The news that a blogger who filmed a meeting of a local council in Carmarthenshire was arrested for “breaching the peace” raises an interesting question that could have a slightly unfashionable answer.

Flip-cams: The sword of transperency or an engine for selective reporting?

My friend, David Allen Green, writing in the New Statesman has a supplied a detailed trawl of the legal evidence along with some good journalistic legwork to conclude that…

“…Carmarthenshire Council and Dyfed Powys Police have simply acted in an altogether hapless, illiberal, and alarming manner. A person, surely, should not be arrested and detained just for filming a public council meeting, and a council should not be able to prevent someone from doing so in this manner. In my opinion, all the councillors, officials, and police officers involved in this sad sequence of events really should be ashamed of themselves.”

I’m in two minds over whether the flip-cam will improve the quality of local democracy, and I think this highlights some of the tension between liberalism and the good practice of liberal democracy.

On the one hand, all of David’s arguments stand – and then some. Surely a good democracy should remove any barriers that stop people from viewing democratic proceedings? Transparency will result in less corruption, better decisions, a greater sense of participation, and so on.

On the other hand, there are a few snags. Firstly, if individuals are doing this selectively – on issues that they care about, we will naturally expect to see a bias towards issues that small groups of individuals care about. These may be (but not always will be) subjects that effect people who have more time/resources on their hands. If this becomes the main way that Council meetings are covered, it can expose councils to more pressure group politics.

This may be at the expense of the decisions that many of us – people with mild preferences and a need to see policy serve the interests of the whole community – would expect to see from local authorities. I know I trot it out a lot, but the example of a more direct democracy provided by California should be a shocking example to us all.

So, is a balanced view of proceedings going to be distributed by citizen journalists? Or will it inevitably result in selective reporting?

Blogger arrested for filming council meeting http://t.co/4CpUfyN MP and public barred http://t.co/wwwR6Gs who do these ppl think they are?

June 12, 2011 12:16 pm via Twitter for iPhoneReplyRetweetFavorite

@bengoldacre

ben goldacre

Another question: Does this drive up the quality of deliberation (i.e. do Councillors raise their game?) or does it result in either a more guarded approach or, conversely, a more soapboxy style?

We expect councillors to behave in a disinterested way and there must be some parallel here with the jury room: Would juries make better decisions if they were selectively recorded?

Then there’s the question of professional journalism. I know this is a moot point at the moment, given the headlong retreat from half-decent reporting among local newspapers. But we expect pro-journos to cover issues in an even-handed way, catering to mild preferences of a broad audience rather than the narrow views of a deeply interested one.

Will this kind of guerilla coverage drive this kind of reporting out? I posted here a couple of years ago about the negative impact that opening Parliamentary proceedings out had – the conclusion was that newspapers stopped covering it because anyone who was really interested could get the real thing on the radio or (later) TV. Will this apply to local authorities, or are we in a different ballgame with local politics?

In my experience, the answer may be that councils should routinely film all proceedings and index them professionally. This will reduce the scope for selective coverage and allow visitors who follow the links the option to hear all of the points (and the context provided by professional local government officers) to the proceedings. It will also allow people to drop randomly into a council meeting and see a broad range of issues being discussed responsibly (or not).

A firm in Brighton called Public i (declared interest: I’m personally friendly with a few of the team there) have been offering a web-casting service aimed at local authorities for some years – it indexes each speaker which saves you ploughing through whole meetings if you’re only there for a particular reason [random example here].

Surely councils need to pro-actively promote a public awareness of the whole of their work? Given the low interest in local politics, it will make it easier then for local journalists to report procedings and may result in more broad coverage. Unless they do this, we can expect selective reporting to dominate agendas more and more.

The Rt Hon. David Laws MP. Click pic for credit

There was an interesting review of a study around politically connected firms on the BBC’s Thinking Allowed programme recently asking how far different countries find their governance effected by the relationships politicians have with previous (or current!) employers.

The early coalition-casualty, David Laws – for example – is a former Vice President of JP Morgan and Alan Duncan used to work for Royal Dutch Shell.

The programme quotes a recent article from Mara Faccio, a US-based Italian economist whose work on politically-connected firms (lots of links from her homepage here) is, in part, er…. inspired … by a desire to understand Silvio Berlusconi’s grip on the Italian state.

