CommonSpace columnist and Common Weal director Robin McAlpine says a centralised system steamrolling over local empowerment is destined to collapse
I’M NOT long back from a very pleasant week-long break in the West Highlands and Argyll. Along with the joy of jaw-dropping beauty which seems to be around every corner, it just reminded me again that the form of politics we have just now is not very good at ‘place’.
I was reminded of it again at the weekend with a story about SNP councillors expressing disquiet at proposed reforms of local government from the Scottish Government.
This is a story as old as civilisation – political power is like a magnet that almost unavoidably tries to draw more power towards itself. The machine runs on power and is seldom sated.
We’ve reached a point where the machine needs to be less avaricious and a damned site more forward thinking if it is to prosper. Everywhere we look, this problem of centralisation is creating conflict.
The thing is, I think we’ve reached a point where the machine needs to be less avaricious and a damned site more forward thinking if it is to prosper. Everywhere we look, this problem of centralisation is creating conflict.
There is a very good case that Brexit is in large part a response to the way that instincts in Brussels are always ‘to make consistent’ – which usually means them making more decisions about us but without us.
There’s an equally good argument that Brexit is in large part a response to precisely the same instincts in the UK – centres of power were much more likely to be happy with the status quo than were communities further from power.
In fact, the more perceptive commentators have been making this argument for a long time now – Simon Jenkins in the Guardian being particularly persuasive.
Unionists who think it is only ‘grievance nationalists’ who think centralisation is a problem are being utterly myopic – it isn’t nats producing GDP figures for British regions which show that virtually nowhere outside the south-east has achieved average UK growth in recent memory.
By a number of measures of local democracy, it’s hard to find anyone who is quite as bad as us at it – and by quite a margin.
But that does not mean Scotland is particularly good at localism. In fact, by a number of measures of local democracy, it’s hard to find anyone who is quite as bad as us at it – and by quite a margin.
So it is at least a sign of some progress that the Scottish Government is going to introduce a ‘local democracy’ bill later this year, which is to be very much welcomed.
But the disquiet among SNP councillors is instructive – the briefing so far has been that the bill will take powers away from Scotland’s inappropriately large local authorities and give them directly to ‘communities’.
That sounds like a good step forward. And it would be, if it wasn’t for the definition of ‘community’, because all the talk is of these powers being given to social enterprises, community groups and possibly some community councils.
Unfortunately, this sounds rather like we’ve finally made some progress on the ‘local’ bit – only to have given up on the ‘democracy’ bit, because the only body it seems which might get any power which has any democratic accountability is the community councils – and even their strongest proponent would accept that they are in a perilous position.
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There is just too much of a parallel between this idea of powers being taken away from the democratic state and given to, at best, only partially accountable local bodies, which is just too close to David Cameron’s ‘big society’ idea.
If people don’t like how a ‘local body’ uses new power and resources, how can they fire them? The public environment in Scotland is already littered with ‘non-profits’ which are little more than commercial consultancies – ATOS with a smiley face. What stops them moving into the ‘localism’ business?
And what becomes of the flawed but at least accountable local authorities we have if they keep losing power upwards and downwards but get no new powers to compensate?
The only surprise I feel at the discontent of SNP councillors is that it has taken so long to surface. There is not a single person dedicated by the SNP to supporting the work of councillors – if you talk to anyone in SNP local government the sense of being unloved and undervalued is common.
What is so worrying about this is that if this Local Democracy Bill was really ambitious and took on the task of real, structural reform, it would do little more than bring Scotland in line with the rest of the developed world.
On council tax, education policy, budgets and much more, there seems to have been a low-level war between local and national government for years now (it predated the SNP, which was initially praised for ending ring-fencing but which then seemed to renew hostilities).
What, for me, is so worrying about this is that if this Local Democracy Bill was really ambitious and took on the task of real, structural reform (which it’s not going to), it would do little more than bring Scotland in line with the rest of the developed world.
