Local councils and (anti) censorship

Maybe it's something that everyone else knows, but I didn't. At the tail-end of this old-ish film clip about Shane Meadows 'This is England' film from a few years ago .....




... (now being sequeled with a TV series), Mark Kermode raises the question of why a film that incorporates an educational message should be given an '18' classification by the BBFC - on the grounds that it includes a bit of racist language and a few violent scenes.

Meadows makes the point that there are plenty of all-action flicks that qualify for a '15' cert while involving slaughter on a vast scale, and I'm sure I don't need to rehearse all sides of this argument for you again.

But for me, the interesting revelation is that a lot of local authorities chose to overturn the BBFC decision and instead apply a '15' certificate for local showings.

It's news to me that this can happen - and I think that it opens up all kinds of possibilities in terms of cultural autonomy. What I'd like to know (and I'll look into it if I get time - unless someone wants to explain it to me) is this: What is the process by which a local authority reviews the BBFC's classification, changes it and then communicates it to local cinemas?

Local councils v journalists

I generally don't promote the work of my Super Ego blog to you, the readers of my Id blog (explanation here), but I think you might be interested in this post?

John Healey on decentralisation

Here's John Healey with a generally encouraging post on decentralisation over at Labour Home.

Two observations:

1. Healey is right that Cameron's decentralising rhetoric is one that masks a refusal to address the causes of political centralisation, and one that will, in practice, continue and deepen the tendency that has gathered pace since the 1970s

2. Healey needs to distance Labour from it's past on this one. There are plenty of understandable reasons why Labour took the approach that it did - he hints at it here:

"When we were elected in 1997 we were a government in a hurry. Our landslide was in part a rejection of under-funded, under-performing and highly uneven public services and our mandate was to transform them. So while we may have overdone the targets, central programmes and performance management, we were right at that time to drive the change from the centre. However, the arguments for doing so are now long gone."

He needs to go a great deal further for two reasons. The first is a principled one, the second is one that is more Machiavellian:

a) in democratic terms, what has happened to local democracy has been indefensible. It's been bad and wrong on so many levels, and they don't need listing again here again, do they?

b) people that work in the public sector are voters too. They've lived through a decade where they've had money chucked at them in a way that they wouldn't have dreamed of in the mid-1990s. They should be Labour votes that are weighed rather than counted.

Yet they hate their work. They hate the useless ever-multiplying over-paid audit-obsessed middle-managers.

They hate the insecurity of 'contestable' jobs. They despair - on behalf of the people they work to serve - of the lack of continuity, the inconsistency and the collapse of professionalism that has come with the rise of the managerial consultariat.

Politicians routinely get their targets met, but more rarely get anything useful done. Public sector employees understand - as voters as well as workers - that these clipboard-wielding zombies are incapable of moving small pebbles up hills. That they are great at giving the public what they say want - but never in a way that they want it. 

As Dr Faustus discovered, you have to be careful what you wish for....

Labour needs to go one step further. It needs to do what is in it's soul. It needs to announce an about-turn. A re-statement of faith in professionalism. A shift towards a publicly accountable - but professionally capable - public service ethos.

It's no longer acceptable for all aspects of government to be about upwards accountability. That's what fosters our enervated arse-covering public sector. 

Instead, we need an almost revolutionary commitment to decentralisation. One that only Labour - with it's Trades Union footprint - can promise.

The case is made here better than I can make it. 

It's time for an apology and a change of tack. Change is in the air. Now's the time to do it.

Go get 'em John!

Small C?

I saw this in yesterday's Guardian: - a feature that starts off talking about Long Eaton - my old stamping ground when I was a kiddie, where I was at primary school. I remember the local journalists on The Advertiser - people knew who they were - they'd nudge each other when one of them passed on the street - did you see who that was?

"A lot of people are missing the Advertiser," says Keen. "This used to be a beautiful town. But it's not the town it was: it's got scruffy, it's got rough, and now we even lose the paper." For the older generation, these things matter. "They want to know who's passed away," says the barman at the Corner Pin down the road, "and to check it's not them."

