9 July 2020

Local Democracy

by Shawsheet

This is our third Focus article highlighting this time Local Democracy (and this week’s Crossword is on the same theme).

We asked people what they thought about it.

John Nick

“They do it in Paris!” And famously, on hearing these words Emma Bovary agreed to join her lover for an afternoon of debauch in the curtained cab of a hackney-coach, hurtling its way around the back streets of Rouen. A reminder to us all of the sublime influence the metropolis can have over local behaviour.

And was it encouragement of a similar sort that persuaded the Government’s chief adviser to secrete himself in the cabin of his 4×4 as it wormed its way around Barnard’s Castle? “By the way, forget lockdown, this is what we do in Islington!”

The people of Leicester are now paying the price for whatever he discovered.  The Government is, understandably, fed up with getting the blame for everything, and there will be plenty more of it once the second spike of COVID hits us, as sadly it surely will. So blame must now be devolved, and in future lockdown will also be devolved.  To fill the gap left by school league tables, now meaningless, there will be a weekly COVID league table. Leicester just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. Doncaster is now on notice. Other cities will surely follow, and when they do it will be the fault of the local community, not the government, for not controlling their citizens more effectively.

“A canny trick,” as they say in Barnard’s Castle. In Rouen, too.

Don Urquhart

Yesterday 500,000 people flocked to the Dorset coast and enjoyed the sun, sea and sand.  Shock, horror all over the media as there appeared to be every possibility of such gatherings kicking off the much feared second spike.

It also brought local MP Tobias Ellwood to our screens to express revulsion at people’s irresponsibility and to insist that it was time for action.  But, however hard the interviewers tried he was unable to tell us who in his opinion should be doing what.  Interviews with local Bournemouth councillors involved much throwing up of hands and head-shaking.

We have friends in Italy who tell us of the creative measures being implemented by local authorities there – booking of spots on the beach, one way systems for getting on and off, food deliveries and regular patrols.  Compared with this Bournemouth was a disorganised carnage.  And yet, surely the Italians are known for their individualism, poor governance and contempt for authority?

Something our European neighbours have got right is the separation of powers between the centre and the locality.  Not for them the almost academic debate about who calls a local lockdown and who knows what to do if there is one.

We are saddled with a government led by someone who sees controlling outbreaks as the equivalent of “Whack a Mole” at the fair.  Guidance has been vague.  Who knows how many bubbles can merge, how often and how big they can be?

Many people will now suffer and die because Westminster and Bournemouth passed the parcel on a rather big bubble.

J.R. Thomas

“Don’t start from here” was the famous response by the countryman to the stranger asking how to get to Manchester.  It’s an equally good riposte to the politician trying to improve local democracy.

Local government and local democracy are two very different things.  Local government is a second (rate) tier of politicians sounding off in the town hall and bossing their neighbours around for no good purpose.  Local democracy ought to be a very different thing, alas very rare, letting local people run their own local services.  Where it ought to be immediately deployed is in education where schools should be run by parents, with input and influence from the teachers in that school, and a few educational experts, at national and county level, to make sure standards are maintained.  School boards, library boards, refuse disposal boards; they would all unite the users to get the service they want and bring decision making down to the people.

But all we really have, or had, is local drainage boards.  Those who paid drainage rates or whose land was in danger of flooding ran the water management systems – rivers, canals, pumping stations – in their area.  Then the dread hand of Whitehall decided to centralise control of all that.  The folk of the Somerset Levels and the lower reaches of the River Don can tell you what happened next.

Let’s get rid of local councils.  Give power to the people and put their own services in their own hands.  Their money; their services.

John Watson

The principle of subsidiarity adopted by the Maastricht Treaty of 1992 dictated that decisions should be taken at the closest practical level to citizens and that the EU should not take on tasks better suited to national, local or regional administrations.  Okay, the narrowness with which the European Court of Justice approached the word “closely” resulted in disastrous over-meddling but, that aside, it sounds like an ideal principle on which to model a system of delegated authority.  It isn’t.  It is half a principle.  You also have to decide at what point the higher authority should intervene if the local body abuses its power.

Take street naming for example, an area which in this country is delegated to district councils who consult with parish councils etc. Normally it works pretty well but one can imagine circumstances where it would not.  Suppose the area was dominated by a particular religious group or people of extreme right-wing or left-wing views.  Suppose the district council decided to express those views through its street naming policy.  Should central government be entitled to intervene or should they say that that is within the ambit of local democracy and shrug their shoulders?

