I read August’s AdLib today with much dismay. I wonder how many of us have found ourselves squatting beside a hole in the road, posing for a photograph, and subsequently pondered on why we weren’t voted in?
I completely understand the rationale of acknowledging local priorities and the important safety considerations of potholed roads, but are we getting our priorities right when we establish major campaigns over such mind-numbing issues?
Surely the focus on these little concerns, at the expense of far more important and life-altering policies, only diminishes LibDems in the perceptions of potential voters?
Do we really want to be viewed as pettifogging obsessives about the depth of tarmac when essential services such as schools, health, housing and social care are under threat?
Although I am repeatedly advised by the pundits and pollsters “This is what the focus groups are talking about” I do not find that this is the first concern on the electorate’s lips when we talk on the doorstep. Voters want to know about drops in local education standards, the lack of public transport to enable rural employment and, increasingly, the loathed bedroom tax.
Should we seriously be spending such disproportionate effort, resource and irreplaceable time on such comparative trivia when all it exposes is the pettiness of local politics?
Do we want to be seen as the party of crackpot pothole-groupies or do we have sufficient gravitas on the key issues that affect the lives of us all? I believe we do have serious and credible policies that would be supported by constituents – but our immense strengths are weakened by our stance as pothole champions of the UK.
* Ruwan Uduwerage-Perera is Chair of the Ethnic Minority Liberal Democrats.
Follow @libdemvoice.org on Bluesky
Like us on Facebook
Subscribe to our feed
Sign-up for our daily email digest
The Joy of Six 1339
Kemi Badenoch vs the Conservative Party: how the polling compares - The Week in Polls
F10 is passed overwhelmingly. Now the work begins...
Blackness Road - 1967 #dundeewestend
Torchwood is now a Cardiff Bay institution
Zachary Adam Barker
tom arms
Neil Hickman
Joe Bourke
49 Comments
Tell a cyclist who has just come of their bike on a busy road, or a motorist who has just had to fork out for new suspension that deteriorating roads are ‘trivial’.
I’m not arguing that potholes are more important than schools and health care, but in Oxfordshire at least the state of the roads is a very visible sign of Tory neglect.
And, as a local councillor, getting them fixed shows that you care and are getting things done.
In my experience, as well as being a good thing in itself, it tends to mean more votes in the box too.
I think what it is that as a community politician you talk to people on the doorstep and if this is an issue that crops up it is fair enough to put it in your Focus. For those of us who think about the bigger issues in the world this can seem mind numbing. However a lot of people do not think about these bigger issues, maybe they should but many do not.
Personally I think the most important issues in the world today are tackling global warming, reducing nuclear proliferation and strengthening the social fabric in society. But could I put that in a Focus? Not sure I could expect to win with that somehow, maybe after a number of years when I am confident that I can engage the electorate then it might be worth doing.
I should add that if you are not getting feedback about potholes then it shouldn’t go in your Focus.
The reason I write about them in street letters and Focuses is quite simple: it’s the thing residents tell me about most often. In fact, parking and potholes are quite often the only two issues I hear about in a canvassing session. This might be because I’m in a fairly prosperous part of the world, because the roads really are rubbish. I suspect it’s a combination of the two.
If we’re talking about harmful obsessions, I’d say the Lib Dem penchant for opposing almost every housing development is much worse. As for schools, health and social care, it’s difficult for us to talk about those, because many of the cuts to those areas, which many of us (and the voters) disagree with, are as a result of us being in Government with the Tories.
I’m sure we could all pack our Focus leaflets with lots of big issues, but I’m going to carry on banging on about potholes until people stop telling me potholes are a problem.
Ruwan says he has read August’s AdLib today with much dismay. I have followed the link he helpfully gives but can find nothing there (apart from a request for me to pay £35). Is he trying to drum up subscriptions?
Ruwan wonders “how many of us have found ourselves squatting beside a hole in the road, posing for a photograph, and subsequently pondered on why we weren’t voted in”? Well, the photo shows that he seems to have done that but has still been voted in. I and most of my colleagues have so posed from time to time, and been voted in. >i>Post hoc ergo propter hoc?
I have my own explanation for its popularity – it’s visual. What photo would illustrate a FOCUS story about drops in local education standards?
