In Tuesday's Guardian, Polly Toynbee, analysing the local election results claimed that localism was not important and that securing proportional representation for other elections was a far more important issue at present.
The danger with this argument is that it disregards the significant polling evidence that where people feel their views are being listened too locally and they have a meaningful way to take part, they have much greater local satisfaction. Many regeneration schemes in deprived communities across the country have shown this as evidenced by the level of participation in their community activities.
The evidence she puts forward for 4 star councils changing hands politically whilst poor performing Councils don't is not borne out by the evidence as Council's such as Hull demonstrated last week. The assumption seems to be that voters judge Council's on their star rating, when that is itself a central government construct rather than anything localist in its own right.
Voters take a much localist approach with 4 star Camden changing hands due to its position on parking charges - a localist policy if ever there was one.
Despite it being a national furore in recent weeks, the public expressed their view in various ways on the frequency of rubbish collection. Again this was a opinion expressed on what were initially locally made choices, even if it then later became part of a national debate.
Polly Toynbee herself has chronicled in her Guardian column people's local satisfaction with services and contrasted it with their dissatisfaction with the same services at a national level. Surely this local satisfaction is down to the hard work and engagement of those who work in these front-line services?
She has also been a superb advocate for services like Sure Start, in which many parents go on to become staff in the service - surely a hard indicator of participation by those previously hard to reach?
She is or course right to say that "voters are disaffected....not because they yearn for more meetings", but there are many ways to engage with people that do not require conventional meetings as TCC knows from its own experience in this field.
Naturally there is a tension in the localism debate between the provision of universal services and the requirement for local discretion, but there does seem to be an emerging consensus around; firstly the development of more local organisations such as NHS Foundation Trusts with a large membership base; and secondly the requirement of minimum levels of service that seeks to reduce the worst aspects of postcode lotteries.
On the day she published her article, the Daily Telegraph reported that in a speech to the Policy Exchange think tank, Oliver Letwin was saying there was a divide between Labour as what he described as a "centralised provider" and the "framework state" provided by the Conservatives. Whilst Gordon Brown or David Miliband would no doubt respond that that is a caricature of government policy, nevertheless all of this goes to the heart of what sort of localism should evolve in the coming years. Process is part of it but then so is the minimum level of service.
So far there has been no public debate on what a "national minimum service" should be for every locally provided service. This is an area where there will be clear differences between the main political parties and surely we all need to know what the differences are? Polly Toynbee could be a powerful advocate for such a debate.
Localism is not a panacea to voter turnout, but then neither is proportional representation as European election turnouts show. The only practical way to reduce disaffection and increase turnout in an era when there is a consensus on many of the big political and economic questions is to increase the amount of face to face contact that parties spend with voters on the doorstep in weak areas as well as strong areas! That requires activists and the only way to give then a good reason to come back to all the parties is probably a substantial shift of party funding to local parties so they can engage with all voters and not just target voters in target seats.
Localism isn't just about how to provide services, it is also about strengthening political engagement too!
Recent Comments