Denham: Centraliser or soothsayer?
Over on the LGIU blog, Jonathan Carr-West is not impressed with John Denham’s conditions for the devolution of powers to local government:
“So we find ourselves re-rehearsing the chicken and egg of earned autonomy. Councils need more powers to deliver better services and increased public confidence, but to get more powers they need to deliver better services and increased public confidence.”
He goes on:
Let’s have a public confidence test by all means, but let’s not make it absolute: do you have confidence in local government? Let’s make it relative: who do you have more trust in, local or central government?
Wonder what the result would be…?
I’m not sure I understand Jon’s argument here – and particularly the way it morphs from one about quality of service and public confidence into a slightly opportunistic political one about trust.
On the day that a good local council (or well-communicated opposition programme) dramatically defies the national ‘swing’ in a local election – when it becomes plain that the local councillors are there because of their policies and their personal profiles – then Jon’s point will make some sense.
Political centralisation has causes. They are manifold and stubborn. At the PICamp strand of Reboot Britain, FutureGov’s Dominic Campbell is doing a session entitled ‘How to learn to stop worring and love local government.” At other sessions at that event, we’ll be looking at the thorny political issues that bulwark centralisation (details to follow).
But one thing is plain: We need some game changing set of events to solve this problem. The alleged centralising tendencies of individual politicians aren’t going make a blind bit of difference.
A blog about representative democracy, social media and a conversational politics. How will peer-to-peer communications change local democracy? How is representation changing? 
OK so I’ll start with a confession: I didn’t mean to introduce trust into the discussion.
I had meant to write
Let’s have a public confidence test by all means, but let’s not make it absolute: do you have confidence in local government? Let’s make it relative: who do you have more confidence in, local or central government
But while the replacement of confidence with trust may be an interesting Freudian slip on my part I’m not sure it changes the terms of the argument which is basically that it only makes sense to say that devolving powers to local government is dependent on public confidence if the public has more confidence in the body that currently exercises that power i.e. central government, and I’m not sure that it does.
In other words, given that these powers must reside somewhere any confidence test should be relative who does the public have most confidence in.
If you recouched all that in terms of trust it would be more politically loaded but would still apply I think.
I agree with you of course, that centralism is deep rooted and has many causes and that Denham’s personal attitudes are unlikely to make much difference one way or another but I thought the comments were interesting in as far as they seemed to reflect a cultural attitude that central government is the natural seat of power from which it devolves (to local government, to communities? To people?) only when we have earned our little share of that power.
I thought that was a little depressing