It’s a good question that tells us a lot about some of the bigger issues in local government.

The London Borough of Havering are doing it, and the argument for this is that it will cut printing costs. The good people at one of my favourite blogs We Love Local Government have done some sums:

“…over that four month period, on average, the Council spent £398.48 per month to provide 17 printed copies of the Cabinet Agenda to the Councillors. This, I think, means that in a year the Council could be spending £4383.28 on Cabinet agendas”

So. For the sake of argument, with no bulk discounts, 17 iPads at £400 a pop (the lowest priced option with only WiFi & no 3G – lets assume that there’s one or two WiFi signals available in the Council chamber!) comes to £6,800. The £500 option (with 3G)? No problem – that’s £8500 for 17.

So assuming they don’t all lose or break them, and assuming they can all actually get them to work in the first place, we’re looking at an idea that will be in the black after six months or so.

This also assumes no productivity savings and no efficiency gains. It assumes that there is going to be no positive cultural shift and that using a new medium will add nothing to the capacity of councillors to use a new medium in new ways – to improve their representative skills. I’ve spent long periods of time working with Councillors on their use of online communications tools and the two biggest obstacles we kept hitting were this utilitarian approach to kit and training, and (or course) the outdated rules on use of communications tools for political purposes.

For me, it’s a slam-dunk. Place the order now! However, WLLG still aren’t totally comfortable with the idea and have four observations at the end of the post:

• These tools should never become a perk of being a Councillor. So to ensure they are tools, a business case for why Councillors need them should be put forward that shows how they can be used as tools to further the Councillor’s work.
• Use some procurement sense. As with a contract, work out your options and find the model that offers value for money for the Council.  So would another tablet Computer be able to do the required job, instead of the fancy and fashionable I-pad?
• If the Councillor breaks it, through misuse by them, then they cover the costs. At the end of the day its the Council’s property not theirs.
• This one is not a rule, more a suggestion/question. I’m not sure it would work but could the Council do a similar thing with I-pads that the Cycle to work scheme does? So the Council buys the I-pad and slowly the Councillor buys off the Council, if they want it.  Though I suppose it wouldn’t be tax-free like the cycle scheme.

I’d suggest that this represents a triumph of a grumpy anti-politics that ultimately diminishes the legitimacy of local government itself. It’s a populist starting point that negates so many other important considerations. It’s almost as though we can’t clear our throats without acknowledging the Tax Payers Alliance agenda.

I’m not blaming the good bloggers at WLLG here – it is, after all, endemic. It’s largely unchallenged by any of the main political parties that all claim ownership of the term ‘localism’.

There’s a two way compact between us voters and Councillors (as with all elected representatives): They strive for the highest standards in terms of civic representation (the stuff this blog bores on about all the time) and, in return, we give them a high social status and reasonable compensation to cover the opportunity cost of being a Councillor.

I don’t think either side of this compact is being met – I’d be interested to see how many councillors would be able to write a half-decent A-Level essay on what good representation entails – but I do think it’s time to put a bit of dignity back into local government. Someone has to make the first move.

Where I live, the council is no longer based in a granite monument to municipal values (the Town Hall), it’s on some campus in a part of the borough that’s awkward to get to without a car. I’m sure there’s an excellent business case for this, but there’s no way you can build a case for political decentralisation on the back of an institution that has a purely utilitarian approach to it’s democratic and administrative functions.

Decentralisation doesn’t happen because of some localism agenda that is dreamed up in the the think-tanks of That London. It happens because the core tensions that diminish the legitimacy of local democracy are being addressed. I see no sign of this happening any time soon.

I’ve been catching up on the podcasts from Radio 4’s ‘From Our Own Correspondent’ – always a pleasure – and I noticed that the last two programmes both had a life’s like this reportage piece from France talking about apartment living and the sort-of communal spirit that it engenders and one on the more whimsical healthcare treatments (and related anecdotes about the powerful local health lobbies) that the French state will fund.

I don’t particularly want to get into an argument about the relative merits of the la différence other than to pick up on an observation from one of the correspondents saying that the French have more of a sense of sacrificing individual liberties for agreed solutions.