But the younger generation don't much care. Carl and Katrina Smith, a married couple in their mid-30s, not only didn't know the paper had closed; they didn't even know its name - and they were born nearby and have lived in the town most of their lives. They did, though, occasionally buy the Nottingham Evening Post -mainly for the jobs. For this generation, Long Eaton as a place has almost ceased to exist, lost in a more amorphous Nottingham-Derby conurbation.

"It's only the older people who think of communities now," says Carl. "For us it's more a place to live than a community." He was an electrician's mate and worked all over the country (until he was laid off two months ago - people are as vulnerable as papers in the slump); Katrina works in Leicester. Long Eaton is a dormitory for them; they rent a house and say they have no idea who their neighbours are.

"It used to be a proper community, with the railway, the canals and the upholstery industry," says Carl, "but look round at the shops now. You've got Tesco and Asda, and everything else is in decline." There is one new shop in Long Eaton - selling Polish, Russian and Lithuanian food, to cater for migrants from eastern Europe. The shop even has free papers in those three languages, as well as Ukrainian. But they are UK-wide and won't record deaths in Long Eaton, in any language."

I know that everyone has acknowledged most of this, but it seems to me to be one of the great unanswered questions of our time: The small-c-conservative question: Do we want those communities back? The local paper, the street where everybody knows your name? The high street with a High Class Victualler that makes his own sausages, and the baker that isn't Greggs?

Do we want a locality at all? Or do we really want (as appears to be our revealed preference) dormitory towns?

Civic renewal and decentralisation

This is a good post. Go and read it.

This is not a minor skirmish in local government

There are times when I wonder if I'm the only person alive who thinks like this:

• A Conservative councillor in Croydon grew up in Belfast, and in her youth became tangled up in the IRA. Something that she regretted, repented and took action to redress. She wrote a book. She lived under a death threat.
• Later on, she is elected and takes a position on education. Her past life had no bearing on this, and her mandate was to bring her judgement to bear on behalf of the people she was elected by
• A pressure group threatens to publicise her past in order to bully her into changing her position
• She feels she has to resign.

Her youthful mistakes have no bearing on the case in point. Her repentance and redress for those mistakes is total and she deserves to be chaired through the streets of Croydon for her courage rather than to be hounded out of elected office.

It should be a point of principle that people who attempt to bully elected representatives in this disgusting way should be bullied back with infinitely more vigour by the combined forces at the disposal of all people who hold elected office. Party politics should be above this.

That my own party - Labour - connived with this disgusts me. That the Conservatives didn't stick up for Maria Gatland is equally disgusting. It used to be the case that the Tories were defenders of *representative* democracy. This is clearly no longer the case.

This is the degree to which local democracy is being debased in the UK. If such a thing could happen, another Irish Tory, Edmund Burke, would be bouncing of the sides of his coffin in rage.

And he'd be right to do so.

Petition successful

Well, the Currant Bun has got it's way and Ms Shoesmith has been sacked. My understanding is that she offered to resign, was told not to, and then Ed Balls sacked her live on TV. Lovely stuff.

There's a gloriously long unreadable post to be written about how the cathartic sacking of a few named officers does little to solve a problem, but seeing as I have family working reasonably close to this case, I better keep my trap shut.

Here's a very good post by Anthony on populism and good judgement though. Only tangential, like.....

How the Congestion Charge could be decided in a way that improves the quality of governance

Here's Steve Platt on Boris' 'consultation' about the western extension of the Congestion Charge Zone:

"The problem is that Bojo’s consultation exercise, in which he promised to ‘listen to the people of London’ and go along with whatever they said, has about as much to do with democracy as a phone-in talk show. Those who bother to express their views are those who feel strongest on the subject.

So, unsurprisingly, it’s those who were being made to pay more for the privilege of driving their petrol combustion engines through any semblance of a sensible transport and environmental policy who shouted loudest. Out of 28,000 responses (London’s electorate numbers 5,044,962, by the way), 67 per cent of individuals and 87 per cent of businesses said get rid of the zone, let us drive for free. You’d have had a similar response if you’d proposed abolishing car insurance.

Much less well-publicised has been the response to Transport for London’s mini-opinion survey on the subject. This was organised to see how representative the responses to Bojo’s consultation exercise were.

