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.

For those of us who would like local politics to be more highly valued, two slightly conflicting observations were made by prominent political bloggers last weekend.

It is possible that the Tories are regretting using pics of David Cameron to front their 2010 launch?

The first was by the ever-perceptive Potlatch writing about James Purnell, and digging into the question of ‘professionalisation’ of politics:

“Purnell – like Ruth Kelly and Ed Balls – ticks both journalism and policy advice. This is a slightly different issue from the long-standing, Weberian concern with professionalisation of politics. A professional politician is one who is expert at campaigning and winning elections, but has no experience or life outside of this. New Labour was more about the scientisation of politics (sorry if that’s not a word), in which expertise in economics and public affairs became a precondition of political authority.” (emphasis mine)

Potlatch (Will Davies) seemed to see a deepening of the trend towards a more professional political elite – one in which a rare combination of skills was a pre-condition to success. It does have echoes of the almost caste-based Enarque phenomonon in France in which a professional supporting bureaucracy grows up around political parties, consisting of the children of other Enarques.

The second was on Political Betting – a site that convenes genuinely valuable political data* (most political blogs attract opinion – what we would like to happen. PB is specifically about identifying what is actually going to happen) in which Councillors were offered as an underestimated political force.

Political centralisation is widely seen as a consequence of the way that carefully managed branding around charismatic individuals has supplanted the more earthy questions of local representatives, lively public debate and a more engaged electorate. My own Labour Party experience features countless examples of MPs being warned – in a roundabout way – that the only reason they are in Parliament is because of the party logo – and that any individualism on their part is unwarranted arrogance.

If you ask most political pundits, they may be keen to tell you that the election will be decided by a battle of the brands. That Lord Ashcroft is in a position to finance a Tory victory and that local issues are largely irrelevant.

I think that this is becoming contestable. I don’t think that anyone expects Labour to fight a ‘presidential campaign’ with Gordon Brown as the sole focus for the voters. But even the Tories are concious of the way that social media activists are capable of damaging the brand value of a leader – and they are stepping back from hanging the campaign on David Cameron. As Guido Fawkes reported recently, they have also dropped the tag of ‘David Cameron’s Conservatives’ (and I hope its not seen as a partisan point when I say ‘thank god for that!’)

If it’s true that – in a more peer-to-peer polity – one of the deciding issues is the number of local councillors that you have, perhaps this presents those councillors with an opportunity to reverse the trend that has continued as long as the mass media has dominated the political space?

Is it time for Councillors to demand powers that are commensurate with their ability to win elections?

* Let me just add this: Political betting is a really great political blog. Really good. Subscribe to it if you can?

If you get a moment, pop over to OpenlyLocal and have a look around, will you?

It’s a very good start – showing how all of the investment in data standards is beginning to find it’s own tipping point.

It is beginning to be possible for more of us to get really useful comparative data on local government. For the non-techies among you, this means that – when information is added to a local authority website, the tool that assembles the site adds a bit of code to it that describes what the website is telling you. For example, if you update a table on your website when a new councillor replaces an old one, it is done in such a way as to allow another website to access yours, ask for a list of councillors, and then import that list into their own site.

It can then also pull across information about that councillor’s role in committees, meetings that they are due to attend, contact details, etc.

These data standards enable a quiet quick exchange of information that has a huge amount of potential to increase efficiency and allow us to crunch information and numbers to tell us things that we didn’t know. At the crudest level, we can find out who the councillors are in lots of different councils by looking at one site, but have a look yourself to see what other insights you can gain.

OpenlyLocal is a neat example of what is possible now that data standards are beginning to be applied more consistently.

Here’ Dan Drillsma-Milgrom of the LGC on how Councillors should respond to the heavy snow that we’re seeing in the UK at the moment:

A snowflake earlier.

