A democracy worth defending?

Grace L

Our local borough council is being abolished. It’s a done deal apparently.

At the moment we have a local borough council in Hastings that makes decisions on a number of important issues – such as planning permission for new developments and dealing with homelessness –  and a county council with a vastly bigger budget dealing with most of the other day-to-day services such as our roads, buses, schools, and social services.

The government’s plan is that in two years time we will only have one unitary authority covering the whole of East Sussex. While this will centralise local government responsibilities in the county into one organisation, another layer of local government will be added on top with the election of a mayor who will rule over a vast new kingdom of 1.5 million people in East and West Sussex (including Brighton & Hove). Certain central government powers – and big wads of central government money – will be handed down or ‘devolved’ to this mayor.

So in this dizzying mix of centralising and devolving, how’s it all going to come out in the wash for people living in little old Hastings?

When trying to figure out what the impact will be I thought I would start with what the government says it’s trying to achieve, and then dig into what the unsaid agenda might be. Turns out there isn’t a lot of reading between the lines to do. 

Labour wants economic growth, which they envisage will be largely driven by housebuilding – expanding the construction industry and shoring up the mammoth banking and finance sector which relies heavily on mortgage lending – which has the added bonus of appearing to satisfy the popular desire for more housing (even if none of this profit-driven development is likely to be in any way affordable). And while house building in general is popular, in practice it is a deeply contentious process. Local, democratically elected, planning committees, that have to listen to everyone’s concerns about protecting green spaces, affordability, adequacy of water, sewage and other local infrastructure, are a real drag. Hence the need for new powerful and centralised political structures at a local level to get things done.

The other thing Labour wants is for all this construction to be funded by private investment, not public money – and they are prepared to give vast amounts of public money to private investors to encourage them to do that. Go figure. And the best way to get those investors to actually spend that money to create all those jobs and growth (and carbon emissions) is to allow them to spend as little as possible on VAT, tax, wages, national insurance or on meeting pesky environmental or labour regulations. Enter the realm of the Freeport, or Special Economic Zone (SEZ) – low-tax, low-regulation, permitted development free-for-all, zones. And if you want to create more of them, you need to create the ‘special’ political structures to justify these ‘special’ places – the regional mayor. 

Angela Raynor, the Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government, and the heavyweight in government driving these changes, suggests it is a brave and democratic step to give away Westminster power and money to devolved mayors. But given that the ultimate aim is about offloading vast amounts of public money, land and resources to the private sector then it’s actually very canny to have a locally elected buffer to take the political heat for that.

If you want to sell your country to the lowest bidder, then what better gimmick to use to do it? Dozens of local mayors with the power to set their own local rules on business taxation and regulation in order to attract investment for their area – all competing against each other to see who can debase themselves most appealingly to the world’s big corporations.

Research indicates that creating these special economic zones only moves investment from one area to another, rather than attracting genuinely new investment, and that they are almost designed to promote corruption, but why let a little empirical evidence take the shine off a get-economic-growth-quick scheme for a government desperate to look like it has a plan?

In Teeside where the last government created the flagship pilot for these post-brexit fun zones for global capitalists, it ended with 90% of what were previously public assets in the hands of two cronies of the new Tees Valley mayor, who was elected to oversee the project. In opposition Labour called for a national audit office investigation into Teeside about the ‘value for money’ gained from over half a billion in public money spent. That idea now seems to have been quietly dropped.

So when Angela Raynor says the reason for centralising local councils is to “achieve efficiencies, improve capacity and withstand financial shocks,” read: ‘make deeper cuts to local public services’; and when she says her rationale for devolving power to locally elected mayors is “to unlock growth in our regions,” be very clear this is about promoting the growth of profits and power for big corporations. And be very afraid of what that means for the environment, workers’ rights, and any notion of the greater good or the public commons.

The other casualty in all this is democracy. Note the fake democratic input our local council has been offered, in the ludicrously short consultation period for designing these new structures – they are allowed to choose between four different variations on how they would prefer to abolish themselves before the 21st of March.

Or the fake democracy of a mayoral election where the media will focus on cosmetic differences between charismatic or boring candidates, but the political consensus that economic growth is always good, at any price, will go entirely unchallenged.