The answer is: hardly at all. In the TfL survey, only 41 per cent of individuals (out of 2,000 surveyed) favoured getting rid of the western extension and only half of businesses (out of 1,000). Thirty per cent of individuals favoured keeping it as it is and 15 per cent said they would keep it but make changes to the way it operates (such as easing restrictions in the middle of the day).

On a crude reckoning that makes a 45:41 per cent majority in favour of keeping a modified scheme – which is an odd sort of popular mandate for its abolition."

Boris should have just said this instead:

"Blinking flip! I put it in my manifesto. I won the election. I'm going to jolly well do it .... er ....by jove."

Aside from the waste of energy and resources that this consultation caused, this is the kind of abuse that we can expect more of as long as we have this illiterate demand to be consulted and 'have our say' on any contentious issue.

A properly structured (televised?) public debate based on evidence, (and not one of those 'have-your-say-a-thons' that TV debates usually consist of) and then voted on by the individuals who have been elected to the London Assembly would have been a different matter altogether. Or even better - a weighted vote of the Assembly (reflecting the London-wide interest) and the relevant local councillors in the boroughs and wards effected.

When people talk about a "disenchantment with existing democracy", the answer isn't to cook up some scheme whereby the usual suspects - the fanatics, if you like, have a shouting contest.

It's one where we find ways to make votes at a local government and a regional government level count. Where the best decisions are the result of a distributed moral wisdom - not the diktat of a handful of powerful players using their aggregated power.

That means that we need elected representatives to be more communicative - to show their working, and to explain their decisions. And here's the big question; I suspect that - if you got most of our senior politicians into a Chatham House seminar with a few political scientists, that this is the conclusion that they would eventually reach (though probably with an understandable lack of enthusiasm) as well.

But there is no sign that this model of democracy is being promoted or facilitated either by the political parties, the government, or by many individual politicians. It is not the system that the permanent bureaucracy expect to have to work for, and in my experience, they actively undermine anything that looks a bit like it. This new study offers some confirmation of this view.

This is a representative democracy solution - not a direct democracy one. The improvement and logical trajectory of the world's most successful model of governance is - and will be - blocked by incumbents, both political and bureaucratic. And there isn't a popular movement anywhere speaking truth unto power about this.

Why? Bigger fish to fry?

Too strong locally to ignore - who have a missed?

I was taking to someone earlier saying that there were only four British politicians that really were so strong in local government that they couldn't be ignored nationally. That their presence in central government owed a lot to their power at a local level.

I don't mean people who first made a bit of a reputation in local government before becoming national figures (Stephen Byers for example) or people who were strong in local government and became non-cabinet level national figures (Ken Livingstone for example*).

I ask this because it's a significant characteristic of French politics that many national figures are local powerbrokers who are too are too strong to exclude from government. Where the cabinet - to some extent - choose the PM and not the other way around. A useful side-issue in answering Harriet Harman's great question.

I said 'four' because years ago, I developed this argument in an essay that has long-since been lost. The four were....

1. Herbert Morrisson
2. Joseph Chamberlain
3. David Blunkett
4. .... er ....

Who am I missing?

*I would say, though, that Ken is a great example of someone who used his local powerbase effectively against the centre - but for the purposes of this question, he doesn't count.

Empowerment, engagement or leadership?

Here's Kevin Harris on the question of 'community empowerment.'

Like the notion of 'community leadership,' I believe that it needs a good deal more examination than it's getting. And, with apologies, I've told you before that my main purpose in blogging here is to organise my own views and those that I read elsewhere. In the absence of a fully formed comment, there's this, this and this.

More later maybe.

Phew!

Now that the BBC have been told not to build those local websites, we can be sure that private investment in high quality journalism will just come flooding in and we will see absolute proof that the BBC distorts the market!!?!

In other news, the reason the economy is in such a mess is because of too much government regulation!!

Web-usability and decentralisation

Anthony has a really excellent post here about the tensions between demands for local accountability and the needs of national government. Don't let anything I say here now distract you from reading the whole thing.

The core question that Anthony goes over is the need for "balancing effectiveness and democratic accountability in delivery of local services centred around individuals."