“For those who know to look for it, Camden has an easy to use section of its website that directs residents to the nearest sand grit bins and shows the gritting routes. It should be the job of local politicians to let residents know such services exist so they can help themselves and their neighbours. That may be via email or social media, but if it means knocking on doors or delivering informative leaflets then so be it.”

I’m not sure that he’s right to be upset that his local political parties leaflets have totally dried up because of the bad weather, but times like this show why it’s important that Councillors invest in building communications channels with local residents.

My kids’ school has done a great job building up such a network with the parents. There’s a school website, a PTA website,  and – most importantly – a text-messaging system that they’ve used to deliver the good news that I have to spend at least the next two days at home looking after my kids. Tellingly, there is also a totally bloody-awful proprietary system with wretched usability called Fronter that the local authority seem to have imposed upon them.

This tells Councillors something: Set up your own communications networks – they’ll be much better than the clunky bossy rule-ridden ones that your Councils will saddle you with. Most of them are free, and most of them can be set up by anyone who has enough expertise to buy a book from Amazon.

Update: 14:58 – The distribution of grit has been taken out of the hands of local government.

Local government governance guru Peter Keith-Lucas has
an article in this week’s Local Government Lawyer assessing the current state of governance in local councils.

It’s a good read – expert but not too technical. Keith-Lucas has plagues to put on the houses of both parties: the Labour party for watering down the proper role of scrutiny in its most recent green paper, the Conservatives for setting out proposals on Standards Committee issues that (he suggests) leave the door open for greater councillor corruption. Here’s his closing paragraph (but do go and read the lot):

For healthy local government, there must be corporate governance, there must be a balance between the power of the executive and the checks and balances, in terms of council and scrutiny holding the executive to account, and an enforceable set of minimum standards of conduct. I am seriously concerned that the checks and balances which were an essential part of the 2000 Act Settlement are under attack. That promises a prosperous New Year for lawyers, but not a happy time for local government.

Kevin Harris has forwarded this article about the role that councillors are obliged to adopt in relation to planning.

Nothing in it will come as a surprise to anyone familliar with the role of a modern councillor, but it’s a nice round up of an issue that will continue to perplex anyone with an interest in local representation. (Shorter version: that councillors have to adopt a jurist role on the question of planning. If it can be demonstrated that they have a predisposition on a particular planning matter, this can disqualify them from deliberating on it).

It reprises a few old posts here asking about whether councils are advocates or jurors. I’m not going to comment on this one in any great detail apart from to observe that councillors now have a potential to convene and conduct conversations quickly and spontaneously in a way that they never used to be. This is what social media can do best: It can allow anyone to invite everyone to dump their evidence in one place.

This ability (when the bulk of councillors become accustomed to having it) hints at yet another role for the councillor to adopt. Not juror or advocate, but as the curator of evidence and opinion on local matters. In offline terms, think of the way that detectives setup an evidence board in the incident room that we’ve all become familliar with in police procedural TV programmes.

Either way, it points to a role where councillors are expected to be more inclusive and conversational and less adversarial.

To illustrate this, I’ve been racking my memory for examples of where someone has used lots of different social media and bookmarking tools to simply gather all of the information on a particular subject in a neutral and even-handed way so that visitors can get a good overview prior to making a decision. I know there are lots of examples, but I just can’t think of one now (help me out, willya?)

Note to councillors: It's called FACEbook. Not 'Bottombook'

Speaking to some Councillors in Kent today, I found myself answering a few questions about Facebook ‘dos-and-don’ts’ – I mentioned that there was bound to be something from the many social media practitioners that have written on the subject, and that a quick Google would turn up a handy etiquette guide.

Looking around, however, there doesn’t appear to be one, so here’s a quick bunch of suggestions from me:

1. Friends:The classic question that bothered many early-ish Facebook users was the question of ‘what happens when my suit / twinset friends meet my t-shirt friends?’ Do you want your boss to know that the reason that you’re a bit quiet on a Monday morning because you spent all day Sunday downing Tequilla Slammers? Similarly, councillors need to think about how much they want their daily trivia to be in the peripheral vision of the people that voted for them, their local journalists, or their political rivals.

