Chapter 26
Political thoughts
26th July 2004
As the vicious trauma I have suffered fades and the historical perspective becomes clearer it is becoming apparent to me that the causes of this debacle lie elsewhere. I make no excuse for the following history lesson as the vast majority of people now know almost nothing of its contents. Perhaps they should learn.
Before WW2 the local councils in Britain ran almost everything. They owned outright the utilities and ran the supplies of electricity, gas, water and transport and even some telephones. They ran trams, busses and trolley busses. They funded and controlled the police and the fire service. They controlled all education and its costs and the only universities of note were at Oxbridge. Primary, secondary, grammar schools and technical colleges were mostly funded and controlled by local councils.
The councils also funded from the “Rates” all council services such as cleaning, lighting roads and the miniscule social services of the time. Control from Whitehall was virtually unknown. The councillors were mainly businessmen who gave their time quite freely to help run the city. The city was a big business and had many departments and required a lot of local talent and effort that kept the people in touch with local government. The decisions of councillors had immediate effect on the people and the people had almost immediate contact with the decision makers.The local council even licensed vehicles and dogs and a number of other mundane but necessary functions. I confess I do not know who ran the Ambulance Service but I bet it was not Whitehall.
That system has now all but disappeared. All the utilities are run by quangos that are rarely answerable to anyone but themselves and never to anyone outside Whitehall. Their operations are so complicated that no-one can possibly understand them, let alone control them. I could write a book on each of the matters of the supply of gas, water and electricity and the ombudsmen, regulators and consequent problems, but at this point it is simply necessary to note that control has been utterly removed from local councils and from the people.
Centralisation of the control of the fire service has done this city no favours although the quality of service does seem adequate; but there is not the slightest local input to its control.
Centralised control of the police is downright dangerous. Those who refuse to learn from history are doomed to relive it! Just take a look at the relatively trivial matter of the Chief Constable of Humberside and imagine what that amount of centralised power could do in the hands of the wrong person in Westminster. (The Chief Constable was severly criticised because a nasty criminal had moved from Humberside to East Anglia before comitting a nasty murder of two young girls.)
The centralisation of control of education was certainly unnecessary in order to improve educational standards and achievements. It is clear that good and bad schools are made by the head, governors and staff. The prescription and imposition of standards by central government has simply taken almost all control out of local hands. The system of controlling our schools has become so complex that it is a bureaucratic nightmare. The true work of education has become secondary to politically expedient rules of control. Local people have virtually no say in any related matter.
The Social Services have grown to majestic proportions. They are prescribed totally from Whitehall but local councillors have to implement the policies and carry the can when they don’t work.
The only remaining services directly controlled locally are local roads, lighting and civic cleaning. The road surfaces are falling to pieces and the streets are filthy. This is not the fault of local councils but of central government that has imposed draconian controls on funding. This has occurred by a roundabout process. Firstly Whitehall grabbed control of most functions and then imposed unachievable requirements. Then it had to admit that the only way to implement its requirements was to fund them itself. Then it had control of both definition and funding of the activity. This happened sequentially with all the functions of the council until it eventually had no control over anything.
Simultaneously Whitehall imposed massive new burdens upon councils such as Social Services and Education that swamped the few remaining legitimate tasks the councils retained. It was inevitable that local councils would become just local branches of Big Brother in Whitehall.
All councillors do now is to rubber stamp decisions made in Whitehall and fill in a few minor details. Many, many, many times when I have asked “Why?” I have been told “Because”. Power is exercised with draconian authority and the traffic is almost totally one way. Whitehall commands and the councils obey.
Decisions are not made locally. They are made in Whitehall or Downing Street. Very few, it seems, are made in Westminster. Thus the decisions are removed one further step from the people. The average punter knows little of this history or the details of how we got here or even how the system operates. But punters are not fools. They very soon discern that councillors have no real power and quickly lose interest. Why should they waste their time talking to the monkey when the organ grinder clearly lives elsewhere? The fact that they might actually get more sense out of the monkey carries little weight. He has no power – and that is what counts.
The result has been growing voter apathy and political disenchantment. The politicians are not fools either and discerned this growing problem many years ago but no one has been able to slow or modify the process let alone reverse it.
A parallel series of events has been the dramatic growth of capitalism at the expense of all the other “isms” that abounded fifty years ago. No one who has lived through the last fifty years could fail to be highly and favourably impressed by the truly massive increase in our standard of living measured in our consumption of consumer goods. There is no doubt this is due almost entirely to the growth of capitalism and globalisation of production.
This has had an enormous impact on the quality of our lives but everything has a price and in this case we are paying by losing control over our means of sustenance. We have become much separated from the production of the goods and services upon which our lives depend. We have become impotent in these matters and understand little of how we earn this sumptuous consumption. We fear it may be unsustainable – and possibly with good cause.
All of these factors have combined to leave us quite dissatisfied and even disaffected. The growth of the protest industry is no accident.
This is the background to the current political vogue for “community involvement”. The current politically inspired programmes for implementing community involvement sprang from the takeover of the Labour party by Tony Blair. Old Labour had got itself into a position where its policies were downright old fashioned and were clearly discredited. No one was ever going to buy Nationalisation again. Tony Blair adopted an essentially right wing policy and won the disaffected Tory voters who had had enough of John Major.
