Public Domain - Relationship counselling, by Colin Talbot

26 Jun 08
As Gordon Brown contemplates his first anniversary as prime minister, he might be wondering why his public image changed so fast from Iron Chancellor to Mr Bean. A bit of cod psychology could help

27 June 2008

As Gordon Brown contemplates his first anniversary as prime minister, he might be wondering why his public image changed so fast from Iron Chancellor to Mr Bean. A bit of cod psychology could help

'There is nothing so practical as a good theory,' psychologist Kurt Lewin quipped back in the 1940s. I was thinking about this in relation to the spectacular fall from public grace of Prime Minister Gordon Brown. So here's a theory and you can judge if it is practical.

Relational models theory was developed by anthropologist and social psychologist Alan Page Fiske in 1992 and has spawned a small research community since then. Fiske proposes that there are just four relational models that frame how we humans deal with one another: communal sharing; authority ranking; equality matching; and market pricing. Let's see if they help us explain Brown's fate.

Market pricing is about the question: 'What can I get out of this?' Or as our economist brethren would have it, we are all 'rational utility maximisers'. It is pretty easy to see how the prime minister has gone wrong here. From his reputation for economic competence (partly based on luck, partly on policy) for a decade as chancellor, he has run into the inevitable economic turmoil that eventually affects all governments in capitalist democracies.

As Brown himself was fond of saying, there are two types of chancellor: those who fail and those who get out in time. He got out of Number 11 just before the credit crunch hit. But he also failed because, although he is no longer chancellor, he did the job so long and clearly still has such a hands-on relationship with economic policy that everyone still sees him as the one in charge.

Unfortunately for Brown, people are not just concerned about their wallets. They have other concerns. One is what Fiske calls authority ranking: how we tend to rank others according to the authority we award them. Brown has spent the past decade claiming authority for himself over the economy. Everything good that happened was due to his perspicacious and prudent policies. And he perpetuated the idea that he was the brains behind New Labour, that Tony Blair was just the front man and he was the real intellectual powerhouse.

At first, these claims seemed to work. Brown could walk on water (well, floods anyway); he could be steadfast in the face of terrorism; he could even transform the leak of the foot and mouth virus from a government-run facility into a triumph of his authority.

Then he blew it all on the election that never was: a stratagem designed to wrong-foot the Tories turned into a fatal undermining of his authority. Disasters such as the loss of 25 million people's data added to the picture.

Equality matching is the idea of equal shares and reciprocity — you scratch my back and I'll scratch yours. In politics, this translates as a desire for fairness and due process. The 10p tax band fiasco was a clear violation of people's sense of fair play and equality as it was obvious that the poorest were paying for a tax reduction for the middle classes.

Communal sharing is the idea of belonging to a group and contributing to it, regardless of personal benefit. Brown has fallen foul of communal sharing in one rather sensitive area — he's Scottish. At first, while his authority and the economy were intact this didn't seem to matter. But after the election-that-never-was and the credit crunch, suddenly Brown's perceived identity did.

The best way to illustrate this is the attacks on the English Tory leader, the English Conservative candidate for mayor and the English Tory candidate in Crewe and Nantwich as 'toffs'. These attacks backfired, most spectacularly in the case of Boris Johnson. The thing about Boris is that everyone calls him Boris. He might be a 'toff', but he's 'our' toff. Brown on the other hand, in his public persona, doesn't strike many English people as being 'one of us' and most of Labour's recent electoral disasters have been in England.

Communal sharing and equality matching taken together also give us two of the bedrocks of modern democracies: progressive taxation and one-person-one-vote democracy. The 10p tax fiasco violated the first, the election that wasn't and Brown's anointing as PM without an election violated the second.

Now the perceptive will notice that all of this is all very unfair and contradictory. The punters blame Brown for being in charge (the economy) and for not being in charge (losing people's data). He can go from being our national leader (floods, terrorism, foot and mouth disease) to that Scottish bloke in Downing Street, because our four ways of relating to each other can themselves be rather contradictory.

As I wrote in my own little book on the subject, The paradoxical primate, people are weird. But we are weird in very particular ways, as Fiske's theory also illuminates.

It's a pity one of the most intellectual prime ministers of the modern era doesn't pay a bit more attention to theory.

Colin Talbot is professor of public policy and management at the Herbert Simon Institute, Manchester Business School

PFjun2008

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