So, with this juxtaposition between liberty and democracy in mind yesterday, via Peter Levine, I stumbled on the Campaign for a Stronger Democracy in the US. It looks as though it’s just got started and it doesn’t appear to have too much invested in it at the moment; but the idea is an intriguing one.

My first thought was ‘do we need one of these here’? I know we have Charter 88 but I always regarded that as a series of demands for particular outcomes instead of being something that simply stands by the principles of democracy.

I asked this on Twitter and got a couple of reactons. The first one was that it looked like a surrogate campaign for the US brand of left-liberalism. The focus has a clear appeal more to the US left than the right and one suspects that the demands for ‘democracy’ are for a version that wouldn’t have cross-partisan appeal in the US.

The second problem my interlocutors suggested was that there aren’t the kind of agreed definitions of democracy in the UK that could make for an effective campaign without being hi-jacked by the more debased forms advocated by the likes of Douglas Carswell.

For myself, I’m not sure that it would be too difficult to come up with an aspirational description of democracy without unduly inflaming any quarter of the UK political mainstream. I’d also argue that a well-managed pro-democracy pressure group could make its arguments effectively, asserting the kind of political independence that’s needed to survive changing political weather.

After all, we have a thriving pressure group called Liberty that has a complex relationship with the left and right in the UK. Given the tension between Liberty and Democracy, surely one side is massively over-represented in public debate?

However, Liberty is a good model for a ‘Democracy’ campaign. It’s a large enough, well-established enough grouping to have identified a particular definition of liberty that works politically.

There’s a lengthy essay to be written about which political tribe benefits most from Liberty’s work. To the irritation of lefties like me, it focuses upon the coercion that emanates from the state perhaps more than that which comes from the private sector. On the other hand, it’s a powerful human rights watchdog that challenges those who coerce people who don’t have the power to defend themselves. And it doesn’t appear too keen to run with Freedom Association-type definitions of liberty either.

Does a particular take on democracy have to be a means of either taking sides on the French approach to liberty/democracy? Does in need to conflate the two issues, picking easy left-liberal arguments without necessarily grasping the nettle of what a good democracy is? In both cases, I think it can avoid these pitfalls.

Here are some statements (in no particular order) that I think everybody (possibly including Douglas Carswell) could agree on. I doubt if anyone within the political mainstream would disagree with any of them. I may have missed something obvious – what do you think?

1)      Wider participation in policy formation is a good thing – it increases the public stake in collective decision-making

2)      A more diverse polity reflecting a greater panorama of perspectives can only improve democracy

3)      Decision making should not be dominated by people who have more time or wealth than others

4)      Elected representatives should improve the way they promote the public welfare without regard to their own

5)      Elected representatives should have a level of income and status that enables them to promote public welfare most effectively

6)      People with a vested interest in particular outcomes should never have the capacity to crowd out people with mild preferences

7)      For deliberation to work, doubt and equivocation must be encouraged – and not crowded out by ‘conviction’

8)      A  democracy will not work if minorities aren’t protected from oppression and discrimination

9)      Even if many people agree with an argument, deliberation shouldn’t be sidestepped. Opinion without evidence is almost worthless

10)   Interest groups are good at achieving their aims at the expense of everybody else. These powers must be counterbalanced

11)   Media owners should have no more influence on policymaking than anyone else. Their abuse of this power should be challenged

12)   People paid by the state are capable of serving themselves at the expense of the public interest. A good  democracy must minimise this

13)   Political parties can sometimes compromise deliberative policymaking. They need to be discouraged from this

14)   The quality of parliamentary deliberation in all levels of government could be a lot better – we must insist that it improves

15)   It should be harder for the executive to ignore or circumvent Parliament

16)   Until the local governance enjoys legitimacy comparable to that of central government, ‘decentralisation’ is not achievable

What do you think? Does this have any potential as a draft charter for a UK ‘Democracy’ campaign?

