New politics?

All things considered, Gordon Brown’s speech to the RSA earlier this week, setting out his views on various reforms to the UK’s political system, didn’t go down badly. It was long and hyperactive; setting himself the task of being visionary, Brown attempted to unpack all the possible meanings of ‘reform’ and ‘new politics’. Sweeping from House of Lords reform to the Alternative Vote, via more power for parliamentary committees, all-women shortlists, Freedom of Information and the obligatory reference to the irrelevant expenses debacle, Brown may not have satisfied the country’s cynical mood. But looking purely at the myriad of proposals themselves, I’m in favour of most of them and there was certainly something for everyone.

However, linking so many themes together is perhaps inevitably going to produce a spurious result. The speech drew on issues of corruption and standards in public life, demographic equality of elected representatives, Parliamentary procedure, electoral mechanics, minimum standards of essential public services… all of which are completely separate issues requiring distinct solutions.

Among the most potentially damaging confusions is that between accountability and empowerment, shown starkly in Brown’s own words:

‘That is why citizen empowerment must be at the heart of the new politics I want to see.

That means opening up government, with much more control and information held by the public and not concentrated in Westminster and Whitehall. Over and above our commitment to transparency through FOI we are committed to progressively reducing the time taken to release official documents – ensuring the public have access to public papers far quicker than ever before.

And we can now open up government in new transformative ways not open to us a decade ago.

We have brought public services closer to people in the internet age through the direct.gov website.’… [continues on the theme of web-based empowerment]

Empowerment, to me, means the ability to get more involved and have more clout in the decision-making process – not the ability, as important as it might be, to view statistics on government performance online or order copies of dodgy dossiers. And decision-making means anyone interested coming together to decide on things – not merely holding others to account about the decisions that they have made, or (with reference to another Labour suggestion) signing online petitions. Or, indeed, blogging.

This isn’t just semantic confusion resulting from a harassed PM trying to pack too much into one speech, but a real problem of perception that becomes even more problematic at the local level than at the national. In a speech ostensibly about improving democracy, Brown’s focus on Total Place, new scrutiny powers, consolidation of budget streams, and the like reveals a commitment not to improved democracy, but to improved managerialism. Joint working between the Chief Exec of the Primary Care Trust and the Chief Executive of the Council, drawing on shared funding streams linked to broad social objectives rather than to specific institutions, is almost certainly a good thing, but one thing it doesn’t do is increase the influence your average punter has on local decisions. In fact, by marginalising elected members in favour of appointed managers, it may even decrease local influence.

Whilst we’re still in a situation where central government spending priorities are still the biggest determinant of council taxes, business rates and more, there’s still likely to be a confusion between ever- more-atomised accountability and the collective experience of political empowerment. Next time our erstwhile leader gets the opportunity, rather than canter through a dozen policies, I’d rather he start with just one: putting our money where our mouth is.

Recognition for Transition at Kingston’s Green Guardian Awards

Was very chuffed with this! Press release style article follows. Shaun’s also blogged about it here.

On Monday 25th January, various members of Transition Town Kingston attended the Green Guardian awards at the Rose Theatre. Sponsored by the Kingston Guardian newspaper and the Council, the awards seek to recognise local people’s efforts on environmental issues over the last twelve months. Members were delighted when Transition Town Kingston received the award for the best green group or project. Additionally, Shaun Chamberlin, member of TTK’s temporary steering group and author of The Transition Timeline, was presented with the Green Champion award amidst stiff competition – not least from Marilyn Mason, chair of TTK’s business group, who was highly commended for her Greener Kingston initiative that focuses on ridding Kingston of plastic bags.

Shaun said, ‘TTK’s award came as a very pleasant surprise. It’s a tribute to the effort that a lot of Kingston people have put in so far, hosting community events and, increasingly, starting their own projects. We want to use this platform to raise more awareness of peak oil and climate change, but also to help create a united front on green issues for community groups and individuals in Kingston – there’s a lot of great work already going on, as the amount of nominations at this year’s awards showed. The publicity will come in very handy as we promote our next two big events: our art-based intergenerational project in March, “Our Kingston, Our Future”, and our big celebration-cum-launch party, The Great Unleashing, in April.’

Well done everyone! This is the perfect time to get more involved or start a project of your own. Come along to a meeting or event, email TTKingston@yahoogroups.com or see the latest news on www.ttkingston.org . Places going fast for Our Kingston, Our Future – sign up now at www.ourkingstonourfuture.org .

