Local Democracy Notepad

“The secret of acting is sincerity. If you can fake that, you’ve got it made.” George Burns

Over the next few weeks, my MP (a newly-elected Tory) will go through the parliamentary lobby in support of a range of bills that he knows little about.

@tom_watson - a pin-up for networked politics? (click for pic credit)

Sure. He may have a few reflexive opinions on the general subject matter, but beyond that, like most MPs, he’ll focus upon a handful of issues that he stays on top of: Personal bugbears, issues raised my his more persistent constituents, areas in which he’s been allocated a Parliamentary or Party role.

And however he casts his vote, the letters pages of the local newspapers will regularly castigate him. He’ll often respond by topping-and-tailing cut-and-paste letters provided by someone else in his party.

In this respect, my MP is quite like Tom Watson – the pin-up of the networked politics. I’m sure Tom toes The Party Line when he’s not sure. In other words, my MP and Tom conspire in the fakery that sustains Party politics. Read the rest of this entry »

Party Conference season: Vital equipment.

It’s Friday, and the party conference season beckons. One or two of you may have already been in Liverpool for the TUC, and there is quite a little community of people that have to go to all of them.

cheap celebrex

For some councillors, this may be their first proper look at how their party works. My own tip is to find out where the journalists are hanging out and to go there – it’s a lot easier to get bought a drink under those circumstances, that’s where the gossip can be had and the movers-and-shakers can be found.

If you haven’t got your accomodation booked already, I’m afraid you’re in for a few hours commuting each day. And if you haven’t got your pass yet, expect at least six hours queuing.

If you have got digs, remember that high expectations lead to disappointment. A rumour went around the Labour Party in the mid-1990s that Blackpool would not be hosting any more of their conferences because Peter Mandelson was told that he shouldn’t have stirred his tea if he didn’t like sugar in it.

Also, prepare for a bout of ‘conference flu’ on Tuesday or Wednesday morning. A good fry-up will either kill or cure this ailment, and every chemist within walking distance will be sold-out of Resolve.

Note: Bring your own packet from home

But for now, if you’ve not got anything better to do, you can nip over and read my friend Sadie’s Dean’s guide to bag-carrying at party conferences. And here’s some advice for MPs (much of it transferrable to councillors) on how to deal with a new enthusiasm for teh interwebs. The rest of Dean’s guides are here, the slightly less serious part of the Working for an MP website W4mp.

Final advice: Here’s a warning from the past about what sort of thing you may see if you go to a disco at a party conference.

You have been warned.

In France, the Socialist party want to reform the practice known as cumul des mandats, where an MP or Senator also holds elected office at local level in his home town. The argument is that wearing two hats in that way distracts national level politicians from their main jobs, and promotes cronyism and pork-barrel spending in their local areas.

An article in Le Monde has some eye-opening statistics. 80% of French parliamentarians are also councillors, compared with 20% in Britain, Germany and Italy. Of the 185 socialist deputies in the French National Assembly, 80 hold executive office on a local or regional council, and a similar proportion of socialist senators do the same. Of those who don’t hold executive office, most are backbench councillors in their local areas. The figures for the UMP (Sarkozy’s party) are pretty similar.

Who knows, if the socialists get their way, how many French parliamentarians will give up life in Paris and retreat to their communes. Perhaps not very many – but could you imagine any MP or peer in the UK preferring local office to national? It’s a symbol of the centralism of the UK, even set against the France of the préfet and the Code Napoléon, that being a footsoldier at national level is so clearly preferable to leading the ranks in your home town.

Party funding reform could put Labour and the Conservatives closer to the Lib-Dems funding model.

If there is a point at which most of the authors of this blog (I can’t speak for all of them) differ from most of the sites that we link to, and that link here, it may be on the queston of ‘active citizenship’.

Where it seeems to be an almost unexamined given to argue that we  need more active citizenship, and that it’s usually a good thing, I’d argue that there is a blessed equity in our current system where most people don’t get involved in decisionmaking most of the time.

I outlined the Victor Meldrew problem here a while ago, but a shorter, simplified and provocative version of it is this: Read the rest of this entry »

Dennis Skinner - thought to be sceptical about consensus politics. (Pic: Riana Dzasta)

It’s an interesting twist to the question I’ve been asking, on and off, over the past few weeks: What kind of representatives do we want?

So far, the options have included jurors, rogues and public paragons of virtue. But over on Spiked Online, Brendan O’Neill suggests a somewhat alarming possibility: Maybe we need people who are locked in a partisan struggle – people who will die in a ditch to defend the interests of a social class or ideological clique. Maybe we need (shock … horror) politicians to represent us?

In short, he suggests that the whole expenses scandal is the product of a regrettable retreat from politics – a move to make Parliament meet the petty demands of it’s rivals, and a refusal to prioritise and accommodate political conflict:

“New Labour has discovered that transparency begets, not trust, but further suspicion – the more politicians make their personal purity into their major selling point, and the more they imply that parliament is a potentially corrupt and sleazy place, the more they invite scrutiny of their every foible and Kit Kat purchase.” Read the rest of this entry »

Irish elections: generally more posters than in the UK

So much is changing so quickly. Newspapers and broadcasters are changing. Governments now communicate using radically different means to the ones that were practiced a decade ago. Here’s Exhibit A.

We now have free interactive tools that enable us to hold huge multilateral conversations based upon collaborative filtering and reputation management. We can find useful strangers easily – and I don’t just mean with dating websites.

Of course, these changes throw up hazards. New doors have opened for budding demagogues, busy-bodies, lobbyists, snoopers and quacks. But it also throws up huge opportunities.