The best way to demonstrate your political loyalties, for instance, probably doesn’t involve the colour of the underwear you chose for your ‘Hot Tory in Sexy Wench Pose!!”

Describing the neighbourhood you represent as ‘a bit of a toilet’ can be open to many interpretations – but few of them are likely to make your life much easier as a councillor. Conclusion: Only ‘befriend’ people who are actual offline real world friends on Facebook unless you are determined to portray yourself as a bit of a boring goody-two-shoes. Even then, remember that may people find their loyalty stretched by the opportunity to create a bit of mischief – so no private parts on your profile pic please?

2. What to say?Even if you are surrounded only by people who you beleive to be trusted confidantes, you have to remember that you are a councillor, and that what you say could end up being leaked out one way or the other. Treating the death of a political rival with levity, for instance, is probably a mistake. It’s also worth taking any discussion of party-political tactics somewhere a bit more private. How you refer to your own party can also be an issue. Here, prospective Labour Councillor, Ms Sam Whittington…

“… had few good words to say about the Labour Government, and Labour Prime Minister Gordon Brown, as well as ‘vulgar and profane language along with comments of an extreme sexual nature’ and even ‘racist innuendos’.”

Conclusion: There’s no way of avoiding this one. You lose some of your irreverence / profanity / irony privileges when you even try to get elected. That’s life.

3: Linking up with local residents:This is what Facebook Groups and pages are for. As The Pickards noted at LocGovCamp back in June….

There was a Councillor Allan Andrews of Coventry Council who set up the I Love Earlsdon page on Facebook (his ward area) which has over 800 fans — which if you consider the number of fans compared to the number of people in the ward, and then compare that ratio to the percentage of people the council will usually engage with, has got to be impressive. This also illustrated a point about Councils on Facebook.

No-one (or not many normal people) will declare themselves to be a fan of their Council as a whole. They may be much happier declaring their support for a ward, for a particular event, project, or place. I’m happy to be a fan of the Laing Art Gallery: as much as I like and respect what Newcastle City Council and in particular a few of them are doing online (you know who you are), I’m not going to declare myself a fan of the council.

Groups or Pages? Well, Tim Davies has explored this one in some detail already. Setting up a Facebook group / page is easy, and it allows councillors to have a less direct relationship with local people. Instead of encouraging people to come and shout at you, promoting a more nuanced discussion about a local area can be a good deal more ‘eavesdroppable.’

In France, the Socialist party want to reform the practice known as cumul des mandats, where an MP or Senator also holds elected office at local level in his home town. The argument is that wearing two hats in that way distracts national level politicians from their main jobs, and promotes cronyism and pork-barrel spending in their local areas.

An article in Le Monde has some eye-opening statistics. 80% of French parliamentarians are also councillors, compared with 20% in Britain, Germany and Italy. Of the 185 socialist deputies in the French National Assembly, 80 hold executive office on a local or regional council, and a similar proportion of socialist senators do the same. Of those who don’t hold executive office, most are backbench councillors in their local areas. The figures for the UMP (Sarkozy’s party) are pretty similar.

Who knows, if the socialists get their way, how many French parliamentarians will give up life in Paris and retreat to their communes. Perhaps not very many – but could you imagine any MP or peer in the UK preferring local office to national? It’s a symbol of the centralism of the UK, even set against the France of the préfet and the Code Napoléon, that being a footsoldier at national level is so clearly preferable to leading the ranks in your home town.

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.

MySociety‘s Tom Steinberg has, for some years, been urging government to adapt some of the lessons that successful websites have learned.

Here he is, writing one of the Reboot Britain essays serialised in The Independent.

“….most people are …familiar with Amazon’s ability to tell you that “people who bought this also bought that”, and increasingly “people who looked at this mostly ended up buying that”. Furthermore, every time you log into Amazon it looks at the complete history of everything you’ve bought and suggests totally new books, songs or other items that it has calculated you might like. This is a totally new way of solving the information problem of finding a good song to listen to.