Waste II: Waste Harder

Just got back from a walk with Ruth. We found a pile of new, but slashed Topshop shoes, including a pair in Ruth’s size which were not too much the worse for wear apart from being a bit wet:

Drying out back at ours

We looked them up on the Topshop website and they’re still selling them at full price, which is 28 quid. Until local authorities – who can work with residents to build up evidence of what’s happening on the ground – have some bargaining power with these people, there’s little chance of this kind of chain store code of conduct even mentioning the issue. In the meantime, anyone up for starting a reclaimed goods stall in the town centre and seeing how quickly we’re politely moved on?

Waste

Time sure does fly when you’re sitting around eating a lot. But now I’m back at work, back at school and on the campaign trail. Exciting times coming up for TTK as well, more on which later.

In the meantime I’m slowly revving up for the new year from lazy to angry, aided by this story about clothes chain H&M, which allegedly throws away unsold clothing rather than donating it – even going to the trouble of systematically punching small holes in items with machines first to make them unwearable. The article also implicates Wal-Mart, though less surprise there.

H&M’s glossy sustainability pages boast charity collaborations and trendy organic fabrics. But this large-scale waste story shows all this up as a sop to the corporate social responsibility (CSR) trend – along with the alleged claim, which I can’t seem to find on the website for some strange reason, that a new H&M sustainability policy was to use less paper in their shipping labels.

The social and environmental implications are obvious and massive – but the democratic implications are huge too. One of the biggest issues that I hear people bring up in consultation meetings and discussions is the lack of input that local people have over business activity – and indeed the lack of a stake that local businesses often have in the areas in which they operate. Business rates are collected by the Council but set by – and passed straight to – central Government, who reallocate it – leaving Councils looking greedy for taking business’s money and having little, beyond the joint ventures in areas like crime and the environment that are beginning to emerge, to show for it. This means little of the mutual understanding needed to cooperate on issues like this – and little leverage when it comes to changing minds on the best ways to go about things.

The Conservatives are proposing some welcome changes to the system to protect smaller shops and allow local councils to keep business rates from new development. But nothing that I’ve seen – apart from possibly the Sustainable Communities Act – is proposing that Councils be allowed the power to do deals with businesses around the leying and spending of rates to incentivise – positively or negatively – dubious and pretty much immoral practices like throwing away clothes. (On the other side of the coin, the lack of a statutory duty for Councils to collect business waste – despite businesses ostensibly paying rates to the Council, the body which notoriously empties everyone else’s bins – means that as things stand, Councils might not even find out about such practices, and would need to make a special effort beyond their usual remits in order to help out with the situation.)

This would not be a substitute for corporate social responsibility or community pressure, but it would give it some focus on both sides of the debate – helping CSR teams do their job by spreading genuine best practice arising in local situations, and giving communities recourse to more than just making a noise when they didn’t like something that was going on.

It’s exactly the turf on which the Conservatives are trying to establish themselves. But in a climate of cuts, they’re going to have to do something spectacularly principled to offer more than the tired old formula, moulded under Thatcher and still an ever-present legacy, of Councils getting more power only when Government is assured that they will also get more of the blame.

What do you think? Please comment – even (or especially) to expose any small machine-punched holes in my logic.

To discuss any issues around Kingston, politics or both, just comment on this post and I’ll get back to you, or feel free to email me at any time at majeed@cantab.net

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Twitter: majeedneky

The Wave

Nothing like a good tidy up. Thanks to all who made suggestions for improving the layout.

Busy at work and university but looking forward to this Saturday’s climate march, The Wave . If anyone from around Kingston / Surbiton is keen to go but doesn’t know anyone else going, a few TTK members and others are meeting up at 11.30am on Waterloo Station concourse by the ticket barriers closest to Platform 10. All welcome!

There is an ongoing debate amongst social and environmental activists as to how effective such marches are. Pessimists – or realists? – point to the million-plus people who mobilised in the UK alone on the first London march against the Iraq war in 2003, asking what difference they made to the decision to go to war. Harder-line activists might suggest that a family-friendly march, stewarded by the police, will never have the shock value or achieve as much as proper direct action such as stopping a coal train en route to a power station.