Update – 10.34am: Gah! One of these points got lost in the edit. Here it is now:

17) Broad participation requires investment. Those asking questions have a duty to make it very easy and attractive to answer

Professor George Jones panning the government’s new localism agenda:

“This move to pass governmental decision-making to a level below local government is ill-thought-out. We do not know what is meant by community associations, how representative they will be, their boundaries, nor their audit, probity and accountability arrangements.  Rather than setting up such amorphous entities, the Government should empower local authorities, to promote and support public involvement in their localities. After all local authorities already exist with their own ready-made governance structures, their own democratic mandate, and with 20,000 community activists called councillors in place.”

This is a guest post by Hugh Flouch of Harringay Online

People love living in Harringay, but there are a few quality of life issues that won’t get the attention they need unless citizens and elected representatives enter into a democratic compact to fix them. It doesn’t take a genius to work out that this is the time to be having the conversations which can build towards that covenant. Local websites provide a great forum for them.

So, starting in February, at Harringay Online we’ve been building up our stock of information on the local elections, from how they work to what we can find out about the candidates. I don’t want the elections to completely dominate the site, since by no means everyone is interested, but I do want to offer people, perhaps for the first time ever, an opportunity to find out who the local candidates are and what they might do if elected.

I’ve pretty much always voted in the local elections, out of a sense of civic duty as much as anything else. I imagine that’s not unusual. By covering the local elections, I hope we’re filling in some gaps for people like me and perhaps encouraging those who’ve not bothered to vote in the past to get involved, if for just one day out of every 1,460.

There are three wards which fall partly or entirely within our neighbourhood. That’s 29 candidates. To start with we’re trying to build up online portfolios on each of them. So far we have basic information on most of them, including bios. We’re also digging around, and lifting the curtain, seeing what else we can find out, mainly through a Google-based search.

We’re adding short video interviews with as many candidates as we can as well as the leaders of the main party groupings. Quite a novelty to see video of your local candidates in your living room, if you think about it.

Finally, we’ve taken a leaf out of the Democracy Club‘s book and we’re uploading copies of all local election leaflets

We’re still hoping to organise a hustings, but a number of logistical problems mean that we’re cutting it fine. Our plan is to use a “real-world” venue and also use Cover-it-Live to take the event into people’s homes.

As well as giving local people a better sense of who’s who and what they think, we hope that this indelible record will go some way towards holding our elected officials to account in the years to come.

The initial reaction of the candidates was mixed as was their willingness to be involved. Some were enthusiastic; others were extremely cautious. They’re coming round. Trust seems to be building as they recognise that we’re trying to be scrupulously fair.

In my naivety, I assumed that the politicians would be our biggest challenge. As things are turning out it may well be that the biggest issues will be thrown up the heartfelt passions of some HoL contributors. Curating discussions fuelled by those passions whilst successfully riding out accusations of being in the politicians’ pockets is proving to be a wild ride at times.

However, as long as members continue to add posts like this, I’ll keep doing what I’m doing:

I think this kind of scrutiny is superb I wasn’t going to vote in the Euro elections but did so because of Harringay Online putting the link to working out how individuals views tally with which party. Perhaps I’m rather superficial but that little exercise fired me up not only did I vote but told friends and neighbours who aren’t a part of HOL and they all did the online quiz thing. This created great discussion and at least four other people who weren’t going to vote did so. So, the citizen power of HOL stretches beyond just its members!!

Many of us can’t be bothered with politics and HOL has made me think about voting and invite the neighbours in – the elderly, those for whom English is a second language – for a cup of tea or a sherry and a pakora to discuss the message on the video.

I’ve tried to boil down the killer argument in the whole ‘blogger v journalist’ debate, and it runs something like this:

Take the best article you’ve read in a newspaper recently. The one that was well-written and argued and the one that met a particular need that you have personally. You can be almost certain that a better article was written somewhere on the blogosphere. The only problem is finding it. As social bookmarking and ‘collaborative filtering’ improves, you will increasingly be able to access a personalised stream of these articles that will partly negate your need for a newspaper.

