Tory localism

The past couple of years have seen a near consensus amongst Tories and Labour on the rhetoric of local government. Localism and double devolution, community empowerment and negotiated priorities have dominated the discourse.

Rhetoric and reality remain largely disconnected. Labour's local government reforms have tended in the right direction, but, as Simon Jenkins pointed out in yesterday's Guardian, without devolution of financial responsibility (i.e. revenue raising powers) localism remains merely an aspiration.

For all their rhetoric, the same charge can be levelled at the Tories. Their recent Policy Green Paper, Control Shift. Returning Power to Local Communities, is a major disappointment. Its proposals are remarkably similar to the government's, and in many instances merely semantic differences. What is the tangible difference between the current duty to promote economic, environmental and social wellbeing, and the paper's proposed "power of competence"?

If the Tories really want to put clear blue water between them and Labour, they should have sought ways to devolve financial powers to local authorities. On this, the paper was silent.

Instead, the paper is a agglomeration of small scale initiatives and partisan appeals to those worried about development in their back yard (who simultaneously bemoan the lack of affordable housing) and those encouraged to fury by the Taxpayers Alliance over public sector pay. It's more partisan than might have been expected.

Tuesday saw the proposals defended by Caroline Spelman on the Today programme. She took the partisan defence of the Tory position to another level. She defended a Tory commitment to localism with the bizarre statement that as more councils were now Tory, then power could be devolved to them. In short, only Tory councils deserved more power. As well as being a strange basis for localism, this view is also profoundly undemocratic. That she made it openly begs into question her intelligence and competence (as did her assertion that Labour councils could not be trusted because of the council tax rises they posted in the 1970s - the council tax didn't exist in the 1970s).

The Tories may have begun with a meaningful commitment to localism, but it's been lost in an appeal to their core vote in the shires, a stance on devolution that flies in the face of democratic principles, and a staggering level of incompetence and ignorance on the part of the shadow secretary of state.

Control Shift is more than a missed opportunity. It's a damning indictment of Tory thinking on local government. This is perhaps one area where I genuinely thought the Conservatives might have something to offer. Sadly, it's better the devil you know.

Crunch time for culture

The Audit Commission have found that local authority directors of finance will wield the axe at their culture and leisure services before anything else.

I'm not surprised, but given the likely severity of this recession, and the already huge hole in the public finances which will need to be filled, the gains of the investment of the last ten years are at real risk.

Local providers need to be creative in providing access to culture in tougher times, and central government should bite the bullet and prioritise local services over national institutions. If we want our society to remain healthy while our economy recovers, then we have to invest in the those things that give meaning to life and bring people together.

Ray Lewis and Mayoral Advisers

Boris, like Ken before him, is getting some serious flak because of allegations about one of his advisers.

The mayor is allowed to appoint a number of individuals to posts such as these. They are in a nether world between paid public servant and political appointee.

They attract a partisan press attention so that they cannot fulfil the role of paid public servants, and yet they do not have any accountability other than to the mayor who appointed them, which raises serious concerns about their political responsibilities.

The Greater London Authority Acts should be amended. The mayor should be able to appoint a cabinet, but he should do so from the members of the London Assembly.

If the Mayor wants particular people to particular jobs, he should be able to appoint them, but political and democratic responsibility should reside with the elected mayor and a cabinet drawn from the members of the Greater London Assembly. Operational responsibility should reside with officials.

The same system as set out in in the 2000 Local Government Act. Use this, not the failed mayoral cabinet experiment.

A London of villages

The past week has been spent in the New Forest. I have tramped miles of forest and heathland paths (with T in a rather impressive new backpack), cycled to the coast and wandered around small towns and villages.

Once you got outside of the real tourist traps, I was taken aback by how polite people were. Civility has become quite important to me in recent months. I am getting sick of seeing people spit in the street, toss litter in the park, or leave their pit bull lying across a shop doorway. It's the one thing that makes me regret where I live. A nod and a 'good morning' from a passerby, then, was a stark contrast to some of the interactions I have with those who share my particular patch of SE4.