My take on this is that, given the extent of the national media’s role in setting the political agenda, and the fragmentation of media consumption as a result of technological and social changes, a single high-profile national action, appealing to as wide a demographic as possible and therefore reported by everyone, is sometimes the only way to show that a critical mass of people care about an issue. It’s oversimplistic to say that because the Iraq march didn’t stop the war, or the climate marches haven’t resulted in emissions reductions yet, these activities were pointless. Would the groundbreaking nature of the Climate Change Act 2008, or the heat felt by the government over the need for the Iraq inquiry to be public, have been as acute if not for these marches? We don’t know but I strongly suspect not.

So – see you there on Saturday?

To discuss any issues around Kingston, politics or both, just comment on this post and I’ll get back to you, or feel free to email me at any time at majeed@cantab.net

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Twitter: majeedneky

Social capital in action

I blogged here about Robert Putnam’s groundbreaking book on social capital, Bowling Alone. Since reading it, I’ve started to think about more of life through the lens of social capital: aware that it’s just one way of thinking, but nonetheless finding it enlightening.

This view of things coloured my experience of an evening hosted by Transition Town Kingston at the Mayo Centre, United Reformed Church last night. Entitled ‘The Power of Alliances’, it was organised by two intrepid members who brought the idea to the TTK steering group, asked for the support they needed, got on with it and did a fantastic job. The idea was to bring representatives of local groups – not necessarily environmental – together to explore shared challenges and see how TTK’s role as a Kingston-centred umbrella organisation could be helpful to existing groups.

Immediately I was keen on the idea: by helping each other out, we can make our social capital go further, particularly if it’s dwindling as Putnam says. In particular, the idea of formalising our social capital by forming associations was explored by the guest speaker, Peter from Ham United Group, who have attracted considerable funding for some very ambitious projects (some not mentioned on the website as they’re still coming together) simply by virtue of being a hard-working, visible, place-centred community group with a structure and regular meetings. Formed a year after HUG, this is starting to be TTK’s experience too, with an approach by ARTGYM leading to a joint bid for government funding and a very exciting project, due to come to fruition in March 2010 (website coming soon!)

The community garden at Ham Library. Photo: Richmond Environment Network

The new partnership orthodoxies of local government depend heavily on such formal, constituted groups as a consultation base. I’ve argued before that this can lead to views of individuals being overlooked – not everyone identifies with a faith group, or a charitable association, or an environmental group – and also to an excess of conformity, stifling new ideas. History continually demonstrates that the rebels of today are the vested interests of tomorrow.

But such groups are where much of the achievement and improvement in a community happens. They are a crucial way of giving people the confidence and desire to stand up and be counted in local politics. So as well as changing the structures by which we do things in order to draw in individuals by offering more power, perhaps society (as Putnam posits) would be better if more, and different, people were involved in groups.

Thinking about it, my anxieties about groups and the democratic process are in large part to do with the ways in which groups often position themselves. One of the many people I enjoyed meeting last night was a representative from a local residents’ association. He told me that it was in danger of collapse, with activists standing down from committee posts for a variety of reasons, and no replacements coming through. When I pressed him on possible reasons for this, he said that paradoxically, it was because the association had already achieved a great deal; what problems there were have either been solved to residents’ satisfaction or have proven intractable.

If they are to succeed, such groups must reposition themselves positively: my knee-jerk suggestion for the residents’ association was to ask residents ‘How do you want your area to be in 10 years?’ and draw up campaign priorities accordingly. This positive approach necessarily leads to a widening of scope: not so much an interest group, but an interests group. For example, around a core theme of sustainability – which, as legislation and corporate rhetoric constantly show, is interpretable very broadly – HUG have started a community magazine, investigated energy projects, created both productive and ornamental gardens, run craft and sport sessions for local children, and more. The key to their success, said Peter from HUG, was perseverence, but also the idea that whoever had an idea would run with it and be able to draw on the group’s resources for support. This was inspiring and affirming to hear: the way in which the evening itself had been put on was a major shift towards that model of operation for Transition Town Kingston.

This sort of thing is surely the resurgence in civil society that David Cameron cites. But to see volunteers as a substitute for funded programmes would be a mistake. Volunteers can and do burn out. Funding for projects often does not cover labour costs and so necessitates volunteer involvement anyway.

Decentralisation and community empowerment do not mean a laissez-faire approach – far from it. Cut too much and you risk derailing positive objectives in favour of negativity; After all, if everyone’s at the Poll Tax riots, who’s going to grow the veg?