To illustrate the point, here’s a great post by James Cridland on how you can weave your own personalised radio station together. That’s the sort of innovation I’ve been awaiting for years (more in ‘innovation’ below). And then, to add a bit of flavour to the argument, here’s something on how journalists can build their own reader-communities. And while we’re on the question of the media, here’s some breaking news; Murdoch’s paywall idea isn’t suicidal after all. Murdoch isn’t stupid and isn’t afraid to think differently and take on big beasts. Who knew?

So. Great blogging: take the last couple of days as an example. I’m interested in how far politics is about the clash of social forces rather than the public discourse around the ishoos. Here, Peter Hetherington (admittedly, writing for the evil MSM) has a post on how local v central is a cross-cutting issue. Ingrid has a very perceptive question: Hang on, isn’t there a local election happening at the moment as well? And wasn’t teh Hinterwebs supposed to create a space that allowed the local to re-emerge? My only quibble with Ingrid is buried in the notion of the availability bias.Surely well-targeted local coverage is only seen by local people? It reminds me of the popular misconception among politicians about Facebook. It looks like a mirror – after all, you only see your friends – people who wish you well. So for Labour politicians, it looks like The Guardian and for Tories, it looks like The Telegraph. But, it’s actually a two-way mirror with all of those vindictive Express and Mail readers behind it – rubbing shoulders with … well, the list that Fremania has draw up (see below).

Hugh Flouch of the verygood Harringay Online will be partially addressing this question on these very pages shortly.

The other day, Chris Dillow highlighed David ‘Two-Brains’ Willetts really fascinating-looking book on an inter-generational conflict of interests. Chris’s concluding question ….

“Isn’t there an unavoidable tension between intergenerational justice and democratic politics?”

… is, I suspect the mask for a much much bigger question. Insert ‘long termism on climate change’, ‘global social justice’ or any one of a dozen other issues to see what I mean.

Oh – and in my highly-cultivated collaboratively-filtered stream of bloggery and journalism, I’ve noticed that there is an inverse relationship between the focus on Climate Change and the nearness of the election. What does that tell us (apart from something about the failings of my own filters)?

What else? Oh yes: The Power 2010 campaign. I have no words the express my irritation at the quality of demagogic simplification that underpins this whole campaign. Think Martin Bell in his white suit tied to Esther Rantzen and times it by ten. Thankfully Sadie – a returning exile from the blogosphere – has dug into the whole question. Warning: There’s wit as well as wisdom in that one.

Not content with a brief return, Sadie is also on Left Foot Forward here writing the post that this blog should have carried about the objectively anti-democratic nature of the superficial Tory appeal to invite us all into government. Freemania goes one step further and lists the specific individuals within Cameron’s proposed new government that he specifically objects to. Again, funny and perceptive stuff. It includes…

My boss

My boss’s boss

Kerry Katona

Piers Morgan

Cab drivers

Estate agents

Bankers

Disgraced former MPs

Nick Griffin

My weird neighbour

That kid I hated at school

Those bastards who still haven’t been convicted of Stephen Lawrence’s murder

People who find the ITV early evening news too complicated to follow

People who apply for all those incomprehensibly-titled public sector jobs in the Guardian but get turned down because they’re too petty-minded

The tenor in the Gocompare ads

… and many more.

What else? Oh yes – there’s a couple of good points about the impact that social media is having on public debate – one from 21cfix and one from Hopi (again) – that last link is on the diminishing power of journalists.

Changing the subject, here’s a great report my Martin of Currybet on what people really want from the word ‘innovation’:

“People don’t actually want innovation ….. everyone thinks they want a hover board, but actually they want the same thing they had before but actually works.”

Read it all though.

Back to the MSM (just to prove that I have lingering doubts about my own arguments here) Jenni Russell has an excellent article on Ed Balls’ disgraceful treatment of Sharon Shoesmith in Haringey. This raises a massive question for me: If Balls had refused to respond to the tabloid witchhunt, would Shoesmith still be in her job? Would Balls? What are the implications for the whole ‘politics should be about ishoos and not personalities’ question?