I read the post just after having looked at an online presentation about usability and the iPhone (ta Kathryn), and it started me thinking about different models of decentralisation. And Anthony's implied use of the term 'user-centred design' (OK, he didn't use those exact words, but still...) made me think about how developments in software will change things. How the medium will shape the message.

Usability and interface design is a fascinating subject. It's a huge growth area in commercial web-development, and the increasing seriousness with which it's taken says a lot about the maturing industry. It has the potential to turn unused services into highly efficient ones if it's done properly.

The practice of usability in design offers a number of lessons that translate well outside the world of XHTML and CSS.

The title of first book that I flicked through on the subject about seven years ago - 'Don't Make Me Think' - is one such lesson that has implications for the whole dialogue around choice. How far does it get in the way of ... well... choice? And, really, since about 2001, books like that, and the work of Jakob Nielsen and others have had a massive impact well beyond the GUI design sphere.

Another is the question of the legitimacy of market choices as a rival to democratic ones. One of the staples of Public Choice Theory has always been that we make only one big decision at the ballot-box every five years and a few smaller ones in between, whereas we indicate dozens of preferences each day at the checkout (and, increasingly, via Worldpay). As Chris Dillow put it when I interviewed him a while ago, "imagine if we bought our food simply by voting for Tesco or Sainsbury every five years."

Now, I don't want to go into it too much here as it's the subject of a book rather than a blog-post, but - as Tom suggests here, this notion of rationality, with markets as their expression, leaves a great deal to be desired.

Indeed, picking up on the discussions around 'behavioural economics', perhaps in some ways, usability and web-design can tell us more about people's preferences. When Anthony talks about user-oriented design of local government services, it is noticeable how little attention is paid by policymakers into the subject of web-usability.

Usability works in a number of ways. Firstly, it re-focuses the design of the interface upon the needs and preferences of the user. In terms of web-accessibility (a separate, but closely-related idea), this means allowing users to customise the interface to meet their particular physical requirements. Poor eyesight? Change the font-size. Dyslexic? Change the fonts and the colours, use a speech-browser, and so on.

One mistake a few commentators make is that accessibility = political correctness. In reality, what this evolving science does is that it removes bureaucratic and diagnostic boundaries around needs and abilities. The 'skip navigation' links that appeared early on when sites had a separate 'text-only' interface. The convention has now been mainstreamed, and many of the better websites offer automatic browser-sensitive options such as single-column views of websites for mobile phones.

So a highly literate, perfectly-sighted athlete can navigate their way around your website on their mobile phone, while riding a bicycle, using only their thumb. And someone who doesn't have the use of their hands and has a visual impairment can using assistive technology interfaces can do so as well.

Things move on. It's a couple of years since I worked around accessible web design, and I know certain approaches to web-accessibility rapidly move from orthodoxy to heresy in this evolving sphere, so I'll leave it there.

But there are other issues. Matching expectations with the use of language, for instance. Have a look at Moo.com as an example. The design is straightforward, the language used is attractive, and subtly honest - you don't get scripts that pretend to be human in some way with the messages that you are given.

And then there is commercial usability. Large retail websites spend a fortune watching user groups use their website. Put most crudely, eye-tracking software will tell a researcher exactly where on the screen a user first glances when they decide to buy something. The 'Buy Now' button gets moved to that spot as soon as the research results are in. But, more broadly, whole businesses can be re-designed following a usability exercise.

One report that a saw a while ago said that eye-tracking software could even be applied to window shoppers. Look at an item in the window, and find some context-sensitive help that tells you what a bargain it is. Privacy issues abound there, of course.

Enough, already. What I'm trying to say, in summary, is this:

Services can be perfected quite rapidly using other evidence than market data, and this is starting to happen in a way that it didn't use to.

Now, back to Anthony's article. Much of the distrust between Westminster governments and local bureaucracies is in the quality of service design and implementation. One thing Anthony didn't really pick up on is the way that this results in a managerial centralisation - where services are boiled down to processes that are designed to remove professionals and expertise and replace them with a more narrow, er.. flexible workforce. We are seeing feedback mechanisms and - ultimately - service design being perfected centrally and applied locally.

It would be interesting to hear views on how effective this approach is destined to be - it's one that has been barely started, but one that could be expected to evolve rapidly over the next decade.

