Creating a dynamic environment where we can all get better together is vital: to do that you need a clear focus on where you are and what you’re doing there.
Keir Starmer is right we need to see more evidence in our everyday lives of people, all people actively engaged in the world we want to help them build. Keir spoke of apprentices, nurses, small businesses, firefighters, people who are as much a part of his vision of parliament and government as his fellow MPs and everyone who elected them and didn’t elect them.
People like today’s apprentices (below) with the last apprenticeship minister Robert Halfon and below them, apprenticeship forbears….who’d have started their apprenticeships in the nuclear industry in 1983
Below: Apprentices toward the end of their careers in the nuclear industry photo who started out in 1983
Apprentices in 2024 need us to believe in them educate them in shared values, on the environment, risk, supply chain equity and fairness and give them the tools to push back at bad practice, give them the social support to make things work better: some will be building the 1.5 million homes, some will become apprentices in Great British Energy (projected savings on gas in West Bridgford (£300 energy savings per year GB Energy producing 46,000 jobs in the East Midlands).
When Keir Starmer talks about the mess the conservatives have left what I think he means is the fact that they haven’t run the country for everyone, ever. It’s extraordinary when you think of the energetic momentum of people in the social and economic reconstruction after the Second World War.
Now for a rejuvenating economy to bring apprentices to work and apprenticeships to work we need to rethink the dinosaur highly profitable multilayered supply chains around training, education, construction, maintenance and repair: oversight and accountabilities on new construction, social housing: health and safety of workers and the public.
Building respect and fairness builds social health and capacity. Young apprentices need to know we’re on the Grenfell (and now Dagenham) case as a society, as a government and they need updates that we are doing this.
When we talk about placemaking it’s not just a marketing term: we need to change the culture that building professionals, suppliers, architects and people with skills work in. We no longer live in feudal Britain we live in a modern country that just hasn’t listened to all of its taxpayers, its voters, its workers, its professions properly for over forty years. Go parliament get some good discussions going, get some great debates, represent every neighbourhood in the UK on the floor of the House of Commons.
Make it that you’re not there for the feudal establishment, nurture modernity and representation.
Integrity isn’t gatekeeping access to corrupt supply systems like the system where Studio E who ‘won’ the contract to reclad Grenfell Tower were probably ‘played’ by the big supply chains to take responsibility for choosing a product that if they’d been in their right mind, if their training, vocation, profession and their professional judgement was respected could have made a good decision.
What we need to understand is how the heart of darkness around the value of everyone involved and touched by this way of manufacturing, repairing, buying and selling, working on these projects. We need to re-humanise what we are doing at every stage of work: better skills, more equity.
People’s lives matter across the lifespan whether they’re born under privileged or underprivileged eyes.
What’s shocking is that no-one had a real voice: you do what we want with this product, these people or that’s it you don’t get the work? Who really knows what are the wider forces operating on what we call a local or a localised job?
What we don’t see in KC Richard Millet’s Grenfell Web of Blame below is the visualisation of the hostile gatekeeping against accountability to people, place, neighbourhood or expectations of service standard and delivery.
The Conservative party laissez faire way of removing accountability and reciprocities in exchanges so that increasingly larger and larger private interests can have the place to themselves without rules, laws, conventions, accountabilities to the people in these spaces hasn’t been visualised yet.
Think again and reflect on Studio E the architects who ‘won’ the re-cladding contract. Think of them as any small business in the locality. They probably came from a history of public works, social and placemaking that was the norm after the Second World War but they were up against the unaccountable might of big corporations, interests and investments, for years and years.
This is how Grenfell happened.
Studio E, like many students, workers, sole traders, small businesses, young graduates in corporate businesses trying to succeed and do well in this culture that demanded enormous amounts without any guarantee of return, reciprocity or human response probably lost touch with the wider impact of the economic and social changes they were experiencing.
This information vacuum against public scrutiny and accountability hiding behind ‘commercial sensitivity’ sucked the vitality and life out of local neighbourhoods and economy and we need to acknowledge, repair, replace, rebuild and rejuvenate our capacity, trust and creativities.
In 2024 though we all need to come together to constructively and meaningfully challenge the increasingly monumental and rejecting public space of the supply chains. We need to work inside the organisations we’re already in to shape that environment.
Think about teachers: a history of UK education here (and the toxic culture children, teachers, parents and workers experience in the academy system began with ending hot meals at school in the Education Act 1980)
Above: BSL teacher trainer graduates 1980 and below: Chartered Teachers graduating at the Guildhall London 2022
When you think about how well education of working class students was doing in the the post war period: schools, like John Player in Radford Nottingham were producing results in the working class neighbourhoods that were as good as the affluent communities.
The academies projects took advice from America. Our teaching leadership in Nottingham were blinded by the American idea of there being different ‘types’ of ability and academies could be set up that were class, gender and colour blind to background: so that all children could find their specialism.
The problem would be about an innate sense of belonging.
What this actually meant in Nottingham was that working class schools were closed down, working class children were displaced from their relation and history to neighbourhoods through the school, (their sense of connection to their past not seen as important) bussed into affluent schools were they were unwelcome guests, then when the new schools were built brought back in to an environment that had been set up for privileged middle class children to thrive in.
They had been structurally alienated and displaced.
We need to understand how the giant academies securitised off from working class neighbourhoods because working class people don’t fit in in their own neighbourhoods now and because they don’t fit in they’re idle, they’re prey, they might just be criminal: so most of the academies (that don’t employ the parents of the children they’re excluding because, well, you know) have a special unit and many, many labels for all of the disabilities structured social inequality appears to produce. We need to rethink what we did to working class neighbourhoods and do much, much better.
Nurses: a history here as well as a history Below nurses who feel valued in training, article by Amira Begum
The world we need now needs to build relation, trust and capacity across generations and society.
People need each other, need neighbourhoods that have schools, hospitals, infrastructure that not only works but fosters the creativities in the sole trader, the micro business, the organic supply chains, the greener way of thinking, living, working are us.
We are they and they are we.
Running a business as a sole trader, micro business partnership was historically just as difficult as working in a factory, in a service
Yet the reality of the way candidate selection has lost social accountability over the last forty years means that jobs aren’t advertised and so only go out as far as the employer/employee network. This has a big impact on the culture of an organisation and slows down the productivities produced through genuine competition.
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