And there’s loads more that I’ve not included, but that I have read and enjoyed. I’ve spent the last couple of days traveling without the need to buy a newspaper. You can see what I read and shared on my phone on these two feeds.

Confused? You will be! Stay tuned to the next exciting episode from the bloggers. Better than the newspapers since people started using Google Reader properly….

Here’s a reminder of how it works if you’ve not tried it:

Sustainable development, and party politics in the UK, are both fond advocates of localism and decentralism. In the case of the UK Conservatives, party leader David Cameron promises no less than the most “radical decentralisation” seen in a century if his party is elected.

There is something of an environmental zeitgeist in this language too. One of the most visible meta-signals in the aftermath of the 2009 Copenhagen Climate Summit was disaffection with national and international level government solutions on the part of environmentalist civil society groups, and a corresponding emphasis on the importance of local activism and bottom-up solutions to the challenges of climate change.

Community-based activism on issues such as energy and food seems never to have been so vibrant as it now is in the UK. The phenomenal rise of the Transition Town movement and local ‘climate action networks’ around the country are just two examples.

I’ve been meaning to write this post since the launch of the Hansard Society’s 2010 Audit of Political Engagement on 3rd March, because that shows a worrying counter-current. Consider the following extracts: (on pages 24-25 of the printed version of the Audit)

..there appears to have been a significant change in the public’s knowledge of local government over the past seven years. In the first Audit study [2004], 38% of the public claimed to have ‘a great deal’ or ‘a fair amount’ of knowledge about their local council. This figure had climbed to 47% in the fourth Audit report. But this year that figure has dropped back to just 40% claiming the same….

…it is perhaps not surprising that declining levels of perceived knowledge about local government are matched by equally declining levels of interest in local issues in recent years. Whereas those reporting to be ‘very interested’ in national issues has declined moderately  from 25% in the first Audit to 22% this year, in comparison 32% of the public claimed to be ‘very interested’ in local issues in Audit 1 but only 19% claim the same in this year’s report…

Signs of a general loss of interest in local issues linked to declining knowledge of local government should be extremely worrying: not only for David Cameron and his team, but also for anyone concerned with sustainable development.

[NB: this post also appears on http://www.fdsd.org/category/blog/]

I’ve started drafting three articles in the last 24 hours for this blog only to find a better one on the same subject written by someone else.

Crowdsourced data visualisations are more useful for the public sector

Firstly, it’s a regular theme here that data visualisations are a huge opportunity for us all because they allow us to break the monopoly that civil servants, sloppy journalists and political parties have in describing the problems that elected representatives are expected to solve.

The rubbish-in-rubbish-out problem. They are, therefore an opportunity to involve more of us in a constructive way in policy making.

According to Public Technology, this is a bigger opportunity than I realised because public sector managers use data visualisations more than the private sector do.

Secondly, Alison Benjamin has a good roundup of the problems that a reliance upon social entrepreneurs and active citizens can bring in the provision of local services.

“…if you live in a neighbourhood where concerned, educated, articulate residents with time on their hands will rise to the challenge. Leaving the fate of, say, the local library in their hands may not be such a bad idea. But what about areas where decades of joblessness and drugs and benefit dependency may have robbed residents of any glimmer of a can-do culture? Here, doesn’t the state have a moral duty to provide a library service where pensioners can read the paper, where schoolchildren can do their homework in peace and discover a world of books not available at home, and where the digitally excluded are able to participate in the wonders of the internet?

If library provision were left to local volunteers, or social enterprises – those not-for-profit organisations run by entrepreneurs much-feted by the cheerleaders of this new settlement – what of the postcode lottery that would no doubt result?”

She’s very restrained. If I’d have been there and got the glib ‘so what’ response that she received, I would have left the room only to return shortly with a flamethrower.

Thirdly, there’s Dave Briggs post on Google Buzz – the reviews I’ve seen are mixed. One side of the argument from Google Reader addicts who carefully select who sends them recommendations is that all of a sudden a tool that was working beautifully is suddenly chucking loads of unrequested information at me.