In Mrs Thatcher’s time the London County Council made such a nuisance of itself that she abolished it.  In the US we see a system of locally elected police chiefs delivering very mixed results.  Should the locality be overridden because it has chosen badly or should it live with its mistakes?  That, rather than an allocation of jurisdictions, is the question at the heart of local democracy.

Dan Moondance

Think Local, act Global.  Good or bad?  It all depends on what sort of paper you read.  In our first year the second team captain was a bit dull, an intense dribbler.  Someone explained this by saying he was the sort of person who wrote letters to his local paper.  He did come from Bolton, so that was understandable.  Or was it Burnley?  At least there was a chance someone would recognise him in the street and say well dribbled.  Not much chance of that with the Telegraph, even if you can get them to accept your funny accent.

You get so much more for your money with the Local News.  Planning appeals.  Driving offences.  Guest speakers at the WI.  And there’s a chance the adverts might be useful.  None of that “We’re supporting you through Coronavirus” crap from Lloyds Bank more like what’s on offer this week from Lloyd the chemist.  And there’s all the stuff the Nationals wouldn’t touch.  Can you imagine Peregrine Worsthorne bothering to find out why they’ve moved the War Memorial from where it’s been happily standing for the last hundred years to a back alley behind the church just because it was getting in the way of traffic?  If it had been a statue of Rudyard Kipling it would have been a different matter.  The bit I like best is Births, Marriages and Deaths….

And don’t forget that Local Power corrupts, and its rot is a lot less visible than the stuff you get at Westminster.  Remember T. Dan Smith?  If he’d been down there he’d have been Minister of Housing and a total waste of space.  At least up here they can make a park out of him.

Paul Branch

It’s been said, probably by our nearest and dearest like the Scots or the French, that the English are an ungovernable lot, that we’d rather be drinking and fighting than taking ourselves a bit more seriously by adopting rules and regulations and sticking to them.  And compared to other liberal democracies they’re probably right.  Our appetite for local government seems to swing between apathy and indifference; local election turnouts for county councils, town councils and city mayors hover around half compared to those voting in general elections; and the results are usually shrugged off by the media merely as an up-to-date barometer reading reflecting the changeable national mood, lurching somewhere between pessimistic and grumpy.  So do We The People really want the Power that’s been offered to us?

The idea presumably is to let the common folk run local government where we know best, as opposed to national government where we clearly don’t so we have to rely on proper professional politicians to do it for us.  However, in most cases it’s the same political parties that hold sway in local elections as in Westminster, encumbered by the same philosophy, ideas and party structures with little real opportunity or real possibility for true Independents to break the mould.  Even the voting system is the same:  first past the post, winner takes all with or without a majority of the overall vote.  In short it does seem not to exude anything approaching excitement above the level of occasional polite interest.

Where local democracy does seem to set the pulses racing though is when it gets down to the very deep and dirty levels of community politics, a minefield for those well-intentioned enlightened souls who put everything into trying to make their immediate environment a better place for all, without offending anyone or stepping on toes.  Not an easy task in smaller communities where everybody knows everybody else’s business.  In some cases the wielders of power are elected, or at least put themselves forward for tasks which they feel are necessary and within their capabilities, and very frequently are unopposed in these roles.

In our village for example we are governed benignly by the parish council which looks after the local amenities and recreation green, plus the odd controversial planning application, a village hall committee which arranges entertainments throughout the year, a heritage committee for our little museum, and an events committee overseeing ways of raising much-needed funds for local charities.  This last weekend there’s been trouble on the green with visitors making a huge unsightly mess with their litter, but thankfully the pub has not yet emerged from lockdown so there was no opportunity for indulging in English primeval fisticuffs and all has been sorted out by those in charge.  Never a dull moment …. and frankly much better value than the town council, district council and county council which tower above us in the pyramid of local power.

In conclusion, and taking a very parochial view of the world, people tend to get far more involved in areas where they have a personal interest and which they can affect directly, and by and large seem to get things done harmoniously and effectively where traditional party politics are irrelevant.  And for all the talk of increasingly devolving power to the masses, we’d be better off merging the upper echelons back into national government and leaving the rest of us alone.