The simple fact is that politicians have lost much power to the capitalist corporation that now run many of the prime functions of society and there is little to choose between political parties. Political dogmas of the past are virtually dead. They have been rendered redundant by the amazing progress of world-wide production. This is not necessarily sustainable, but no one dared seriously ask that question. For the moment politics is a minor issue. European issues have simple added to this process and removed the people even further from the apparent seats of power.
When Tony Blair took power he needed allies in a difficult takeover of the Labour party. He made John Prescott his deputy as part of his power broking negotiations. John Prescott was well aware of the disaffection and distancing of the people from political power and set out to try to involve the people through programmes of community involvement. As a result of the political arrangements he had a great deal of power and was able to implement a well-funded and comprehensive programme.
The essence of his scheme has been to require local councils to set up new departments to implement community participation. The directives have been issued from the Cabinet Office and monitored by a staff that has doubled to around 1500 members in the last three years. In Coventry the requirements resulted in the formation of Area Co-ordination in 1998 with six area offices. The total staff had grown by 2004 to around 70 members. The funded activities were essentially restricted to “priority” areas which had been defined by deprivation indexes.
My work with Area Co-ordination involved both priority areas and relatively wealthy areas. Some were unbelievably bad and some quite pleasant places living cheek by jowl. I had much help developing the Forum as I have described in a previous chapter of this memoir but I was the main full-time activist and it was largely my work that drove matters forward. I make no apology for writing this report in the first person.
One serious problem was that the associations in the well-heeled areas were run by competent and powerful people who knew how to operate in a political environment. The associations in the priority areas drew upon relatively poor and sometimes ill-educated people who had little experience of positive self assertion and none whatever of political and business methods. Many could not even write a letter. Some were actually illiterate. These glaring disparities caused jealousy and tension within the Forum and I spent much time negotiating compromises and smoothing ruffled feathers.It rapidly became apparent to me that the main thing needed to make this programme work was “capacity building”. This is a buzz word and is social-political speak for specialised education aimed at empowering disenfranchised people. I advocated it at every opportunity for it was clear to me that we would never make progress unless the activists in the priority areas improved their communication ability by a factor of ten. The officers directly involved tried their best but the task was stupendous. Most of the people in the priority areas were there simply because they were seriously incompetent in such skills. Many of them were wonderful people with a great range of unsuspected skills – but they had never learned how to make use of their abilities. Closing that gap proved a gigantic task – far beyond the resources of Area Co-ordination.
Time after time the multitude of initiatives failed because of apathy or incompetence within the community. In-fighting destroyed incentives and the constant fear of crime and disorder promoted withdrawal. Bad behaviour, more correctly described as sheer nastiness, and drugs drained the will of the few who might have made a difference.
In the wider Forum community things worked very well except that some of the issues brought us into direct conflict with other departments of the Council. It was quite difficult for Area Co-ordination to be funding groups that were doing their best to knock seven bells out of City Development over the Road Scheme as described elsewhere.
Never-the-less the Forum was seen as a very powerful non-aligned political vehicle and was very well respected. It appeared for a while that Mr Prescott’s dreams were coming true. Communities were being empowered and were participating in the decision making process! Whoopee!The end was quite quick. It took three years hard work to build the Forum and only a few months to destroy it. When Scrimp decided I had become too powerful and, quite mistakenly, thought I was no longer following his agenda, he decided to oust me.
Although I always knew he held extreme left wing views, I had worked all my life with members of my family who held equally extreme views and I thought he placed the values of the community before his political agenda. I trusted him and I was wrong. When it suited him he turned on me and caught me unawares and persuaded several other people, some of similarly left wing views, to join in his witch hunt.
While at least two of his acolytes resorted to violence and serial defamations, there was otherwise little that does not happen in normal political life. I have seen several powerful councillors reduced to shadows of themselves and to serious ill-health by political in-fighting. Politics is a nasty business. But most party members are aware of the risks and have a chance to hone their political skills, fighting abilities and alliances by development within the party. Members of the community have no such benefits. They are vulnerable individuals.
When I suffered the vicious political attacks, I was quite unprepared. I had taken on the roles that I did in good faith and wished only to use my ability to help the community in which I lived. My reward would be a better place in which to live. I never expected to be attacked by a gang of marauding left wing fascist thugs.
Mr. Prescott has sought to solve the problem of power mania in Whitehall by empowering communities. His initiative is almost certain to fail. The priority communities will never be able to participate effectively without massive educational improvements. If those improvements are achieved, then his participatory initiatives will not be needed!
The second problem is that the participants in his community initiatives are quite unprotected and are leaving themselves open to all manner of abuse. The conventional political parties have evolved over several centuries and long ago learned how to protect their own. If they did not, they would not survive. To attempt to bypass the conventional wisdom and impose a new political form on the people of England is a serious disservice to the individuals involved.Mr. Prescott should seek to re-establish the contact of the people with the political parties and processes instead of trying to bypass them and expose innocent citizens to risks they do not understand. He should seek to return political power to the people – where it correctly belongs.
Community has failed.