For me, the glittering prize – from a democratic point of view – is the potential to promote decentralisation of power. Putting the levers of power in a place that is geographically closer. Breaking down the rigidities that made participation impossible.

In the same way that the DIY ethic of blogging and social media has helped millions to somehow dilute the alienation of modern living, it has allowed many of us the chance to test our voice, contribute and to take some responsibility for public discourse – often for the first time. Read the rest of this entry »

Given all the talk of localism in recent months, it is pretty disappointing to see Caroline Spelman, the Conservative shadow Local Government minister, making the following statement (via the BBC) on Council Tax rises:

At a time when millions of workers are facing pay freezes or unemployment this year, it adds insult to injury to drive up bills by a further £41 a year, on top of previous years’ rises. Labour’s refusal to follow the example of Scotland and freeze council tax bills in England is unfair on English taxpayers, who yet again have received a raw deal.

What makes this posturing worse is that there is a real case for the Government to answer on the funding formula, non-domestic rates, LABGI and so on – all of which could be argued from a localist position. And yet we get this attack, which implies that central government is where voters should place the accountability for council tax rises.

Does Ms Spelman think the Westminster Government sets Council Tax? If she realises that councils do, does she know which party is in control in most of them?

Tony Blair: A bit more concerned about controlling his party's message than his predecessors were.

OK, in recent posts, I’ve moaned about the demands for political transparency that are being fuelled by new interactive media applications. Let me try and put this into some perspective:

In my opening ‘defending political parties‘ post, I acknowledged that there are a few early knockout punches that could be delivered to the argument that political parties are a good thing.

Here are some examples: Firstly, all political parties ‘control their messages’ (unless they are an electorally unsuccessful party) and do anything they can within the law to silence opponents, discourage sceptics, and orchestrate the way that the public are seen to to receive their ideas.

Were you or I as boorish, the dinner-invitations would dry up fairly quickly. In this respect, politicians behave like successful commercial brands.

They conduct personal campaigns against their opponents, playing the man instead of the ball. They bully anyone that they need to in order to get their message across. They compete in the market for votes with the ruthlessness and cynicism with which businesses compete for customers.

If one of their number is caught with a hand in the till, they cover up or excuse it as far as they can. But if the alleged culprit is – in fact – innocent, they can still be expect to be abandoned without mercy if things get too hot.

The concerns that parties raise in opposition are often forgotten as soon as the ministerial backsides sink into the ministerial limo. They can play very fast-and-loose with the actualité at times. They are opaque where they could be transparent.

They are not consistent in their communications, and different audiences are routinely told what they want to hear. You can never trust a political party to do what it says it’s going to do, and you can expect manifesto pledges to be treated like clauses in a public-procurement contract: Things to be wriggled out of as soon as the deal is done.

But that’s enough about their virtues. No party could ever win an election, or govern effectively without committing all of the sins listed above, and few governments have ever been faced with an opposition that isn’t prepared to match them on these points. The alternative to strong political parties is a tyrany of Victors.

This is not to say that politicians don’t sometimes do bad things as well though. If they do all of the above, and introduce generally good legislation, I suspect that most of us would all forgive them. Read the rest of this entry »

The voice of reason.

This blog is here to explore the concept of a more inclusive means of forming policy at a local level. So let me offer you two examples of the kind of people that we need to include in such processes.

Our first case in point - let’s call her Mrs Meldrew (though it’s not really a perfect parallel – perhaps Dot or Clarrie would do) is a woman who lives in difficult domestic circumstances. Caring for disadvantaged and difficult family-members, she was never able to develop a professional career, and she has no inherited wealth or private income.

She often works nights and always long hours because of the vicious circle she is trapped in – needing money to pay for occasional respite care.

She relies on public transport and local infrastructure. The library is one affordable trip to look forward to each week. She doesn’t have a PC at work and can’t afford to use one at home – and as a result, she’s not particularly tech savvy anyway. She doesn’t have an e-mail address, a Facebook account, and if you asked to Twitter her on the backchannel, she’d probably phone the police. Read the rest of this entry »

There’s a very good article over at Westminster Wisdom about the longevity of the US two-party system – a dominance of only two largely unchanged political parties since 1860 – “a record unmatched by any other Democracy.”

A comparison with the UK, in which the period from 1945 until the late 1960s marked a fairly rigid period of allignment along party and class lines, and the subsequent fragmentation of voting paterns is interesting. There’s an entertaining gap-fill exercise here where you can test your knowledge of this, but it’s often hard to recognise just how much things have changed since 1966.

If you look at the general election results, you see only two very major parties, a very marginal Liberal Party, nothing that could be called a Green Party, tiny Nationalist parties and a miniscule far-right (Union Movement). 

Of the 630 MPs, all but 13 were Labour or Conservative. And of the remainder, 12 were Liberal and one was Republican Labour – the late Gerry Fitt in West Belfast.

The expectation among politicians that they should advance particular policies – as opposed to a general approach – in order to attract votes is a fairly new one in the UK. When Labour lost power to the Conservatives in 1970, a relatively small number of voters switched allegiance. In addition, it is often argued that this reflected a demographic shift (people leaving the Labour-voting class and joining the strata that vote Conservative) more than any reflection on the actual polcies of the political parties.

In 1970, Labour went into the General Election with a fair degree of optimism – their defeat was an unpleasant surprise to them. All of this following a period that included the devaluation of Sterling and Harold Wilson’s famous ‘Pound in your pocket‘ sophistry. 

All of this raises the question: Do we have an electoral system that reflects voters’ expectations of representation? If the main system of voting did so in 1970, by definition, it can no longer do so in 2009 because those expectations have changed so dramatically.