Broken localism: the politics of empty slogans

We know that devolving power from central to local government, and to individuals and communities below them, or localism as it is sometimes known, can offset the impersonal forces of globalisation which corrodes community ties and leaves people isolated and vulnerable. There should be no doubt that we need to protect and build up the local, to enhance social resilience in these times of austerity. We need to promote homespun prosperity. We do need to be ‘all in it together’ as the government mantra would have it. So although it commanded little press interest the new Localism Bill, presented to Parliament on 13 December 2010, matters a great deal. The Bill was heralded by government as a devolution of powers to councils and neighbourhoods. What we got was piecemeal legislation, a few minor changes here and there, no spectacular surprises, and certainly nothing to warrant the rhetorical claim of turning the relationship of citizen and state on its head. Rather than big bang localism the Bill is surprisingly timid, especially when set next to the vigour with which the wider cuts agenda has been pursued.

Tip O’Neill former speaker of the House in the US Congress famously once said, ‘all politics is local’. But what happens when the local is all politics? Specifically what happens when it is the politics of central government that uses localism to consolidate its own position? In this country, unlike most others across Europe, Scandinavia and America, all local politics are subservient to the politics of central government. The slogans go one way, the monopoly of power in another.
The Bill presents a battery of measures. There is a predictable clearing out: the Standards Board regime, Home Improvement Packs, Regional Spatial Strategies, the Infrastructure Planning Commission and the Tenant Services Authority are all going. The replacement options for these shibboleths are minimal rather than visionary. More control appears to be given to councils via a new ‘general power of competence’ which enables them to carry out any lawful activity on behalf of the community. However we would do well to remember that central government, via Parliament and the court system, gets to decide what ‘lawful activity’ means. Elsewhere in the Bill a handful of areas will be able to hold referendums for directly elected mayors; it is as if government couldn’t quite make up its mind whether it wants to push ahead with older reforms or invent its own ones. When it comes to local residents the Bill wants to direct their energies towards service delivery rather than give them an entirely free rein. Local people are to be given the power to instigate local referendums in the hope that they might be persuaded to save local facilities threatened with closure and run them themselves – a poisoned chalice if ever there was one. Social housing tenants have a similar dilemma: their more flexible tenure gives them a greater ability to move to different areas, yet local authorities can now limit who can apply for social housing within their areas.

The Olympics get a mention, as does the defunct London Development Agency, business rate relief and a community infrastructure levy. Not that these last two items do anything to address the uneven contest between councils and communities on the one hand and unscrupulous developers on the other. Faced with a Bill like this we are beset with minutiae, a cacophony of planning technicalities, and left to puzzle how the mechanics of how a referendum might actually work. Policy officers up and down the land, in the few remaining jobs in local government and the voluntary sector, will be looking for crumbs of comfort. Somewhere there is a sentence or two amidst the verbiage that can be relied on to make the case for whatever local agenda might profit from having government license. That is the first option, to make lemonade out of lemons, and it is well under way. Or, having absorbed the detail, we might consider the Bill and ask how much it really changes anything? Beyond the fizz and froth, this non-event of a Bill poses further questions: what would real devolution look like? Why is the localism agenda so consistently overhyped? What would it take to make localism happen?

Real devolution of power would mean local government becoming formally independent from central government, both legally and financially. In this Bill councils are still subordinate to the centre. In 1986 the Widdicombe Commission bluntly asserted that, ‘local government has no right to exist’ because, ‘parliament is sovereign’. This remains the case. Perhaps more importantly, money flows from the centre. Currently around three quarters of all local authority money comes from central government. Until local government is freed up to raise the majority of its money locally, as happens in other comparable countries, it has no practical independence and will remain a creature of central government patronage.