The other side of the argument is that it will being an awful lot more people into the day-to-day activity of sharing and collaborative authoring of content. This can only be a good thing for everyone, surely?

I thought I’d wait until you’re all back from the Christmas break before I posted about my trip to Copenhagen and it’s various climate events. Almost everything climate-related that happened in and around Copenhagen over those  two weeks offers rich pickings for reflection on the changing relationship between democracy and climate change.

I work for the Foundation for Democracy and Sustainable Development where I’m just starting work on a new project on ’the future of democracy in the face of climate change‘.

In the coming months, we’ll be reflecting on the big question: what next? And we’ll be looking, not just at the critically important coming twelve months, but beyond, to 2050 and 2100.

This is a shorter version of a longer blog post that I’ve posted on my own blog. I wanted to highlight one or two elements because I think they are relevant to a local government audience – but please don’t let me stop you going and reading the whole thing if you want to.

Here, I highlight some of the ‘local democracy and climate change’ themes that emerged in Copenhagen.

City mayors talk positive

City mayors from around the world met at an event organised by the City of Copenhagen during the official talks; the Copenhagen Climate Summit for Mayors. According to an informal email from one participant: “This looked and felt like a team! They listened to each other’s plans, they openly encouraged plagiarism and replication, they fostered support for each other in a way that was uncontrived, open and positive. They discussed technical fixes, finance and resources, education and engaging citizens: they discussed mitigation and adaptation, economic opportunity and necessity: and they recognised they need to be leaders of substantial cultural change.”.

Divide between ‘bottom-up’ and ‘top-down’ solutions

One point above others stands out: the huge political and psychological distance between the key issues and solutions debated during the official negotiations at the Bella Centre (where the formal talks took place), and the belief in bottom-up locally owned and self-managed solutions that characterised many of the ‘unofficial’ side meetings for civil society at the Klimaforum space and in a variety of other meetings spaces around the city.

Indeed, with the slow pace of progress in intergovernmental talks, it has become apparent that much more emphasis will now likely be placed on local level innovation to deliver climate solutions.

Already in the UK, commentators are paying renewed attention to the groundswell of community-based activism that has sprung up over the last couple of years away from the formalities of ballot-box decision-making or the stifling bureaucratic decision-making of some town halls.

This renewed call to ‘community-based local solutions’ is both valuable in practice and laudable as prescription; the more so when it builds community ties and hence the ability to remain resilient in the face of climate change.

And yet, a note of caution must here be sounded on two grounds. First, because it was noticeable in Copenhagen that the vision of ‘bottom-up’ decision-making that was articulated in many side events was not accompanied by a seamless vision of the role of national government; or of the much-vaunted national level ‘leadership’ that became a war-cry of campaigners during Copenhagen (e.g. in statements of the ‘politicians go to fancy dinners; leaders act’ sort).

Related to this is the real-world fact that any failure of global democracy resulting from negotiating inequality between nations is necessarily also a failure of national government.

In the run-up to the 2002 Johannesburg World Summit on Sustainable Development, governments encouraged so-called ‘Type 2′ agreements to be tabled and to become a formal part of the Summit’s outcomes. These were essentially voluntary agreements or partnerships between different stakeholders to tackle different dimensions of sustainable development. But there was a backlash from some potential ‘Type 2 agreement’ signatories, who accused governments of passing the buck to non-governmental actors instead of getting on with reaching a deal themselves.

There must be a risk that the same will happen now on climate change: that governments will seek to bring citizen and business-led voluntary action into a bigger intergovernmental tent at the expense of much-needed national level leadership.

That is not in itself a bad thing, but must not become a substitute for effective action at the national and international government levels.

Second is the reality that politics is nowhere more personalised; nowhere more exposing, than at the local level. Any move formally to institutionalise a prioritisation of local level decision-making needs also be accompanied by efforts to tackle marginalisation and social exclusion in local level decision-making; to ensure that minority views are given due weight.

Localism must not become a banner under which marginalisation or ‘business as usual’ decision-making by vocal elites become entrenched in public policy.