Will we have a need for locally-designed and implemented services in ten years time? Or will we have replicable bureaucracies all over the country - doing things in the same way, responding to feedback in the same way, allowing users to shape services in the same way? And if so, will this clarify the real political questions that preoccupy elected representatives?

Will it reduce their reliance upon local civil servants? I'm inclined to think it will.

Will it increase the power of those elected representatives? I'm inclined to think it will.

In the wider context of e-government infrastructure combined with post-bailout new thinking, this is an exciting time. I'd argue that a centralisation in the way that services are designed by users may ultimately provide local government with the kind of 'dashboard' that it needs to actually make manageable local decisions again without exciting the displeasure of a Whitehall bureaucracy that can snatch powers away at the first hint of incompetence.

Perhaps this is very deterministic - even idealistic - but it is possible, surely, that centralisation in service design will result in political decentralisation. A new sort of 'subsidiarity'?

I know I'd really need to write a book rather than a post to make this point properly, but can you see where I'm going?

Oh - one final point: Have you noticed that the countries that are the best at designing usable process-fitting products that value design as highly as technical innovation (mobile phones, flat-pack furniture) are the Scandinavian social-democratic societies that have spent the last thirty years being the least distracted by the irrelevant arguments around the need for a universal market determinism in everything?

Scrap The Standards Board!

Flying in the face of everything that is proper and decent, I'd like to say that Dizzy is absolutely right in saying that The Standards Board wastes its time and our money. (OK, it's an old post, I missed it the first time, but still...).

Between 2004 and 2008, the Standards Board for England investigated a total of 2937 complaints. Of those 2344 either had "no evidence of breach" or "no further action".

That means that 80% of the complaints that were made were, for want of a better word, spurious and/or baseless. The total cost of investigating these complaints was £21,024,225 of which £16,274,604 was spent on the spurious or baseless complaints.

Is there, or can there be, a justification for the existence of quango that spends 80% of its time investigating things with no outcome at a cost of £16.2 million? I'd say there isn't.

Me neither. And all of this really does throw complaints by right-wingers about how democracy is all a waste of money, and that politicians are doing politics (and lavish lifestyles to boot!) on the rates.

If you were to argue that £21 million should be spent on state-funding for political parties over a four year period, I expect that you'd get the usual barrage of abuse from the anti-politics hardcore that we all (and most readers of this blog - yes - I do mean you) give an easy ride to most of the time.

But £21million to fund a group of bureaucrats with a brief to create an effective rival for politicians? No bother. Not a squeak. Or not until Dizzy squeaked, anyway....

Obama's personal qualities: Bad for democracy?

Here's Marina Hyde on how wonderful an orator Barack Obama is, and how ... er ... pale ... British politicians are by comparison.The US, with it's more professional polity creates - she argues - something of a gold standard that we can only aspire to in this country at the moment. She compares Bill Clinton's speech at Labour Conference a few years ago (following Blair's appearance) "being a bit like Robbie Williams opening for Frank Sinatra."

True enough. There does appear to be something frighteningly competent about Obama, and there is plenty of comment around saying that if he is half as good at governing as he is at campaigning, the whole Bush SNAFU will be forgotten within six months and the US will be restored to it's most loved status.

But all of this worries me. US Presidents make our politicians look like amateurs. National full-time politicians make local ones look like amateurs. As Hazel said the other day, we have a political system that favours career politicians these days, and some cabinet ministers appear to be more groomed and less authentic than their predecessors (and some of their colleagues!). The next Prime Minster will probably be from this professional treadmill, and this marks something of a change in British politics.

Politicians mystify most of us at the best of times. When they behave rationally, we think they are being weird - for the reasons I went into in this post. They are basing their decisions more on sophisticated polling now than instinct, and it makes them appear even less human. And in the meantime, while the public value the quality of their own local services, they don't value local government in general particularly highly because of the way that local government is reported. It's the old NHS paradox: That polling shows people saying "The NHS is bloody awful, but - as it happens - my local hospitals and doctors are really good ... but I'm lucky..."

This high expectation about the quality of communications skills and this lack of a route into politics for the streetwise mother is a serious problem. In an ultra-competitive arena, Obama has raised the game yet again to a standard that most aspiring politicians will never match (as Marina says, most successful national politicians won't match it) and this can't be good for democracy.

