The Power report is a disappointment. Funded by the Rowntree Trust the report is the result of 2 years widespread consultation with a broad cross-section of the British people all over the country. Unfortunately the Commissioners have produced a preamble to a debate not an agenda for action.

In trying to treat George Best over the years, doctors first implanted something that would make his body reject alcohol. When this failed he had a liver transplant. But his continued drinking killed him. The point here is that the nature of the solution to a problem is often different from the nature of the problem. The deeper the problem, the more likely this will be true. A fallacy at heart of the Power report is that a political problem must require a political solution. If there was ever a solution to Best’s problem in was in his head, his mind, not in the medical structures and procedures through which a solution was sought.

The Power report is also littered with vague, woolly recommendations I learned as an Audit Manager, must be rigorously avoided if any effective action was to be taken. Eg.

23. All public bodies should be required to meet a duty of public involvement in their decision and policy-making processes.

Even if I really knew what this meant or to whom it refers, I would have no idea what would count as it being implemented. And with a Prime Minister who could oppose the motion that 2 + 2 = 4 and render the outcome of the debate uncertain, this kind of civil-service-ese waffle will just be ignored. Or, God help us, implemented at great cost and to no worthwhile purpose.

On the Best analogy the fundamental problem lies in people’s heads. Their thoughts and attitudes, not the political structures around them. The report notes, with Churchill, that democratic structures and processes are irreducibly imperfect. People can accept that. But I am certain that the British people at the moment would elect a one-legged Orangutang if they were guaranteed that they could give it some money and get back an effective service or amenity they wanted.

The century of ideology has gone. The people want delivery – of healthcare, clean efficient trains, honourable policemen, and good education for all, not socially stratified training for a job. They have discovered by bitter experience over many years that ideologies don’t deliver. And one strain of their deep disillusionment and cynicism that the report correctly identifies, derives from their proven judgement that neither politicians nor politics can deliver what they need.

They want better outputs, outcomes – delivery: not improved inputs – more debate, involvement etc. And while, in the absence of anything else, some will buy into the mythical effectiveness of business concepts like ‘choice’, ‘targets’, and the ‘customer’ culture – most of us miss being patients, students, parents etc. Why should we want to be customers? Every day we experience the apparatus of what has been called ‘blood-pressure’ marketing – answer-phone systems, one-way internet communication and the sheer impossibility of talking to a human being with a shred of knowledge or authority who might address our problem. The individual customer is dead. Governments who nail their colours to the last business fashion but one just weren’t at the funeral. British people see the downside of a totally capitalist culture in the USA and it horrified them even before the salutary confirmations of Enron and New Orleans.

In her speech at the launch Baroness Helena Kennedy spoke of the dangers of politicians not listening to the message in the report but did not say what she meant. For me it’s about one-legged Orangutangs – or to get real, the British National Party, the IRA, Islamic fundamentalist groups or even the Kray twins. Not caring who is in charge as long as you get protection, effective delivery of what you need and freedom from what you don’t like or understand, is profoundly dangerous. Mussolini’s trains.

In terms of their primary concern – delivery, people no longer believe democracy works. And all the worthy, desirable recommendations of the report are secondary to effective delivery of good public services etc. Not a single recommendation made will directly help achieve that objective. People won’t be content with lousy services just because they have had more say in setting them up. And they will admit they don’t actually know how to make a discriminating judgement between hospitals, surgeons, transport systems etc. They will either laugh or groan at the recommended solution to the problem of giving Local Government more money given their day-to-day experience of how badly existing money is spent. The phenomenon of scepticism about the effectiveness of local government is at least as old as I am. Look at decades of voting turnouts.

Politics cannot improve things for people: it can only create the conditions under which they can improve them for themselves. They don’t need consultation and involvement in debate – they need leadership and the empowerment of action.

You can have management and control without trust – but not leadership. The credibility of the whole report is undermined by claiming that people’s cynicism and disillusionment is NOT (their capitals) the perceived (my addition) “low calibre and probity of politicians.” They call this a red herring. Some herring. Do the commissioners ever watch Question Time to take just one good example? Week in, week out, month in month out, the audience spontaneously applauds any speaker who talks of lying, deception and self-interest on the part of politicians.

