‘It is the people themselves, who are incessantly called upon to participate personally in the decisions, not merely by expressing opinions about them in innumerable popular meetings; not merely by voting for or against their exponents at recurring elections; but actually by individually sharing in their operation’
Read on to find out who said this about what, where and when!
The course that I have been attending this autumn in
A recurring theme has been this Government’s commitment to ‘community consultation and participation’, which pervades their thinking on Local Government reform. The idea is that ‘People should be empowered’ to take responsibility for their own neighbourhoods, and that the role of the Councillor is to ‘lead’ and ‘facilitate’ the people in their role. (It was a course for Councillors, so they couldn’t be entirely written out of the equation!)
The motive for taking this approach is cited as concern about general apathy towards local government, whether evidenced by low turn out in elections or unwillingness to participate in community events. It is thought that by empowering people one will stimulate some sort of community spirit.
In this connection we were introduced to two projects that derive from Government ‘thinking’; ‘Participatory Budgeting’ and ‘Transfer of assets to the community’. The first idea is that local communities should be given some of the public purse (or ‘community kitty’) to manage for themselves, and the second is that a number of assets currently owned by councils should be handed over to local people to run.
In my view there are many problems with these ideas, and I, along with the vast majority of participants on the course, am highly suspicious of them.
There is absolutely no guarantee that money or assets passed to the community as a whole will ultimately fall into the hands of those who actually need them. Far more likely is that they will be appropriated by those ‘usual suspects’ who are articulate and can shout the loudest. I believe it is one of the key roles of the elected representatives of the community (i.e. councillors) to make judgements about resources, and to be accountable to the community as a whole. Anything else would result in an unpleasant free for all.
I believe that these ideas are really an attempt to concentrate more power in the hands of central government by diluting and emasculating the power of Local Councils yet further. In the event that local communities fail to act responsibly the perverse result would be to shift the seat of judgement further from the grass roots
This brings us back to the provenance of the quotation that started this post. It was actually written by Beatrice and Sidney Webb about Stalin’s