Real devolution of power for communities would go beyond the opportunity to call for a referendum, deliver services or take over the running of a building. These achievements are only possible, if at all, after huge amounts of support by larger professional organisations. If localism were to happen from the grassroots upwards we would see a rich diversity of informal community action, which inevitably takes years and costs money. The more likely scenario is that local community action will continue to decline, as always happens at times of economic hardship because the rational choice is to use one’s time to seek paid work not to volunteer. The real danger is that this decline in social action will snowball because the kind of opportunities for community empowerment that government envisages are something local community groups could never realistically be expected to do on the scale the Bill has set out. The scale of cuts will mean plenty of empty public buildings and that service contracts can now be picked up by private sector bodies. Also a new brand of larger charity that is voluntary in name only, and that has little or no connection with the local community it purports to serve, will clean up. Having hollowed out the public sector, civil society itself becomes deracinated.
For years governments have overhyped localism, claiming to give back power to the people. In the forward to the 2008 Empowerment White Paper Hazel Blears spoke of The English Civil War, the Rochdale cooperative movement, Peterloo, the Chartists, the Suffragettes and those who fought fascism as part of, ‘the great struggles for democracy’. They certainly deserve to be remembered as such but implying that New Labour’s brand of localism stands in such a tradition is errant nonsense. Continuing this more recent custom of extreme overstatement, the minister for decentralisation, Greg Clarke, writing on this bill in the Guardian (13.12.10) insists, ‘there’s a new boss. You’.

It is attractive to be our own boss but state-sanctioned narcissism does not begin to tell the truth about how we are to live together. For citizens to rise up and take power, notwithstanding such partial measures as the ‘right to challenge’, the ability to bid for assets and deliver local services, they must have councils that are not cowed by central government. To balance a strong local state, citizens will also need a vibrant, well resourced civil society led by the collective action of voluntary and especially community groups. This kind of society doesn’t exist. The time, effort and resources it takes to support community action have been exhorted but not understood. The consequences of overhyping localism are that it becomes a discredited currency and more generally we lose trust in politics. In 2007, writing principally on New Labour (The Triumph of the Political Class), Peter Oborne described an era of post-democracy where a new brand of politician, increasingly detached from civil society, pumps out simplistic messages based on market research or borrowed from the advertising industry. He called it manipulative populism and drew a parallel with totalitarian countries. In pre-election speeches David Cameron appeared to understand the risks of such a debased political culture and made considerable political capital out of it, which makes the current Bill all the more disappointing.

Any steps taken towards a stronger civil society and deeper democratic practice would be a towering political achievement, whoever pulled it off. The only way it could be achieved is by reversing conventional political wisdom. Lord Wei, the government’s Big Society adviser has spoken of society as a three legged stool, implying the need for proportionate attention to the needs of both the public and private sectors along with the newly discovered civil society, formerly known by New Labour as the ‘third sector’. And yet the reason why we are seeing unprecedented cuts is because of private sector failings over above those of the state. Only a state so deeply obeisant to private sector values, a market state, could present it as radical and empowering. The government’s premise that bureaucratic government is both ineffective and undemocratic is correct as far as it goes, but when taken to extremes, and the scale of the cuts are extreme, a bit of bureaucracy can quickly appear preferable to little or no government at all.

For localism to work there would need to be real vision and courage to not only spread power more widely but for central government to have proportionately less of it. Our local government would need at least double the freedoms and powers it currently has to catch up with localism in comparable countries elsewhere in the world. And for civil society to play any kind of significant role, made up as it is of mainly of small community groups, there would need to be unprecedented levels of appropriate support, offered without strings attached. There is a reason why people volunteer and it has nothing to do with seeking to undercut the costs of state provision of local services. Services may benefit, savings may be made as a result of having a stronger civil society but this is a by product not a cheque that government can expect to cash any time soon.

Meanwhile power has stayed where it always was, at the centre of government, and now government has decided it can no longer afford former levels of support. This is presented as giving away power so people can do for themselves what government used to do, before the bank bailout. Picking up the bill for the banking crisis changes everything. Claiming that austerity is an opportunity for redistributing power to communities is as disingenuous as it is politically expedient. We are encouraged by ministers to view this as a radical shift of power away from central government – it isn’t. Without money and power localism is an empty slogan.