Unsurprisingly, there’s a direct correlation between press freedom and low levels of corruption. In the UK, 150 firms have connections to MPs – the highest level of interpenetration anywhere in the world. It’s quite a surprising statistic initially, but in the UK, politicians are offered opportunities to join boards rather than the other way around – where businesses put their people into politics (the strong contrast with Italy). As a result, the benefits to the firms were, according to Faccio, negligible.

It does put all of the recent expenses scandal into perspective though, doesn’t it?

Listen to the whole thing though if you can?

I was very sad to hear – via Slugger – of the passing of ‘Horseman’ – one of the better (anonymous) bloggers that I have in my RSS feed.

Being busy, I missed his last posting on his Ulster’s Doomed! blog – a terrifically good one at that.

Writing about our image of politicians, Horseman points to one country that stands out – Sweden.

“In Sweden 43.8% of people have a ‘rather favourable’ opinion of their politicians, compared with an EU average of 12.4%. And only 18.4% of Swedes have a ‘rather unfavourable’ opinion, against the EU average of 55.4%.

Swedes are not foolish people, and are no more likely to be fooled by their politicians than anyone else, so what these results show is that Swedish politicians are simply better than any others. If their voters have a positive opinion of them it must be because they are more honest, more diligent, more representative and more efficient than any others.

And, of course, good politicians lead to good politics and good governance – and these lead, almost inevitably, to a more responsive state in which the needs of the people are served better than elsewhere. No wonder Sweden is close to the top of the list in almost every international comparison, whether it is looking at freedom, affluence, education, development or happiness.

Whatever it is that Swedish politicians are doing, they are doing it well, and their voters are happy with them. We need to learn from them.”

We may all have our explanations for this. My own suspicion is that there is a more entrenched culture of inclusion and an awareness of (and strategy for neutralising) the damaging disruption that unrepresentative pressure groups and media interests bring to bear on public life.

But back to Horseman, briefly. He was a very good blogger – quite a number cruncher and one with an idiosyncratic standpoint (as all of the best bloggers have). His main story was a belief that the nationalist electorate would overtake the unionist one in Northern Ireland at some point in the middle-future. It wasn’t one that I bought wholesale, given the relative lack of actual hardcore nationalist sentiment among Northern Ireland catholics. But that’s for another day.

My sympathies are with his family and friends for whom he must be a huge loss.

Copenhagen Climate Change Summit: Failed by the decline of democracy?

Tuning into the Personal Democracy Forum 2010 event in Washington, Scott Heiferman of Meetup.com offered a nice quote from Alexis De Tocqueville:

“In democratic countries, knowledge of how to combine is the mother of all other forms of knowledge”

It’s certainly true that state-sponsored organisations have even less of a monopoly over the ability to combine people with any efficiency. Heiferman gave an example of Seth Godin sending a tweet urging people to use Meetup in order to discuss his work. Within days, hundreds of events were organised all over the world to do so.

John Perry Barlow from the Electronic Frontier Foundation followed Heiferman to the podium and told us that Barack Obama deserved a good deal more credit than he was being given because he’d inherited the task of government – an idea that in itself was becoming broken thanks to the Internet.

A recent edition of BBC Radio 4′s Analysis programme – Doomed by Democracy (featuring our own Halina Ward) focused on the unwillingness of democracies to address the demands from the scientific consensus around climate change.

Mark Littlewood of the Institute for Economic Affairs argued that a good deal of the problem was down to over-spinning on the part of the scientific establishment. If they were to refrain from this, he argued, the public would be more likely to take their claims on face value. It’s an argument that entirely ignores the fact that commercial pressure groups will not limit themselves in the same way – in direct opposition to the general public interest. In a more direct democracy, the unequal ability to convene entirely undermines the notion that the quality of argument should be a deciding factor in a debate.

The Analysis programme was a bizarre one in which ‘democracy’ was taken to mean a debased variation on Direct Democracy. Here, the ability to combine (see the way that newspapers whipped up the anti road-pricing petition a few years ago) showed exactly what the challenge from those who have “knowledge of how to combine” means. It doesn’t mean that democracies are incapable of making decisions that are unpopular in the short-term.

I feel a post coming on along the lines of ‘how democracy can be saved by a rejection of direct democracy in all it’s forms’. At my current rate of posting here, though, don’t hold your breath willya?

Anyone who follows the BBC News site, or who reads a newspaper, will be familiar with a good few interest groups and think tanks. Where their news releases aren’t the entire basis for the story, they are invited to comment at length, in the name of political “balance”, or on the basis of an often-undeserved authority.

The TPA: Corporate shills?

