy. And people like Sascha Haselmayer whose book Slow Lane is based on interviews with social entrepreneurs around the world, another group of moral agents.

We are talking about people who go against the grain of orthodox social thinking. What if the answer to all of our problems was each other, and not more services? How about revealing the dictator who runs our country to be the buffoon he really is? Why can’t people with intellectual disabilities exercise their rights to live in the community and not an institution?

We have turned the last page of each of these stories so none of the propositions seem shocking. But shocking they were before the authors of change put pen to paper.

In this episode, Katherine Zappone helps us make sense of these conversations. What do we mean by moral agent? (Spoiler alert, the answer is about morality). How do people sustain themselves through the long struggles of social change? When and where will the next generation of moral agents leave their mark on society? 

Katherine is better placed than most to answer these questions. She either led or was closely involved in the leadership of three major social movements in Ireland. On women’s education, on marriage equality, and on fertility rights. Then she moved from civil society to state, applying her moral compass to lead a ministry and contribute to cabinet decision making.

Sascha Haselmayer’s book The Slow Lane, is published by Berrett-Koehler. In the podcast we talk about Ann Louise Gilligan’s book Reclaiming the Secret of Love published by Peter Lang. Paulo Freire’s work is best understood through his book Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Katherine is working on a memoir about her transition from civil society to government, hopefully to coincide with the 10th Anniversary of the 34th Amendment to the Irish Constitution that followed from Katherine and Ann Louise’s long struggle for marriage equality.

Ratio Talks is available on Substack, on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

Get in touch with us any time by sending an email to [email protected].

Ratio Talks is produced with the help of sound designer Nik Paget-Tomlinson and creative director Richard De Angelis. The show’s theme song is by Luca Picardi.

Jyoti Mhapsekar is the child of Indian freedom fighters. Jyoti’s struggle was different from her parents. She fought not against the British but alongside and for the women of India. Her weapons were song and theatre. 

Her story, told in this latest episode of Ratio Talks, starts with The International Year of Women in 1975. Women of Jyoti’s class and caste began to re-interpret the global renaissance in feminist thinking for the Indian context.

The work of these women coalesced into a movement called Stree Mukti Sanghatana, which roughly translates as Women’s Liberation Organisation.

The movement spread out from Mumbai into the rural areas across Maharashtra and then to the rest of India. They put on theatrical events and concerts and engaged with tens of thousands of women at each performance.

The conversations that followed revealed new challenges. Violence against women. Blocked opportunity. The loss of dignity from working in harsh conditions, as exemplified in this episode by the waste pickers who make their living sifting through garbage tips.

When Stree Mukti Sanghatana was formed half a century ago, two thirds of Indian women were illiterate. Today two thirds can read and write. There is much more to be done. But the tide has turned.

In this episode you will hear Jyoti sing as well as speak. In this link you can see a younger Jyoti and her colleagues performing one of the songs that inspired a generation of women on the sub-continent. 

In addition to Jyoti, we hear from Noel Mathias, founder of Novel Solutions to Wicked Problems, an initiative to help listeners like you get more access to innovation and to learn more from people like Jyoti in the Global South.

Ratio Talks is available on Substack, on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

Get in touch with us any time by sending an email to [email protected].

Ratio Talks is produced with the help of sound designer Nik Paget-Tomlinson and creative director Richard De Angelis. The show’s theme song and design is by Luca Picardi.