That the word 'local' gets conflated with 'parochial' and that the parochial is treated as a bad / boring / incompetent sphere is something that needs to change before Marina can get the standard of public life that she asks for in her piece.

Most people don't accept this, by the way. Hazel does though....

(Sorry for the lack of citations in this post. It's written quickly and arguments are from memory: But the stuff about polling and the NHS / local government is true - check it out if you have time...)

Community leadership

I was talking to a local councillor (a Tory or a Lib-Dem, I think?) yesterday, and he was fulminating about the whole concept of community leadership.

He'd been at a seminar at which this role was being urged upon him, and he mentioned that he believed that it cast him almost in the role of a Nazi-style Gauleiter. In fairness to him (and I intend to be fair - I completely agreed with him) he was quick to point out that he wasn't doing a 'NuLab = Nazi' comparison, but I think his point was well made.

As he explained it to me:

"If I went on the doorsteps and said 'vote for me and I will lead you for the next few years', I would hand a safe council ward to my opponents very quickly. I can only ask to voters to pick me as a representative - not a leader. If that's what they ask me to do, that's what I should do."

I think that the Gauleiter comparison is very apt given local government's role in delivering (yuk!) central government priorities, and that this concept is a horrible symptom of the centralising approach to local government.

That the concept of community leadership is being imposed without comment from any of the main parties illustrates very clearly the leap in democratic literacy that is needed before we can take any meaningful programme of political decentralisation of the kind that all of the parties claim to want to promote seriously.

Like the phrase 'postcode lottery', the term 'community leadership' is a standing obstacle to any meaningful reform of local government.

And another thing - again, suggested by the term 'Gauleiter', that role of 'community leadership' seems very close to the outrageously-named community representatives that proliferate in Northern Ireland - often surrogates for paramilitary groups. Community leaders would be a better term for them, I think?

Leadership doesn't imply an election, after all....

Unfamilliar ground

Er.... Simon Jenkins has written a quite-good piece on local democracy. I missed it a few weeks ago, but in the interests of balance, I should add it here.

I suppose the only major criticism (there are a number of minor gripes) I can have of it is that it can't have been written by the author of this. However, back to the current piece. Jenkins says:

British people still regard their local council as their first port of call for public services: by two to one, compared with central government (according to Mori). Yet these councils are, to the centre, mere agencies. Their elected representatives are superfluous as conduits of accountability, and their voters not to be trusted with policy, taxes or priorities.

Empowerment is empty without accountability, and accountability is empty without fiscal bite. There is no communal governance in Britain at present and no intention, on the part of either big party, to introduce it.

To the government, Britons are considered incompetent to shoulder the democratic responsibilities considered normal elsewhere. Ask why, and ministers all give the same reply: "But have you actually met any councillors? They are useless." Were it true, which it is not, they do not ask what has made them so.

When Jenkins says "..were it true, which it is not..." he is at least half-wrong in my experience (and I believe that if any commentator were to do any field-work on this, they'd agree with me rather than Jenkins on this). By way of credentials, I'd say that I've met a great many councillors in recent years - probably a good many more than Jenkins, or indeed, most journalists.

He either knows he is half-wrong or he hasn't done much field-work. Interestingly, we see no mention from Jenkins about the quality of local public sector management - another elephant in this particular room.

A better question would be to ask what can be done to change this? Because, being half-wrong on that point, Jenkins would like to see power handed to a group of people who simply would not exercise it very well. That would further damage the case for strong local representative democracy. Is Jenkins arguing, for instance, that .....

• Councillors should be given resources and assistance with research in order to frame policy more effectively
• Councillors should be given assistance in publicising themselves, their work, and in meeting the public in a way that they can benefit from the undoubted wisdom that the general public can impart to elected officials
• Councils should go out of their way to make standing for the council an attractive and fulfilling civic duty
• Council officials should be trained to understand that councillors are the most important people in the local government decision-making chain - and that the democratic services team within a council should generally have a pro-councillor (rather than a pro-Chief Executive) orientation

Certainly, there are very few local authorities that have any record of doing any of these things - even though none of them are problematic under current legislation. Would Jenkins, for instance, ask that the odious Standards Board should be scrapped so that councillors are not subjected to petty humilliations every time they have the nerve to remind an unelected local government officer about who should really be in charge in the Town Hall?