But I don’t think catch-up is anything like enough. On my holiday up north I did a talk in Ullapool (it was a holiday, not a holiday holiday…). I was asked about localism. I asked a packed meeting how they felt they were run by Edinburgh. There were wall-to-wall groans.
I asked them how they felt about the inordinately big and distant Highlands Council. The groans turned to indignant sarcasm. This is a community with very strong self-reliance; it has had to be, because if it wants to influence how it is governed, someone has to get in a car and drive for an hour and a half (to Inverness) or four hours (to Edinburgh).
When they get to Edinburgh there will be lots of executive types going on about how they do business with Singapore in the morning, Frankfurt at lunchtime and New York in the afternoon.
From Ullapool (or Dumfries or Motherwell), it looks quite a lot like well paid professionals patting each other on the back for failure – schools fall down, banks collapse, IT systems fail to work, poverty and inequality change little.
Globalisation, eh? But what about Ullapool?
Of course, you don’t need to be geographically distant to feel distant from power – in rural areas, in former industrial towns, in peripheral housing estates suffering from decline, the list of places which feel like they are governed from somewhere else is probably substantially greater than those that don’t.
I’ve spoken to people with power in institutional Edinburgh and often they can’t understand what the provinces are moaning about. After all, hasn’t a professional class over recent decades perfected the art of technocratic governance? And they have the indicators to prove it.
From Ullapool (or Dumfries or Motherwell), it looks quite a lot like well paid professionals patting each other on the back for failure – schools fall down, banks collapse, IT systems fail to work, poverty and inequality change little.
Power always thinks it is merited, that it is justified, that it is self-evidently in the right place – and it seldom asks difficult questions of itself. Worse, it tries to prevent others asking difficult questions of it – from the failure to have proper inquiries into the banking crisis or the PFI scandal to a questionable attitude to Freedom of Information legislation.
The more time people spend in the corridors of power in Edinburgh (or anywhere else there are corridors of power), the more the values of that power become absorbed.
The more time people spend in the corridors of power in Edinburgh (or anywhere else there are corridors of power), the more the values of that power become absorbed.
Later on in our wee break I was having a coffee in the glorious sun in Tobermory. I wondered to myself, where would a politician who wanted to really make a difference on Mull best spend their time? The more I thought about it, the less I could persuade myself it was in Holyrood.
It’s an awful long journey to sit in debates the rest of us are watching on TV, just so they can press a button at the end. Of course, it is important for people to meet up sometimes and there are times when there is no substitute for looking a civil servant in the eye.
But why could MSPs not join parliament remotely, from their own constituencies? With half decent broadband (another failure of central belt planning…) and some ingenuity, the need to make the pilgrimage to Edinburgh could be greatly reduced, with the parliament meeting in person perhaps just one or two weeks a month.
Something is going to break this logjam. It just isn’t conceivable that Scotland continues to be perhaps the most unrepresentative local democracy in the developed world. It could be a major reform of local democracy, it could be a decentralisation of parliament – or it could be some kind of revolt by disillusioned ‘villagers’ tired of doffing the cap.
But why could MSPs not join parliament remotely, from their own constituencies? With half decent broadband and some ingenuity, the need to make the pilgrimage to Edinburgh could be greatly reduced.
From what I understand, the Local Democracy Bill now is exactly what it was going to be before the election, but with added adjectives. Radical? To fail hopelessly to make substantial progress in catching up with the norms of modern democracy?
Still though, an Edinburgh-based journalist will probably quote an Edinburgh-based consultant working for an Edinburgh-based accountants which has contracts with Edinburgh-based civil servants to show that everything is as good as it possibly could be and that local people are simply wrong.
And so the machine will chug on – until it breaks. And then the journalist and the consultant and the civil servant will be running around trying to work out why it broke.
But like I tell my four-year-old son, if you cling on to something too hard, it will eventually break. If you care, let go a bit.
Picture courtesy of Documenting Yes
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