The apparent distance between local and global level solutions – a canyon or a rift at best – was made all the deeper by the Copenhagen organisers’ unforgivable failure, over at the official Conference of the Parties at the Bella Centre on the outskirts of the city, adequately to make provision for non-governmental observers of the Conference (including this one, who lacked the stamina of some to stand in a freezing queue for 6-9 hours on the last day that non-governmental organisations without ‘secondary’ badges were allowed to exchange their pre-registration for entry badges to the venue).

Civil society and climate change

Beyond Copenhagen, there is renewed pressure on civil society around the world to make its voice heard above the non-voting views of economic interests and politicians limited by short-term political priorities or (in some countries) crude opinion poll data. This is precisely the message that is emerging from the larger non-governmental organisations: “we don’t have a real deal, and we’re not done yet”, is the essential message.

Or to put it another way, ‘we’re all eco-warriors now’. Action based on this insight will undoubtedly shape both the course of democracy, and the course of climate change, in the coming months and years. But there is also a significant tension between the Green political tendency towards political decentralisation, community activism and bottom-up change and my observations here. For sometimes only strong local, regional and national representative governments have the capacity to take on un-elected interests such as commercial pressure groups; and sometimes representative democracy is the best back-stop for fair decision-making on climate change at local level.

Just a quick one to round the week off. I missed this post yesterday on Paul Waugh’s site.

I won’t accuse George Osborne of cowardice for saying this because he’s hardly unique in this respect:

But he left the best til last. When asked if there was any chance of following up this localist agenda by giving councils more of their own money via loc govt finance reform, the ghost of the poll tax hovered over his reply:

“Let me put it this way. Local government tax reform is something that we might leave to a third or fourth term..”

But it does sum up the problem, doesn’t it? I don’t think you could read that story and not see that local policies are seen as anything other than a pawn in the Westminster game – one that’s played out mainly for a small highly valued demographic of swing voters who have to be reached through the prism of the reporters on a handful of national newspapers.

Pic: Okko Pyykkö - click for attribution.

Anthony has beat me to a response to the new Green Paper today, so I thought I’d develop his scepticism about the appetite for ‘scrutiny’.

For me, the interesting question is – as ever – around the whole notion of representation.

Town Hall Matters has lighted on this question and that post returns to a theme that Jenni Russell picked up on a few weeks ago (covered here at the time, and subsequently as the subject for a session at Reboot Britain) albeit with a focus on local rather than Westminster politics.

THM asks:

“…is a desire to scrutinise really what motivates people to become councillors?”

The post then goes on to recount that John Denham wants to…

“…make council leaders ensure scrutiny is a core function and that it is adequately resourced.”

This raises a significant question – one where I suspect common sense would conflict with the current public mood.

If one were to take Denham at his word, this would justify his claim that the ‘Strengthening Local Democracy‘ consultation proposes “the biggest shift in power in a generation.”

Labour has something of a credibility problem when it demands more emphasis on scrutiny from it’s elected members. It’s hard to know where to start describing the damage that Nick Brown did to Labour’s claim to promote the role of scrutiny when he promised to refuse positions on select committees to MPs that had voted against the government.

This all has an odd resonance with David Cameron’s view that parliament needs to sieze back some powers from our bloated Quangocracy. In the same way that John Denham is right to ask Councillors to take on the role of scrutiny with more vigour, Cameron is right to demand these powers to be returned to parliament.

But do either party really mean this? It brings us back to Town Hall Matters‘ original question:

“… is a desire to scrutinise really what motivates people to become councillors?”

The answer to that question (it’s “no” by the way) shows the challenge that any serious proposer of a stronger, more scrutinising body of MPs and politicians will have to address:

Politicians are political people. They behave in a political ways and their scrutiny will involve political research, political judgment and political deliberation. Their decisions will be based upon their politics and will have political consequences. They will need more researchers and a larger secretariat to help them with this political work.

It will require political resources that will have to be provided by the taxpayer or by political parties. It will also require political parties that are prepared to recruit candidates that exhibit independent thought, as opposed to the compliant outlook that is currently the key virtue.