Local Democracy Notepad

According to yesterday’s papers, the No10 Petitions website has been canned. I can understand that a cheap viagra 100mg lot of the people behind it saw it as a learning experience and it clarified a few things.

My problem with the whole project is that this is one area where politicians let themselves down. Civil Servants go on public management courses and would expect to do their political masters’ bidding on things like this more quickly than they would on areas where politicians can’t be expected to bring native expertise to bear. If they are asked to implement something that is plainly at odds with representative democracy in this way, it’s the politicians’ look-out.

I also understand that not every politician would be able to match the basic knowledge of someone with – say – a first degree in political science. But when a whole government can’t find two such geniuses to rub together (and I suspect that the last Labour government – which I supported – fits this description) you have to worry.

Now here’s

the next question: Will local authorities have to continue to impersonate No10 in this folly? (I had a post up here that outlined the various options for local authorities a while ago)

In other news, I was in Belfast at the weekend organising an unconference on Political Innovation and one of the attendees was the policy officer from the Northern Ireland Local Government Association. She was inspired enough by the event to go and set up a new blog called ‘Local Is Beautiful’ - one to add to your RSS feed. Welcome Karen!

Here’s Rory Sutherland on the Spectator blog:

“….here lies the central challenge of the ‘Big Society’. In Britain our spectacular capacity for collective action in opposing things (Nazism, new housing, nightclubs) is matched only by our inability to harness any will or consensus when it comes to doing something new. Worse, our resistance to change is often self-defeating, since viagra on sale the only people not defeated by the bureaucratic hurdles are huge organisations like Tesco — while those traditional smaller cafés and shops that traditionalists claim to love cannot summon the energy to clear them.”

He

continues by promoting a smart ‘planning permission in return for something’ proposal that I’m sure I’ve seen before somewhere (when you think about it, it’s a locally hypothecated variation on Land Value Tax, isn’t it?), but nevertheless, it’s a good one.

When bloggers meet, I often find that old allegiances (be they left right, or Unionist/Republican often dissolve into a different political spilt. Those of us who imagine that we ‘get’ the read-write web against the political colleagues that we have who, we believe, fail to foresee the possibilities or the threats.

I’ve occasionally witnessed left-right-and-centrist bloggers in (non) violent agreement with each other – not about political direction, but about what is possible in harnessing the power

of the web. About how a more effective participative political culture can bring about a range of subtle changes – to reverse the broken politico/media relationship out of some of the cul-de-sacs that it appears to have stuck in.

Today, a few of us have come together to launch a project called ‘Political Innovation’. It’s for anyone who has ever asked themselves ‘why is politics brand viagra over the net still done like this?’

We’ve put a call out through our personal networks for initial contributions and we’ve already had promises of more than ten essays suggesting serious political innovations that are based upon an understanding of what interactive social media and the web can achieve. Read the rest of this entry »

For some reason, I’ve managed to miss the very-good Bad Conscience blog up until now. It’s worth a visit, if only to read this post on Max Weber’s notion of plebiscitary Caesars. They are, it seems, the kind of political leaders that we yearn for:

Max Weber

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“Weber believed that mass democracy held out the promise of ensuring new kinds leaders emerged; not privileged notables or landed gentry, but men with charisma who could carry the trust of the masses and be propelled forward to exercise genuine leadership in the face of state and party bureaucratic nihilism.”

And, while I know that avoiding the global love-in with Obama is both the hip thing to do, and therefore the right thing, I can’t help thinking that he fits this template more than anyone. Not only was Obama charismatic enough to overcome enormous odds over the last few years, he also practically reinvented the notion of the party machine.

He redefined it – attracting large numbers if low-ticket donations rather than the narrow patronage that political parties have come to rely upon.

There’s another thing to pick up here as well. Google the term ‘post-bureaucratic age’ and you will find that it’s something of a common feature in the speeches of senior modernising Conservatives in recent years. Spookily, it has all of the convenient political utility that the notion of ‘The Third Way’ had back in the 1990s.