A great deal of our time as bloggers is thus spent exposing the same old partisan front groups – the left are interested in the TaxPayer’s Alliance, – corporate shills, and organisations that exist purely and simply for the promotion of a particular set of views. Right-wing bloggers hunted down a significant scalp last year, taking out the earlier incarnation of Labour List – a site that appeared to simply be a political attack dog, and one that wasn’t embedded in the better instincts of the blogsophere.

While individuals can always change their mind on an issue, interest groups cannot, and will not. Moreover, their neatly packaged set of proposals can be tempting for governments running short of ideas, and short of friends.

Whether the groups are ostensibly on the left or the right, their influence can only be bad for politics. In the name of “balance”, the essential politics within a debate – the key issues and arguments – is drained away, or rechannelled to the financial benefit of one organisation.

Why should we – as bloggers – put up with seeing the same discredited arguments trotted-out again and again, and which we have argued over and over again, when we have – at our disposal – a vast resource of evidence, argument, and opinion to call upon?

What I propose is a collective – and non-partisan – organisation of political bloggers, which will challenge the interest groups in the name of honest and open politics, and provide newspapers and online news sites with a central resource that allows them to dispense with the services of self-interested think tanks and self-styled experts.

These bloggers would come together whenever required, putting aside their partisan interests, to tap the blogosphere’s collected wisdom – and, just as importantly, its memory – to fisk, rebut, and generally trump groups that are used to thinking in relative isolation. Bloggers will have many advantages, not least access to background information about the groups, via SourceWatch et al.

Of course I don’t propose that bloggers attempt to produce consensus. Not only is this implausible, but it would be dishonest, and would drop us into the same trap as the BBC and others. While artificial disputes help no one, genuine disagreements must come out. The public must have access to the full range of political opinion – no political cause benefits in the long run from anything different.

All in all, by shaking up lazy journalism, exposing lazy thinking, and by undercutting the “go-to” groups and “experts”, the reputation of the political blogosphere – as simply the best resource for distributed thought and opinion we have – must surely increase.

Please join the Positive Political Blogging campaign on Facebook, and help spread the word!

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.

If only all decisions were made by jurors, right....? (Click image for credit)

Like a minority of people who have watched what will surely be 2009′s official leitmotif - the demand for full disclosure from MPs – play out,  I’ve wondered when similar demands will be applied to those who rival MPs for power.

This phrase of Larry Elliot’s – explaining the roots of the current economic crisis – underline the problem here:

“But there is a motley band of discontents for whom business as usual, in whatever form, means that another crisis will erupt before too long. They argue that the exiguous nature of current reform proposals is explained by the institutional capture of governments by the investment banks, the world’s most powerful lobbying groups.”

Certainly, politicians have been teed up so that they can be whacked squarely whenever they get ideas above their station. Right now, it would be hard to make the case that MPs are the right people to take on Tom Wolfe’s over-powerful Masters of the Universe.

In the same way that the Ross-Brand affair was used to tee the BBC up by politicians who don’t wish the corporation well, there’s an argument that demands for transparency rarely come from an organisation’s friends.

Much of this has been led squarely from the political right. The Taxpayers Alliance and a range of right-wing anti-BBC bloggers have worked in tandem with media owners that have been frustrated with what they see as the BBC’s anti-competitive influence on the media landscape. Certainly, at this moment, the libertarian right is the key mover behind the UK’s anti-politics campaigns on MPs expenses for reasons that have more to do with a pro-direct democracy position than more short term party political advantages. The current scandal has, after all, hurt the Conservative Party as well as Labour.

It’s hard to seperate this question from the differing political attitudes to the decline of newpapers. In no less a place than The Washington Post, we see this:

“For the first time in American history, we are nearing a point where we will no longer have more than minimal resources (relative to the nation’s size) dedicated to reporting the news. The prospect that this “information age” could be characterized by unchecked spin and propaganda, where the best-financed voice almost always wins, and cynicism, ignorance and demoralization reach pandemic levels, is real. So, too, is the threat to the American experiment.”

From the left, there appears to be an emerging response. The first is to harass the newspapers, those who use the libel laws to suppress inconvenient truths and other pedlars of perverted science. Jan Moir, Trafigura, and the British Chiropractic Association have all felt the sharp end of this kind of crowdsourced hostility in recent months.

Over on OpenDemocracy, Tom Griffin wants to see lobbyists put more firmly under the spotlight. Certainly, this idea has some traction with the liberal centre, and in the US, the Sunlight Foundation is at least as concerned with transparency on the question of lobbying as it is on the personal conduct of politicians.