Civility - treating people with respect and decency - seems to me to be an ultimate foundation of a good neighbourhood. It's a quality somewhat underplayed by many of the writers on what makes for a successful city.

Perhaps, then we need to conceive of the successful city not in terms of its totality, but more as a collection of smaller communities - akin to the small towns, villages and neighbourhoods of the non-urban and suburban bits of the UK. We are continually told that disappearing pubs, schools and post offices are ripping the heart out of such communities, and I wouldn't want to romanticise, but noticeboards on village halls and the banter in pubs where I stopped for a pint told of places where people had ample opportunity to interact with each other, and to do it at a level which is meaningful to them and their lives.

Such thoughts recurred to me as I wandered around yesterday's Blythe Hill Fields Festival. People came together in their area to do something with each other, and the effect, from what I could see, was fantastic. People were happy in each others company and were having fun. We need more opportunities to do this, and while festivals have their place, it needs to be embedded in the core of what local places have and what they are about.

When I say we need to look at making successful places to live in terms of thinking of cities as a conglomeration of villages, I'm not saying that we need to import some bucolic vision of a pastoral idyll. We don't want to make places that crush diversity or are small 'c' conservative, restricting people to their allotted role and preventing them reaching their full potential. What I mean is creating a space where people live that they know is theirs, and where they have opportunity to interact positively with those around them, and where everyone is aware of their shared interests and works together to secure them.

What attracts me to this idea is that it creates and supports communities of interest by place, and thus is supportive of diversity. Your neighbours are the people around you, no matter who they are. It is a way of breaking down barriers of race and class.

So, how to do this? Firstly, you need to make sure that people have the spaces to interact. You need to invest in high quality parks, libraries and public places - and not to see them as an add on. You need to take a robust line on school admissions so that schooling becomes social as well as educative.

Then you need to make sure that people have the motivation to interact, so it has to be in their interest to do so. The only way to achieve this is to make local communities themselves responsible for their quality of life. So, devolve as much power as possible to the lowest possible level and support people to be involved in using this power.

Finally, you need people to respect each other. Civility is vital. No man is an island, and if our interactions with our neighbours are blunt, negative and coarse, then so are our lives. If you you create spaces for people to come together and you make sure it is in their interests to work together than you promote better relations between people. If we treat each other decently then we have the essential building blocks for us to work together, and then we can make the successful villages that can make a successful city.

Civility, though, is the one thing that government cannot legislate for. So the onus is on us to treat each other better.

When people vote BNP, they tend to mean it

An excellent article by Lynsey Hanley in the Guardian last week. She makes several points very well indeed.

Firstly, that BNP voters are not passive sheep with nowhere else to go, they have made a choice.

Voting for the BNP is a deliberate decision: you are not "driven" to it any more than a car drives itself. It is a decision to allow self-pity to influence your vote and to disguise it as righteous anger.

That it is dangerous to assume that BNP voters are a monolithic block, and not a significant one in national terms.

Contrary to the claim made in another newspaper that votes for the BNP are "a cry of white working-class anguish" (thereby letting middle-class BNP voters off the hook), the vast majority of voters refuse to vote for a fascist party because they know what it means to do so.

Ouch. She also gives a useful illustration.

The estate on which I grew up, just outside Birmingham, has had a BNP councillor since 2006. The estate which adjoins it, of near-identical social and economic makeup, has just elected a Green councillor. Interestingly,there has been little hand-wringing over residents of the latter estate being "driven" into the arms of environmentalists, rather than fascists. What motivated "the white working class" there? Are they, as one, "victims" of climate change just as voters in the next ward are "victims" of an unthinking liberal elite?