As long as it isn’t the only (or even the main) thing in FOCUS then good luck to everybody.
When a local council doesn’t fix its roads, fails to collect bins on time, leaves its parks untended and playgrounds broken then it is a clear sign that they are incapable of getting the basics right. Without getting the basics right, how on earth can they get the bigger things right? The focus shouldn’t be getting potholes fixed, per se, but on getting the basics right. It is the minimum people expect on a local level. In my experience, authorities failing to do this are often preoccupied with ‘the bigger picture’ of politics, talking about – and campaigning about – things which are largely put of their control.
Haringey Labour do this all the time, while failing spectacularly to make a difference where they can. For example, a lot of noise has been made about the benefit cap and bedroom tax in the Borough, with Labour councillors and their leader taking their moment in the national media with relish, slamming the LibDems in government. They failed, however, to spend all of the money handed to them by central government for the very purpose of relieving hardship for residents most at risk from local and national cuts, having to return thousands and thousands of unspent pounds to the treasury. Happy to talk the talk but failing in the basics.
Some people think we shouldn’t sweat the small stuff. I think that if we don’t , who will?
@Craig Brown
I totally concur with your rationale for being ‘pothole champions’, for they are a means to an end, rather than as some of our members feel the end itself.
Regarding the photograph of myself reluctantly measuring a pothole (in my own street as it happens), I lost this particular campaign resoundingly to the Tories who apparently care not about such frivolous things. In my recent successful campaign, I only spoke of such things as Craig Brown does, as an example of a sloppy and uncaring service.
I have to say that when I’ve been talking to people on the doorstep, they never talk about education or tuition fees or the “bedroom tax”.
The thing they mention most often? Potholes. Closely followed by fly tipping.
Every constituency is different.
I think that the “Lib Dem obsession with potholes” is one of the things we use to laugh at ourselves – much like beards and sandals, and a fascination with psephology and Land Value Taxation, it has some basis in fact but is exaggerated for comic effect.
I remember when the Independents For Frome got voted in and promptly ripped out the tarmac the council had previously allowed to be used to repair an old street in Frome, putting back paving slab(s). Cue seven shades of twittering from the Lib Dems (example: http://maggydaniell.mycouncillor.org.uk/2011/09/30/paving-the-way-to-a-different-relationship/)
Like Craig Brown says, “The focus shouldn’t be getting potholes fixed, per se, but on getting the basics right.” For Frome’s inhabitants, who are an odd bunch at the best of times, the basics included what you might call conserving heritage. The argument in defence of the tarmac was roughly that there was no money available to replace paving slabs with anything more expensive, to which the IFF response was getting one of the councillors, who happened to be a builder, to do the job… “Bugger policy, let’s just get on with it.”
It was hilarious and very memorable.
That said, I agree that generally potholes are pretty irrelevant to voting decisions on a national level. On that level we’re probably more interested in all those issues, like NHS and tuition fees, on which the Lib Dems have recently been embarrassed. So perhaps on a national level it is preferable to talk potholes, too.
It’s not crackpot to work for local people on issues like potholes.
As someone who’s had to pay out a lot of cash in the last few years due to suspension problems, caused by potholes according to our garage mechanic, it’s quite a live issue for me.
It’s not ‘mind numbing’ to want safe roads.
One of my suspension malfunctions nearly caused a blowout, thankfully the smell of burning rubber alerted me or I may have had an accident on the windy rural roads here.
Now if the article were headed ‘Can anyone explain the Lib Dem obsession with CCTV ?’ it would be more understandable.
Once upon a time, the council in my area went and painted a lot of yellow rings around potholes, and then did nothing else for ages. We resolved to put a picture in our next (peacetime) Focus. However, by the time we were ready to issue a Focus, all the yellow rings had faded from view.
So our intrepid councillor, who I will not embarrass by naming, got out his tin of yellow paint. He used it to decorate a convenient pothole at the end of his own road, and photographed that.
Before the Focus had been printed – The Council came back and mended the pothole!
Check out http://glumcouncillors.tumblr.com/ which has lots of pictures of councillors pointing to potholes.