I suspect that some Conservatives would argue that Obamas ability to almost reinvent a political party in an organic way made him the first post-bureaucratic President? If so, how come Weber  found an Obama-shaped space in his understanding of bureaucratic government?

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.

I attended an interesting seminar yesterday afternoon, hosted by the 2020 Public Services Trust. The topic was the future of citizen-centred public services.

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The two principal speakers both brought innovative ideas and a real vision, which is more than can be said for a lot of these public policy seminars. Ben Jupp, from the Cabinet Office, and Christian Bason from the Danish reform institute Mind Lab, set out a vision that I might crudely summarise as:

• We need to understand that public service goes wider than the things funded or provided by the state – in other words, the hospice movement is part of the health service, even if it isn’t part of the National Health Service
• We need to combine greater user empowerment, productivity drives and a better understanding of user pathways to identify waste in the system
• Future services will be provided in a radically decentralised way – well below town hall level
• Citizen/citizen and citizen/state relationships are the most important element of this new mode of public service

There’s a lot to like in this vision of decentralised, democratic public service, particularly if it brings about the alchemical “better services at lower cost” that we’re all hunting around for.

I don’t think it’s a simple or risk-free transformation, though. The questions that occurred to me were:

• Public service delivery is something that goes wider than taxpayer funding, but it is also something that is fundamentally political. How can decentralised local organisations be made accountable and representative to their users and those who pay any taxes that fund them?
• Are we acknowledging the problems of Whitehall managerialism only to create them over again at local level?
• How do we create the active and informed citizens needed to co-create and co-produce these services? It feels like the change needed – though a good change – is either a years-long cultural transformation programme, or devolution to a group of super-engaged people running local services.

I don’t have any easy answers. I want to see more democratic and less managerial service delivery – which is what both Ben and Christian were describing. I want fair and comprehensive public services. I buy the vision and the potential. My only nagging worry is that in a world where we’re living with the consequences of the efficient markets fallacy, we should be wary of stumbling into an efficient citizen fallacy.

Dr Ben Goldacre

One of the recurring themes of this blog is the way that weblogs are (as Charlie Beckett put it in that book review that I pointed to the other day), reconfiguring journalism and political discourse.

The most prominent examples of this in the UK have been the war of attrition that right-wing libertarian bloggers have conducted against politicians and the very idea that government should tax (“steal from”) people and spend (“burn”) their money. Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve just read through the new Strengthening Local Democracy Green Paper, and I can’t sum it up better than Talking Heads did in their 1977 hit, Psycho Killer. Not the refrain “better run, run, run, run away”, but the verse:

You start a conversation you can’t even finish.
You’re talking a lot, but you’re not saying anything.
When I have nothing to say, my lips are sealed.
Say something once, why say it again?

The first line is doubly apt – it’s optimistic (at best) to publish a consultation document ten months before a general election. It’s optimistic and unproductive when the document itself contains reams of prose on the benefits of democracy, without taking any of its thinking through to a logical conclusion.

The document treats strengthening local democracy as equivalent to strengthening local councils. That’s part of it, but a long way from being all of it. There is also, for starters, increasing the awareness of local political issues in the public, increasing turnout at local elections, making councillors more representative and more ambitious for their role, and promoting better debate and discussion at local and national level.

To be fair and balanced in my brutality, Conservative thinking on the issue is no better – as evidenced by the ragbag of populism and councillorism in their Control Shift paper. Both parties seem to be unable to think up sustainable and coherent initiatives to strengthen the political environment within which local councils work.

Back to the condoc. What little novelty it contains is around scrutiny. John Denham (or Hazel Blears, who knows?) obviously thinks scrutiny is just the thing to revive local democracy and make councils meaningful again. The Total Place initiative will tell councils how much public money is being spent by local bodies in their area, and scrutiny committees will have new powers to oversee local public services, including the utility companies, and scrutinise their budgets (p.18).

I suppose this might be good material for a green paper called “Strengthening local councils a bit” but it seems to be asking scrutiny committees to sprint before they can walk, whatever warm words there might be about duties to fund them sufficiently (p.21).