It’s hard to see where this will end. There is a case to be made for…

• Significant reforms to media ownership rules to ensure that the media is sufficiently pluralistic
• Similar reforms that ensure that commercial lobbies can be uncoupled from self-serving media interests (I argued this point in a good deal more detail over on Left Foot Forward)

I would suggest that this argument has a long way to go. The left doesn’t appear yet to have recognised the importance of rescuing journalism in the way that the right has embraced it’s decline, otherwise the NUJ’s Jeremy Dear wouldn’t be struggling to raise his arguments for new forms of journalistic funding to a level where anyone would hear them.

And if you’ll forgive me further self-linking, there are a number of posts here that raise the question of what happens if we treat politicians as jurors. If MPs are only really allowed to meet advocates in a recorded way, that would surely be the consequence of Tom’s proposal?

Either way, I’d suggest that advocates of transparency from all sides need to spend more time outlining what they think is permissible and desirable in representation, campaigning and media behaviour. We all seem to know what we’re against, but the interesting question, for me, is what we are in favour of?

Dr Ben Goldacre

One of the recurring themes of this blog is the way that weblogs are (as Charlie Beckett put it in that book review that I pointed to the other day), reconfiguring journalism and political discourse.

The most prominent examples of this in the UK have been the war of attrition that right-wing libertarian bloggers have conducted against politicians and the very idea that government should tax (“steal from”) people and spend (“burn”) their money.With raw material from the Taxpayers Alliance, a cornucopia of sites have blossomed attacking the symptoms of ‘big government’ while rarely actually making the case for the kind of minarchy that is implied by their position.

The end result has been – it is no exageration to say – the near-total demoralisaton of the political class with MPs openly saying that they hate their job and that their families are begging them to take a job stacking shelves in the local supermarket rather than having to put up with the hyper-scrutiny that they appear to be under at the moment.

On the other side of the fence, though, we’re seeing the institutions that compete with a more left-libertarian notion of democracy being taken to peices by rationalist bloggers. Great oak trees from little acorns grow, and it you don’t like the sight of an organisation being taken apart because of it’s attempts to surpress debate, then don’t go and look at this article now.

Those of us that are rather keen on representative democracy may have a happy couple of years to look forward to, watching all of the organisations that rival elected politicians getting their comeuppance.

Here’s LD’s co-blogger Anthony writing (or rather, quoting) from his main blog on the growing ‘pressure group industry’:

“The flourishing of associations is the denial of mediation. Taken to its logical conclusion, the slogan of the movement is: for each individual their own association, and by that very fact, no association at all.”

It’s often easy to forget that political parties are the counterweight to pressure groups. If the role of political parties were to diminish in the way that many would like them to do, would we (as individuals) have more influence over policy – or less?

Perhaps the key to this is a public education campaign that assures people that an equal say in policy making only provides us with the expectation of a tiny amount of influence – and this is the best possible outcome for all of us?

How far does the way that some politicians and organisations raise public expectations – the clarion call to Have Your Say – damage the quality of liberal democracy?

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:

Active citizens are time-rich nosey busybodies and do-gooders that promote their own self-interest at the expense of the people that don’t have the time, energy or obsessiveness to engage in public affairs. At least if we force these people to channel their energies through political parties, they will have to spend most of their time competing for the once-every-few-years votes from the rest of us – those of us who don’t have the time, energy, inclination or fanaticism to go to consultations, circulate petitions or run campaigns.

OK, OK, there’s probably a lot of unwarranted unkindness and caracaturing going on there, but it was intended to lay out one side of an argument.

Here’s a good post from Matthew Taylor’s blog discussing what political parties need to do to survive:

We need a funding system which is fair, transparent, and sufficient for parties to engage. Most of all, we must channel money away from negative national campaigning and into grassroots engagement. It is hard to do but far from impossible, especially if parties – as a quid pro quo for greater state funding – are required to be totally transparent in all their spending at every level. But this means the Conservatives supporting reform at a time when they are benefiting from a huge spending gap in every constituency, and it means Labour has to grasp the nettle on union funding.

I’d argue that any reform of funding – if it is to promote a more decentralised politics – would have to be provided to elected representatives in a form that can’t be snaffled my party bureaucrats.

I’m hoping that Matthew will be able to join us at on of PICamp’s Reboot Britain sessions where the question of active citizenship will probably be treated in a much more balanced way than I have done here.

Oh, and PS, do you like the new blog layout?