Parliament, and indeed our wider democracy, is full of interesting information problems, all of them untransformed by Amazon-like ingenuity. How do we know that MPs and officials are acting in our interests, rather than other people’s? How do we know they’ve made their decisions based on good evidence? How do we know what issues are coming along next that need dealing with? How do we know what other people are doing to try and influence the political process? How do the sentiments of large numbers of people get fairly and transparently transformed into new laws? How do we even make sure that people know what the proposed laws say in the first place?”

It’s an attractive vision – opening up parliament and applying the experiences of usability experts to make it more intuitive. If you’ve not seen a usability lab in action, this advert gives you an indication of how it works:

One possible fly in this ointment is that it’s quite hard to make the case for public spending on usability testing. If I were a minister, I like to thing that I’d sign it off, but I’d expect to be given a hard time for doing it. MySociety’s rejoinder to this would probably be to (correctly) point out that they’ve managed to get volunteer hackers to build gov-related sites that knock the spots of gov-financed ones at a fraction of the cost, and follow it up with the view that the best gov-info sites aren’t built on a .gov domain.

The rest of Tom’s peice outlines how every stage in the deliberation process can be made more transparent.

I’ve always had some concerns about MySociety’s approach to this – and this line in Tom’s article…

One can imagine in future that the moment such a vote is tabled, all around the country activists would be immediately informed and able to mobilise even if they don’t know each other…

… foresees a scenario that may chill many advocates of representative democracy to the bone. Imagine the way that the Daily Mail was able to deep-six the very idea of road-pricing, and then think about it happening every day… it has capital P-political implications, promoting a right-wing populism over a more reflective and rational deliberative process.

However, I find myself in the rare situation of suggesting that there is a form of transparency and openness that Tom hasn’t suggested first, and one that could transform parliament. Regular readers here can change channel now……

The Virtual Researcher

One of the features of political centralisation is the accumulation of resources to a handful of nodes. For thirty years now, the British PM has been able to call upon a personal Think Tank stocked with paid political posts and a cluster of elite civil servants.

With an independent civil service, a cabinet that is picked by the PM (rather than the other way around) and a team of Special Advisers who owe at least half of their loyalty to the PM rather than the minister who hired them, the top of the political ladder is very well resourced.

Think Tanks are paid to service the needs of this office, journalists write with at least one eye on the reaction from that one office … if you could put a price on the amount of money that is spent upon supporting the thought processes of that one office, I’d guess that it runs into seven figures – and possibly eight.

Contrast this with the description of the average MP that Jenni Russell provided the other day – social workers for constituents – and you have a parliament that is almost entirely supine. If Russell’s article has one failing, it doesn’t recognise the near-futility of MPs behaving in any other way than the way they do.

When they’re not carefully indexing their paperclip receipts and providing a paralegal service for their constituents, MPs need to be able to, in Burke’s words, be in “the closest correspondence, and the most unreserved communication with his constituents.”

If constituents were prepared to collaborate with each other to provide detailed briefings to MPs, giving them the answers they need to rebuff the party whips, that would be a distinct improvement upon representative democracy.

I mentioned this idea to a few friends with a social-media orientation and their minds immediately raced off on the various clever possibilities that this idea suggested. Life’s too short to mention the tangled web of bootstrapped XML and existing applications that was proposed, but the bottom line is this:

So far, social media has been added to the armoury of sticks that are used to beat local elected representatives. I can’t think of a single social media / democracy project that hasn’t objectively bulwarked political centralisation.

But if MPs and councillors could be the beneficiary, this table could be turned dramatically.

It’s about time they were armed against their political leadership elites, pressure groups, newspaper proprietors and civil servants.

That could go further than making our slightly broken system chugg along in a more transparent way – it could actually fix it.