Let’s admit that good scrutiny can make a difference to local delivery, and refocus Whitehall-minded bureaucrats on the pressing local issues. It’s a promising area. But in how many authorities is good scrutiny being practised right now? How many councillors would rather be on scrutiny than in the administration? Not many, I bet, in answer to both questions. So why load scrutiny down with new powers and responsibilities, until it’s shown that it’s ready for them?

Another area where the green paper makes some new suggestions is around the entitlements (p.29) set out in an earlier, more wide-ranging document called Building Britain’s Future. The idea here is that the Government will legislate, as it has on climate change, to fix policy priorities in legislation, and then allow councils greater discretion in the ways they choose to provide the entitlements.

There’s a separate post to be written on how democratic it is to attempt to entrench your governing philosophy while staring a general election defeat in the face (“not very” is the two-word summary).

From a practical perspective, though, it doesn’t feel like this a great step forward for democracy at local level. As set out in the condoc, the Government decrees the entitlement, the citizen receives it, and the local council is forced to cash Whitehall’s blank cheque. I foresee enormous legal and political rows about the exact meaning of particular entitlements, and innumerable “postcode lottery” campaigns started by interest groups looking enviously across local government boundaries. A prostitute famously has power without responsibility – now councils get to have responsibility without power (as usual, some might say).

Chapter three of the condoc pitches a few ideas on how councils might respond to climate change. Some might want to do lots of different things, some might want to do one or two big things. Hey man, that’s cool, no pressure, says the condoc. Let us know how it goes, we might delegate you some powers. (p.37)

There’s a fair bit in the document (p.39 onwards), and in John Denham’s launch event speech, about sub-regional working through city regions and multi-area agreements. These have the potential – particularly if RDAs are abolished – to become important hubs for economic and social development, as well as conduits of Government funding. It’s important that they are set up right and governed sensibly. The condoc rightly proposes some ways of democratising the governance arrangements through greater openness and scrutiny.

Amazingly, in a throwaway remark half way down page 44, the condoc also suggests “creating new sub-regional local authorities with a much wider range of powers” and possibly direct elections. You would have thought that a proposal for a third tier of directly-elected local government might merit a bit more prominence than that.

The final chapter (p.46) proposes putting the relationship between central and local government on a more formal footing. What could be more formal than a long series of Local Government Acts, you might ask? Well, the idea is that the Government would create a set of achingly bland and obvious principles (examples in the condoc) that it could then say it was adhering to, and set up a joint Parliamentary Committee to check up on them. Pretty much pointless, I’d say.

Overall, then, the consultation is, unfortunately, a damp squib. Andy Sawford at LGIU has a rather more positive take on it, though I regret the abandonment of empowerment rhetoric which he celebrates. Elsewhere, Town Hall Matters considers the scrutiny issue in more detail.

Apologies for the very light posting this week. Hopefully something approaching normal service will be resumed next week.

In the meantime, check out Matthew Taylor’s ‘Bloggers Circle‘ – if you have a site of your own, it’s well worth visiting it and joining. Here’s the drill:

• Receive an email at about lunchtime when blogposts have been submitted by members of the circle
• Once a week you can submit your best / most interesting blogpost to the circle
• If other members of the circle find your post interesting or provocative they will write about it
• In return, we ask you to write about a blog post promoted by another member of the circle twice a month
• At the end of the month, the blog post written about by the most members will receive the ‘blog of the month’ prize
• If you use Twitter, mark your post #bloggerscircle for profile on the homepage

What are you waiting for?

And if you don’t blog – really, try it. You may be pleasantly surprised….

Power to the people!

The #rebootbritain hashtag on Twitter went haywire on Monday as over 700 people attended the event – I spent over an hour on Tuesday night searching through it and the earliest session I could get to in that time was a 4pm one – it actually challenged #michaeljackson for prominence on Twitter’s trending indicator.

Because I organised six of these sessions, I was confined to them and missed some other attractive ones. Of the six, the session of that I may have the most notable outcome was the one I helped Tim Davies to put together. He’s detailed it here, and the whole enterprise is a tribute to his imagination and industry. Read the rest of this entry »