A turn away from established political parties is almost always a local phenomenon, and has to be understood in terms of the political choices and the people making those choices in a locality. I am not for a moment lumping together the Green Party and the BNP, but I am saying that their vote is often localised and related to local issues.What is needed is for more of the academic research in this area to penetrate public debate (like the 2006 JRF report). But even when it does the accepted metropolitan elite discourse means that such research is used to shore up the metropolitan elite view of a passive white working class rejected by Labour falling into the arms of a grateful and lucky BNP.

Hence the headlines surrounding the JRF research were of "25%" who "might" vote BNP, not an exploration of the more knotty issues, such as why UKIP's decline - a party obsessed with the EU - seemed related to the rise of the BNP - a party obsessed with immigration. Related issues, but still different.

I'd be interested to know whether the rise, such as it is, of the BNP, can be explained in the same way as the turn from mainstream to other "fringe" parties, like the Greens. Or whether it is part of a trend which has seen the Liberal Democrats make massive inroads in previously rock solid Labour cities such as Newcastle, Bristol and Liverpool.

When people are in a polling booth, they make a choice, and they have reasons for doing so. Claiming they do it out of some unconscious urge gets us no nearer understanding what is happening in our villages, towns and cities.

Politics, particularly local politics, is in such a state of flux that we have to look at it from many angles to really get a handle on what is going on. I’m not pretending I’ve got the answers, but I think Lynsey Hanley's done a good job in busting one of the lazier myths.

Nazis

Something bizarre came through my front door. A free newspaper, sponsored by The Mirror, imploring me not to vote for the BNP in the upcoming London elections. Its back page announced that the BNP would remove black footballers from the Premiership, and its centre spread presented recipes from Aynsley Harriot and Jamie Oliver, the cooking of which apparently will combat facism.

My biggest concern is that we give the BNP an inflated sense of their actual worth. The freebie sheet announced that if 5% of London's voters gave their vote to them, then the BNP would claim an assembly seat.

Of course this would be no good thing, but the occasional nutter, loon or even Nazi is the price you pay for proportional representation.

More to the point, when elected, BNP councillors have either failed to perform even the smallest part of their duties as elected representatives, or time after time condemn themselves out of their own mouths as, given a platform, they cannot resist making ludicrous statements.

Yes, we need to fight the BNP, but let's not risk encouraging them by making this bunch of two bit lunatic Nazis seem in any way credible.

Boris

The man is an idiot.

Londoners for Peace

Getting off the train at Ladywell this evening, I was confronted by Londoners for Peace campaigning for Ken Livingstone.

I took a leaflet which tells me that Ken is opposed to the invasion of Iraq and Trident's replacement, while Boris is in favour of both.

Great - interesting background, I'll agree, but I vote for a mayor to sort out London's problems, and I vote for a government to sort out our foreign policy.

This is a local election, and I don't like people bringing in spurious and irrelevant issues and telling me that I should vote on that basis.

The Council

I am increasingly impressed by our local councillors. This comes as surprise to me as I didn't vote for them, mainly because as a student I spent too much time with members of that Party, and their sanctimony, self-righteousness and frankly middle class arrogance knew no bounds. I am very glad to have had this prejudice gently removed from my shoulders!

They are doing exactly what they should be doing. They act as community leaders, bringing people together to talk about the issues that matter on this patch. They represent opinion in the neighbourhood so that it is taken into account by the local decision makers. They challenge the local executive over their decisions.

In short, they are doing precisely what government policy towards local decision making is supposed to be about. The 2000 Local Government Act split the Executive and Scrutiny arrangements in local government to improve the visibiliy of decision making, to hold it to account and to improve local leadership.

I think my local councillors are holding to their side of the bargain very well indeed. The point is, though, that this is a bargain, and the other side of it is visible and accountable local leadership. I was a late convert to the cause of elected local mayors, but I now think they make a real difference. There's a lot that needs to happen to make executives function better, but by any assessment the current system with divergence between those making the decisions and those holding them to account on behalf of the neighbourhoods they represent is far, far better than the old committee system, and its illegitimate child, the leader and cabinet model.

In France mayors are an accepted part of the political landscape. I hope that becomes the case here too.