To discuss any issues around Kingston, politics or both, just comment on this post and I’ll get back to you, or feel free to email me at any time at majeed@cantab.net

http://whorunskingston.wordpress.com
Twitter: majeedneky

Sustainable Communities Act mark II

I went to an excellent and interesting conference run by the Environmental Law Foundation earlier this week on community empowerment. As seems to be a running theme with this blog, this is another often-used but possibly seldom-understood phrase – a buzzword which could be so much more.

In the last couple of years the government has, to give it credit, produced some legislation to accompany the continual talk of devolving power that has persisted ever since Scottish and Welsh independence. The Local Government and Public Involvement in Health Act 2007 and the Local Democracy, Economic Development and Construction Act 2009 have established a ‘duty to involve’ local people in decision-making, including under-represented groups, and a ‘duty to promote democracy’ and increase public understanding of governance structures.

The meaning and impact of this legislation is still percolating through local government, partly because councils are large organisations and this is a major policy shift, but also because the terms of these duties have been phrased deliberately vaguely. This is ostensibly to allow local councils to interpret and innovate, but there is some concern that this will end up perpetuating a model of local consultative governance which, at the moment (from what I read and also from personal experience both as a resident and as a consultant) largely favours representatives of formalised community groups with specific – by no means usually bad, but nevertheless specific – policy agendas.

The Sustainable Communities Act aims at ‘double devolution’ – from central government to local councils, and onwards to local people. Councils ‘opting in’ (last year I helped coordinate a petition to Kingston Council to urge them to do so) must use citizens’ panels of some description to generate ideas for national legislation that would help make the local community more environmentally, economically, socially or democratically sustainable – from tax breaks for local green or independent businesses to special protection for allotment land. Ideas from areas all over the country are whittled down to a shortlist by a board appointed by the Local Government Association and then presented to the Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government (currently John Denham), who must enact them or tell Parliament a good reason why not. Information, including proposals submitted, can be viewed here. You can sign up to support the campaign here.

A project on the Act has found that panels were much more successful at submitting a large number of well-developed ideas before the deadline when they consisted of a new and often larger set of local citizens than when an existing group of customary, quasi-professional ’stakeholders’ was used. Hopefully this new research will influence the direction of local and national consultation policy in the future.

One thing I didn’t realise is that the Duty to Involve allows councils to devolve budgets to ward level. From a quick Google search, the use of this appears to be confined largely to street maintenance budgets, and within that, to capital spending; of course, money spent by agencies other than the Council is not involved. The Sustainable Communities Act goes further, stipulating that Local Spending Reports be published that detail all money spent in a given local authority area, by all public bodies – including quangos previously unencumbered with the need to be accountable to particular communities in this way. Once spending levels are established, the proposals process detailed above can be used to request the transfer of particular budgets to bring them under democratic control.

Unlike the proposals process, which is making significant progress, this commitment on Local Spending Plans has met with some difficulty. According to Steve Shaw of LocalWorks, who spoke at the Environmental Law Foundation conference I attended, the reports released thus far mainly included known spending by bodies such as councils and Primary Care Trusts.

Government inaction is a major threat to what, in a world where financial resources are the biggest constituent of power, may be the most truly empowering initiative that has been seen for some time. Of course, it doesn’t solve all our problems: there’s still the issue of how communities get together and decide how to spend what’s available. But unlike the participatory budgeting pilots held around the country from 2007 (see www.participatorybudgeting.org.uk) there is a sense that we could be moving away from tokenistic and towards genuine budgets. After all, ‘empowerment’ is about getting things done… right?

PS: Please consider helping the Act carry on working – whether there is regime change or not – and making sure that there are proper Local Spending Reports in the future by lobbying your MP: http://www.localworks.org/node/76. I’ve also been reading more about the work of the Environmental Law Foundation – another organisation well worth checking out / considering supporting!

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Old hat but good and relevant… um… hat

Just a quick one again to recommend a book. Been around for a few years but I’ve just got to it.

Bowling Alone by Robert Putnam explores and popularises the idea of social capital – the inherent value of social networks.

At first (like so much in this field) this sounds like a slightly abstract idea. But as I understand it, social capital is what gives a community its capacity for members to to identify with each other, build on successes or deal with problems – its social resilience and adaptability. The links and networks that they form are what gives people the support to go on through a bad time – or the human resources to mount a campaign.

