Local Democracy Notepad

Councillor Stamp. Our August pin-up.

As the silly season draws to a close (it is Friday as well), those nice people over at the internet have brought the ultimate in municipal-porn-meets-pavement-politics: the Glum Councillors.

For some time, I’ve thought that the LGA could prove it’s worth to the nation by doing a Calender Girls type fundraising exercise for charity featuring photos of some of our most nationally recognised and charismatic councillors – pictured as God intended.

The one problem is this; what is ‘the classic councillor pose’? Glum Councillors may have finally answered this question for us.

If you see any more of these, the site urges you to tweet them to @glumcouncillors

(Hat tip to Ivan for this one).

“Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”

In other news, it seems that London is in the middle of a secessionist frenzy. My friend ‘Annie Mole’ has a lovely blog here that every Londoner should bookmark. Her latest post reports the possibility that Archway will be renamed ‘Whittington’, – Dick Whittington apparently ‘turned again’ just has he was passing Archway Tube.

A while ago, a campaign was launched to rename Arsenal tube station as well. Apparently these guys had some suggestions that were, like, TOTALLY unacceptable.

Of course, there’s nothing new about secessionism in London as this old documentary illustrates:

The Western People - do local newspapers in Ireland illustrate the problems with English local newspapers?

My recent sojourn in the west of Ireland has made me look at this whole newspapers v councils issue in a new light.

Roy Greenslade, it seems to me, is thinking inside a very English box. On the Guardian blog, he accuses Darlington councillor Nick Wallis of disingenuity in his dealings with a local journalist when he says (of the fact that his local authority is publishing it’s own newspaper):

“I’m guessing this hurts the local newspaper industry at a time when advertising revenue is at a premium.”

Greenslade goes on:

But Wallis has the gall to add that “local councils can’t win” because “they’re damned if they have a council magazine with significant costs to the taxpayer, and damned if they try to offset those costs with advertising revenue.”

That misses the point by a mile. Councils are not damned for not publishing at all. Council taxpayers across the country are not demanding that their councils produce mini-Pravdas. They know it’s propaganda and treat it as such.

What those residents don’t realise is that their local newspapers are losing revenue and facing closure because their councils can’t stand proper independent scrutiny.

Barron, one of Britain’s most respected regional editors, runs as good a paper as his Newsquest/Gannett budget allows.

I’d suggest that it is Greenslade who is missing an important point here. His loyalty to his own profession is touching, and there is no question that Britain’s journalists aspire to subject local authorities to “proper independent scrutiny”, but the people that own the newspapers (and it is they who count here) simply don’t share this conviction. Mr Greenslade will be familliar enough with books by Nick Davies and John Lloyd to understand this churnalism point, and it’s disingenuous of him to ignore it here.

The last few words in that quote, above, leap out: “…as good a paper as his Newsquest/Gannett budget allows.”

Media owners have not, for some time, shown much concern for the quality of their local reporting. The problem, I would suggest, is in the market failure that has impacted upon local newspapers. It runs something like this:

• Local printed media – with it’s high entry costs and strong economies of scale – tends towards monopolies that secure their position by driving down prices
• This results in a market failure whereby the need to secure a monopoly drives out local players who would compete on quality as well as price

In the UK, we have a handful of media groups that offer a fairly low-level of editorial service, selling newspapers cheaply and handing the profits that accrue from their economies of scale over to their shareholders. Our problem is that we have consolidated mega-groups of local newspapers.

It also isn’t the business of a local councillor to ensure that every single industry exists in an ecology that ensures that it will survive – particularly when they have many of the characteristics of a monopoly. Read the rest of this entry »

Tell councillors what RSS means, willya?

Apologies for the light posting here lately – even bloggers go on holiday, y’know?

I’ve not collected my thoughts for any original posts yet, though the ‘Duty to Promote Democracy’ and the obligation to offer petitions will be on the statute book shortly providing plenty of new material in the coming weeks.

For now, Dave Briggs has an interesting guest post up – ‘Ten Top Internet Tips for Councillors‘ – written by Mark Pack.

I’d argue that there is a real cultural problem around the way that local authorities manage their relationship with councillors. Councils could offer leadership to their councillors – saying that they believe that they have a duty to encourage councillors to be more effective people. In my experience, this approach is the exception rather than the norm, with too much handwringing about providing ‘political’ support to councillors.

In the absence of such support, if I were offering a short course to councillors, I’d start with those lovely Commoncraft videos. As Mark Pack says in that post on Dave’s blog, feed readers are very useful productivity tools.

But my hottest tip to councillors would be to challenge the attitude that local authorities adopt towards councillor development. One argument that I found to be briefly successful ran like this:

q: But surely, if we use council resources to help councillors become more effective communicators using the internet, we’d be giving the incumbent an advantage, damaging democracy, and breaking all sorts of local government codes of conduct?

a: Do you really think that you are providing every one of your councillors an advantage by giving them greater exposure to the voters? Would greater exposure to voters result in more councillors retaining their seats at election time? Or less?

I’d argue that this invisibility of individual councillors actually contributes to the way that political parties dominate local politics at the expense of strong individual representatives.

Promoting a use of social media at a local authority-wide level could be a good laugh – something that councillors would enjoy. I wonder if Commoncraft could come up with a video that would show councils how to do that?

I’ve been out and about again this week and speaking to Council’s about their social web strategies. Its interesting (to me at least!) to note a couple of the ideas which seem to have the greatest resonance as it would be good to know if these are themes which are emerging anywhere else:

• Government should not be building social networking platforms when this is already done so successfully – no-one wants to be friends with a council and trying to recreate FaceBook is an expensive waste of time as councils try to act corporately in a space which is designed for individuals
• Council years are slower than internet years – which are faster than normal time. To accommodate these differential you need to build a permanent online civic space which will outlast the next big fad
• You need to find ways to connect to people in the wider social web and invite them to the civic space – you can’t expect them to move their conversations there and you can’t expect them to turn up spontaneously
• You need to focus around the citizen is the same way as transactional service are focused around the customer in the one stop shop

Anyway – this is starting to sound like a manifesto but would like to know what you think. Am I stating the obvious or barking up the wrong tree?

PS  Once again I tried to think of a picture to go with this – but I just can’t – sorry to those of you that like something to liven things up – next time I can always add one of the dog if I get stuck I promise!