Local Democracy Notepad

Professor George Jones panning the government’s new localism agenda:

“This move to pass governmental decision-making to a level below local government is ill-thought-out. We do not know what is meant by community associations, how representative they will be, their boundaries, nor their audit, probity and accountability arrangements.  Rather than setting up such amorphous entities, the Government should empower local authorities, to promote and support public involvement viagra uk purchase in their localities. After all local authorities already exist with their own ready-made governance structures, their own democratic mandate, and with 20,000 community activists called councillors in place.”

Local government governance guru Peter Keith-Lucas has
an article in this week’s Local Government Lawyer assessing the current state of governance in local councils.

It’s a good read – expert but not too technical. Keith-Lucas has plagues to put on the houses of both parties: the Labour party for watering down the proper role of scrutiny in its most recent green paper, the Conservatives for setting out proposals on Standards Committee issues that (he suggests) leave the door open for greater councillor corruption. Here’s his closing paragraph (but do go and read the lot):

For healthy local government, there must be corporate governance, there must be a balance between the power of the executive and the checks and balances, in terms of council and scrutiny holding the executive to account, and an enforceable set of minimum standards of conduct. I am seriously concerned that the checks and balances which were an essential part of the 2000 Act Settlement are under attack. That promises a prosperous New Year for lawyers, but not a happy time for local government.

Cllr Mary Reid (a Kingston-Upon-Thames Lib-Dem) has a short  post up about percentages of councillors blogging. Cutting to the chase….

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In the UK …

• 7% of all Liberal Democrat councillors have websites/blogs.
• 2% of all Conservative councillors have websites/blogs.
• 1% of all Labour councillors have websites/blogs.

The Lib-Dems plainly value interactivity more highly than the others, and this should be seen as a mark in their favour.

Seasoned political watchers, however, will have come away from the Lib-Dem conference last week with one abiding impression: Of a party that values it’s independence.

Where the leadership were keen to push populists lines of attack, they were very clearly clipped back by indignation from middle-ranking party figures complaining about top-down policymaking.

First question: Is there a correlation between the interactivity of a party’s grassroots and the relative lack of willingness within the party to adopt collegiate positions? I would suggest that there is.

Next question: In the current climate, is a willingness to adopt collegiate positions an essential pre-requisite to electoral success? Again, purely on personal experience, I’d say that there is.

Labour was blessed / cursed with a herd of independent minds rich diversity of internal debate in the 1980s – an experience that shaped the 1990s predilection for ‘control freakery’ in the party.

There is another way of looking at this though: David Herdson makes a strong case here, arguing that the Lib Dems steady progress – it’s slow upwards trajectory – is down to the party’s niceness – and that it is a fool’s errand to even try to behave like the Government-in-waiting.

Last question: Is Cllr Reid wise to be pleased about all of those lib-dem blogging Councillors?

Using the revealed preferences of the voters, I’ve been trying to compile the profile of local elected representatives that the public want – in the cops do in police procedural dramas. I’m not sure that they’re ready for interactivity.

As a further observation, is it the case that party division is really unpopular with the public? Or is that political journalists are so lazy that any easy-to-find evidence of a schism is likely to get a disproportionate amount of press-coverage – and that this issue then adds to the impression that open debate is electorally risky?