Putnam explores the decline in numbers of people voting, campaigning or running for office, and in the numbers of people actively participating in local clubs and societies (as distinct from the model of signing up to a mass-membership national pressure group, which is becoming increasingly common) in the US. What implications might this have? Is it true that people nowadays are still ‘joiners’, just in a different way? What impact has the e-democracy concept had, if any?

Bowling Alone is impassioned and well-written whilst still being robust in its research (and, importantly, honest when there are doubts!) I recommend it not just because it’s interesting in itself, but also because it’s very possibly a beneficial new angle on some other problem or cause you might be working on.

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It’s how you get there that counts

After my robe and cat were such a hit, I’m loath to try to follow it up. So as they say, And Now for Something Completely Different.

Required reading for one of my lectures today (in Social Sustainability) was this paper by Dr. Silvia Gullino, a lecturer at Kingston. You have to be a subscriber to read the whole thing, but you can see the abstract and get a gist by following the link.

Though I didn’t agree with absolutely all of the analysis, the basic premise really resonated with what I think and I feel that it ties together some of my previous posts.

Both British and US planning and social policy (increasingly being treated, I think rightly, by theoretical and political structures as two sides of the same thing) are very keen on ‘mixed communities’. There is no one definition but the idea is one of diversity – of ethnicity, class, age etc – within a local community. The paper gives two examples of regeneration programmes in the US, in Chicago and Baltimore, that set out to regenerate low-income, high unemployment areas by making them into mixed communities – gentrifying them selectively and rehousing or relocating some or all of the original residents to make space for a more diverse crowd with a mix of housing tenures.

In Britain we link this strongly to our other new favourite phrase, ’sustainable communities’. It is by making this link that the shortcomings of the two US examples become particularly apparent.

The idea of a sustainable community isn’t quite as buzzwordy as it seems. To me it conveys the concept that the community is self-sustaining, that it has the resources – physical but also social – to look after its members and to improve itself. The paper argued that not only did the US programmes underestimate the natural social capital in the neighbourhoods (which showed itself in the vigorous residents’ campaigns against the lack of consultation involved in the schemes) but that it also eroded this by relocating people away from their established social networks. This has similarities to the widespread practices that took place in Britain in the 1950s, which I read about recently in the excellent ‘Estates’ by Lynsey Hanley.

Silvia’s paper warns that we shouldn’t fall into the trap of treating the task of building a sustainable community – which is embedded into the new way of doing things in British local government – as a product, when in fact it’s a process. It’s not just about where we’re going, it’s about how we get there. If we fight off climate change, but do so through becoming a corporate oligarchy, is it a sustainable solution? How about if we restore trust in our democracy, but do so by reinforcing the idea that ‘politics’ is about who we send to Westminster every few years and barely think about in between apart from when we read about them (or more likely their boss) in the paper?

This is why I have misgivings about relying too heavily on consultation, as opposed to participation. A lot of the time, consultation is something we get involved in when our interests are threatened. By its very nature it can never be something we do every day. And so even when we get the outcomes we want, the way we do so entrenches the limited range of outcomes from which we will be able to choose in the future.

Direct decision making in whatever form has often been written off as impractical. But this is partly because it has become an anomaly in a system where the principle of subsidiarity no longer applies, if it ever did. Subsidiarity is the idea that any given decision should be made at the most local, smallest or lowest level that is competent to make such a decision. The idea is most often associated with the theroretical workings of the European Community, but you would be hard-pressed to find even the most ardent Europhile who thought that it was truly applied there.

The Lib Dems in local government have taken some steps towards this, devolving first Council committees and meetings and then sections of budgets to groups of wards known as neighbourhoods. It’s a good start and one of the reasons that I’m a Lib Dem is to argue that we should go much further. At the moment, neighbourhoods are administrative areas alone, little-known to anyone not interested in Council matters. But to my mind, when you have an area with its own identity and associated social capital that is also a decision-making force, empowering those within it and giving them an equal voice, that is the foundation on which a sustainable community begins the never-ending process of sustaining itself.

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Our new cat

Continuing the drift towards more lightweight posts, here are some pictures of our new cat, who we have named Æthelstan after the Saxon king allegedly crowned in Kingston. We got him from Battersea Dogs and Cats Home, which I thoroughly recommend – they are amazingly well organised and very friendly.

He is around 2 years old and has been at Battersea for about a month. We were told that he was shy and he spent four hours under the bookshelf, before we brought out his dinner; since then, he’s been a different cat.

Eyeing my stripy dressing gown earlier this morning

Getting a little bolder

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