Britain does not divide between those who think Mr Blair lied to them about Iraq and those who don’t. It divides between those who are prepared to put up with it and those who are not. The evidence for that is extensive and ongoing. And the second group will not easily forgive the majority of politicians who were also deceived, from deciding to join the first group.

Two fallacies of the report’s representation of the data gathered from the people:

1. That the solution to a political problem must be a political one.
2. That people’s primary concern is inputs, more debate, involvement in decision making, being talked to – not outcomes and trustworthy leadership that empowers them to act for themselves.

And: the glaring falsehood in the report – that the people’s disillusionment and lack of trust is not centred on being lied to by their own Prime Minister about the most important issue a country can face – going to war. Plus the fact that for almost 20 years, a series of found out politicians have regarded proof that they have not done anything illegal as a sufficient defence of their behaviour. We want men and women of honour and probity – we sort of took it for granted we hadn’t elected crooks.

So to the lacuna in the report. Eleven pages of Executive summary and a mere 7 woolly and anodyne lines on the media. And the sections elaborating these points again concentrate on structures not outcomes. Plurality of press ownership is of course an important matter, but there is a more critical issue at the heart of the malaise in our democracy. It is a philosophical problem of some subtlety and depth. And no solutions can be effective without addressing it: this is the progressive corruption, decline and misuse of language itself in our public and political debate. Venal or demagogic politicians are nothing new. The recently released film Good Night and Good Luck is a fascinating illustration of then (1950’s) and now. Ed Murrow was able to help bring down McCarthy by respect for the truth, establishing facts and with probity and some courage, adducing them in effective argument to prove the man’s campaign was founded on lies and deception. In our current political climate truth has been replaced by semantics, and fact by plausibility and deniability. Murrow only had to prove what McCarthy did – not what he intended. Today when things go wrong, we are asked to judge a politician not by what he said but by what he can argue he meant. And Mr Blair has made us good enough lawyers to know there is no definitive proof of an intention. That’s why we have our legal process and juries. The jury of British public opinion lives with the paradox that they have judged some politicians guilty, but unlike real people, no one pays. Everyone is responsible so no one is to blame.

This has become a macabre dance between the media and politicians. Media trained and savvy MP’s take on belligerent interrogators in a gladiatorial combat the only victim of which is the importance of the issue and the truth about it. This is about the need for a rediscovered sense of professionalism in both politicians and journalists. And plurality of ownership is a side-show by comparison.

How can the Power report have virtually ignored this central issue? How can its findings and recommendations be so superficial and ill-informed? Recommendation 26: “Public Service broadcasters must develop strategies to involve viewers in deliberation on matters of public importance.” Has whoever wrote this ever visited bbc.co.uk or attended a BBC governor’s meeting, or even watched any of its output? A world respected organisation, critical to our democratic structure, with perhaps the best web site in the world, is already doing what this recommendation requires. But it has been engaged in a battle for at least 5 years for its continued independence and right, indeed duty, to hold government to account before the British people. And it is losing - as an obsequious apology for a vital and absolutely justifiable piece of journalism amply demonstrates. The anxiety and fear generated by that experience has created a formal editorial policy which even Ed Murrow in simpler times, and every current senior journalist at the BBC knows is nonsense – that the BBC must be 100% right to broadcast. This is a certain recipe for safe, bland, conformist superficiality. How important is this? In a coup, the first target isn’t control of the government it is control of the media.

The BBC is fighting with politicians for its independence of funding and editorial policy. And for a last ditch effort to sustain the democratically vital concept of broadcasting rather than an exclusively profit-motivated narrowcasting.

This is where the most important battle for democracy is being waged. I have argued above that the fundamental issue in redressing public cynicism, disillusionment and distrust of politics and politicians lies like George Best’s alcoholism, in the head, the emotions; in ideas and beliefs and not in the structures political or otherwise around them. If I am right then the absence of any meaningful recognition in the Power report of the importance of issues concerning the funding and continued independence of the BBC renders it culpably deficient. Not only in its analysis of the problems, but also in offering any remote chance of their effective resolution.

The commissioners must develop a winning strategy and effective action plan. They must not be content with a nice protracted debate with the same degree of effective change as was achieved by Roy Jenkins’ report on Proportional Representation. In the end I fear this an establishment report, finding establishment solutions based upon a false representation of the view of the British people. The commissioners listened but did not hear.