We will lose the kind of democracy where people get to debate what kind of country or town they want to live in and get to have those debates with elected representatives who live and work in the communities they represent. 

Of course, many of us on the Left have a very healthy disregard for the sham nature of this kind of democracy at every level of government – the illusion of choice at election time when we know that every lever of real power is privately owned and that the unelected military, police and courts are used to protect that private property and power, regardless of who gets elected. We spend our lives campaigning against the vested interests which dictate government policies supporting wars, environmental destruction and deepening poverty and inequality, which have absolutely no popular support. 

A fairly standard response to this from the Right is that it’s not perfect, but if you don’t like UK democracy you should go and live in China or Iran. Caitlyn Johnstone has my favourite riposte to that argument: 

“…the fact that they immediately start babbling about where they’d prefer to live is just a symptom of how sick and twisted this civilization is. They’re so cognitively and emotionally divorced from the violence and tyranny their government is inflicting upon the global south that they think the question of which countries are worse than others is a question of how pleasant it would be for them personally to live in. It’s like yes asshole, it’s very nice to be living in the imperial core that’s receiving the benefits of mass murder and imperialist extraction, and it’s less nice to live in the countries where the murder and extraction is happening. That’s the entire fucking point here.”

But disdain for our threadbare democracy also comes strongly from another section of the Right – the desire for strong leaders to take decisive action, to deal with the corruption and incompetence that comes from all this ‘diversity and inclusion’ and ordinary plebs taking part in making any decisions. For the far right, our sham democracy is an illusion to be stripped away in order to strengthen, rather than confront, the raw power of capital.

This is why George Orwell, in the middle of the second world war, took issue with the radical left critique of “bourgeois democracy”: “[it] is not enough, but it is very much better than Fascism, and to work against it is to saw off the branch you are sitting on. The common people know this, even if the intellectuals do not. They will cling very firmly to the ‘illusion’ of Democracy and to the Western conception of honesty and common decency.”

We might baulk at describing honesty and common decency as being Western conceptions, but Orwell was no bleeding heart, or liberal elitist when it came to British democracy. He wanted a new socialist movement, in opposition to the authoritarian stalinist communist parties of the time, which would be “both revolutionary and democratic”. “It will aim at the most fundamental changes”, he wrote, “and be perfectly willing to use violence if necessary.” And crucially, he argued, for this British socialist movement to succeed it must realise that “British Democracy is not altogether a sham, not simply ‘superstructure’, that on the contrary it is something extremely valuable which must be preserved and extended, and above all, must not be insulted.”

The abolition of our borough council, and our ability to even have a cursory say about what does or doesn’t get built here, is an insult to our democracy. The imposition of a Mayor to oversee mini corporate fiefdoms – operating outside national regulations and avoiding national taxation – is to extend the power of private corporations at the expense of democratic control for the public good.

I’m not going to overblow the significance of any council with a few million quid to collect rubbish and to open homeless shelters when the temperature drops below freezing. Most of us who have ever met a borough councillor know that it usually only takes a few minutes discussing any issue before they remind you how little power they have.

But it’s better than not having a borough council. 

And it’s better than electing fewer councillors to meet in a town even further away, to discuss bigger budgets but with all the same legal and financial restrictions on exercising real power that our local borough councillors feel. And it’s better than having a beauty pageant / mayoral election for one individual who will have sweeping and largely unaccountable power, who most of us will likely never have a chance to meet or interact with, and which will further deepen people’s sense of alienation, disenfranchisement and disillusionment with our pathetically inadequate political system.

On the other hand the process of defending our borough council; of rejecting the mayoral model of personality-driven politics; of coming together to talk about what we think is driving this agenda and what we should do about it – maybe that’s the way we get the real prize. 

It’s not a done deal til the deal is done. Opposing these plans could be how we deepen and extend our democracy so that more people not only know and care about what’s going on around us but want to be actively involved in changing it. At the very least we can show the politicians who try to force it through that they will pay a price for breaking faith with us on our democratic rights.

Time for a Hastings people’s assembly on defending democracy, anyone?

To contribute to the consultation on the local devolution plans, head here.