Reading him is a bit like playing Mornington Crescent. You always end up back in the same place. Jenkins has something of a track-record of using dishonest arguments in support of direct democracy and in opposition to representative government, so ... he's still the most objectively reactionary columnist writing in any British newspaper.

Phew.

No news

Why do local authorities spend a fortune advertising their jobs in local newspapers that have all-but abandoned the job of providing coverage of local issues?

Someone is starting to ask, anyway...

Unsustainable local media

No time at the moment to make much of this, but here's a notepad to work from:

1. Local radio is crap
2. Ad revenue is falling for local media
3. The BBC is squeezing local media (and given the lack of investment from local media outlets, can the BEEB be blamed for bridging this market failure?)
4. Local radio stations are being hit by the increased level of regulatory oversight - can they afford the fines that national media shrugs off?
5. Journalists value national exposure and aren't interested in even writing up local stories for local audiences
6. Regional news on TV is underfunded
7. ITV is even prepared to abandon it's privileged status as a public service broadcaster because it's PSB obligations (local news included) are perceived to be too expensive.
8. Local journalists being squeezed and further disintermediated by a fatal combination of big media and local bloggers.

'Parochial' is a dirty word. Local issues go unrecorded and unexamined. It seems that almost no-one wants to be a local journalist.

Does this combination of circumstances fatally undermine all other projects that are intended to improve the quality of democracy?

Political Darwinism in action.

A good optimistic post over here.

In Northern Ireland currently, the following is happening:

1. SF and the DUP are at their electoral peak. Both are in government and starting to look a bit grimy to those that didn't think they were grimy already. Both are gradually wilting under a welter of internal divisions and challenges from their ultras.
2. Northern Ireland is going through a reorganisation. There are 26 councils in Northern Ireland. They will be narrowed down to 11 in the next few years. That means that a lot of councillors are going to retire soon
3. Double (and even triple) mandates are becoming an electoral issue. Politicians holding more than one of the main elected offices - MLAs, councillors, MPs and MEP. They are becoming less acceptable to the public and can be expected to disappear soonish. So, more de facto resignations of one kind or another.
   
4. Politicians who thrived on a highly divided society on the verge (!) of conflict are no longer finding life as easy. Yet more turf on the political Darwinist fire.
   
5. New boundaries and electoral settlements mean that politicians are having to reach across communal and sectarian divides and look for second preference votes.
6. Most of the parties are starting to acknowledge the all-Ireland dimension and are becoming a bit more post-modern in their understanding of sovereignty. The SDLP are actively exploring links to the Fianna Fáil - the largest party in the south. Old rigid assumptions are going out of the window.
   

What does all of this mean? Well, draw your own conclusions. But I think that it's a good time to be involved in the SDLP (and probably in the Ulster Unionist Party, if you're that way inclined). And it could be a great time to keep an eye on the little dull details of political evolution.

And, bearing in mind the line that Bernard Crick trotted out earlier today - "that local government was the school of democracy" - Northern Ireland could be in the weird position of having the highest standard of political representation anywhere on these islands within the next decade. That would be a total reversal of the current situation.

Sacking surplus politicians

On the face of it, this proposal from the New Local Government Network (NLGN) makes sense. In summary, they want to replace the Greater London Assembly with a council made up of the leaders of London's boroughs.

I'd go one step further and get rid of the elected mayor as well - and just have a regional assembly made up of nominated councillors, who in turn nominate a mayor.

This would not only be a very good idea in principle for London. It would also provide a template for regional government throughout the rest of the UK. You could sack all of those MLAs in Northern Ireland, the MSPs and the WAMs. And you could set up regional assemblies where they don't really sit properly everywhere else.

It would mean that councillors would have more power, and people would have a reason to care about which councillors they elect. And it would allow you to establish real regional government throughout the UK - without having to have a referendum.

In the worst case - if you have to have a referendum, it would be winnable, because the question would be framed in the kind of terms that would appeal to the fuckwits who usually advocate referendums.

People would be asked if they want to sack elected politicians.