After all it was “pavement politics” which launched the Liberal Party’s community campaigning. Perhaps “pothole politics” merely emphasises how far we are from “getting people out of their cars”? Or does it show how many are cycling these days, and the real physical dangers that potholes expose them to?
Time to put the case against.
Mending potholes is just one of many jobs organised and carried out by professionals, whether well or badly. Now, just where do amateur politicians, who are seeking votes, relate to this professional activity?
Amateur politicians could, of course, come along and have a go at professionals doing all sorts of things. They could say “Incompetent teachers, why have you failed with this 11-year-old (picture in Focus!) who still can’t read? Why didn’t you let the Focus Team do the job?” Or they could say “Incompetent planners, why is our town centre still clogged up with parked cars? Why have you failed to find room for all of them to park, within three minutes from the shops, not outside anybody’s front door, and at nil cost to the taxpayers?”
Focus writers tend to avoid such accusations, because it would be rather too obvious that the Focus Team are not qualified to make them. However, potholes appear to be simple, hence clearly fair game. Any politician thinks they are entitled to whinge about potholes.
Of course, in reality, it may be expensive to mend every small pothole immediately, so a prudent professional team may decide to wait for a while and then blitz the area, saving money for the taxpayer.
Of course, it may be our own government which has refused to give councils enough money to fix potholes effectively. Should that give us pause, when we rush in to find fault with the council?
I used to believe that Focus was at worst a harmless activity, at best a way to keep Councils on their toes and make them more responsive to what their residents want. However, it doesn’t always work that way. Sometimes the amateur can do a useful job. But sometimes, the amateur is just a parasite trying to blag votes.
We are not the Labour Party who go on and on about national issues in their leaflets. We are Liberal Democrats and we go on and on about local issues and hopefully report getting these local things fixed.
Ruwan stood in a different town council ward (4 LD elected in 2011) when he won (2013) than when in lost in 2011 (1 LD 3 Con elected in 2011). So maybe he got elected because he stood in a ward that is better for the Liberal Democrats and it might have little to do with the content of his leaflets. However as the Liberal Democrats control Newbury Town Council which he was elected to attacking it for its sloppy and uncaring services seems a strange thing to do. In their 2011 manifesto for the unitary council the Liberal Democrats had three key objectives one of which was to “Fix the roads and the potholes …”.
I do wonder what Ruwan would like to say in his leaflets about us supporting “the loathed bedroom tax”? I think we should have articles in our leaflets where we can achieve something and this may include a local campaign against say a school or post office closure. This doesn’t mean we can’t mention national issues especially our successes – pensions and increased personal allowances but I thought the main point of our leaflets is to tell everyone how successful we are and if not already a councillor what a better job we will do than the incumbent.
Litter picking and sea gulls are the favorite in Bath. Bicycle lanes, but most certainly I would not be on one of those eve if I could with the state of the roads.
Housing, our Lib Dem council does not like that either.
I have been writing on the subject of International Child Abduction and the cause and effects, children end up with things like eating disorders and emotional problems, at the last count not one of your MP’s liked the subject, and not even one in the All Party Group in the Commons.
Empty buildings is another that lacks interest.
So at least a pot hole can’t answer back.
I like all the articles on the subject of the House of Lords, I thought that as a Party you had little interest in the subject.
Perhaps potholes are a surrogate here for any issue which is difficult to blame on another Lib Dem (especially the Govt – although that is a problem in itself, bearing in mind the immense amount potholes nationally would cost to put right vs the paltry extra amount given to Highways Councils by Govt to deal with the effects of the recent mighty wet weather).
A political party needs a level of “discipline” to hold together, but I feel our parliamentarians have gone so far “off on one” at this point – Clegg’s attacks on those “who want to remain in opposition” serving as a symbol of this. So, I think increasingly you will see local attacks on Govt policies (Lib Dems will find writing about suffering under benefit cuts particularly difficult). , and you are already seeing former Lib Dems standing as Independents to enable them to make attacks of that type. This will increase. As Lib Dems, we continue with our pavement / pothole politics heritage, but ultimately we need a different national and international future too fight for from the neoliberal constrained views of the current lot nationally. I would always try to use some wider issues in local Focus – and have been prepared to use, say, the successes of Pupil Premium to demonstrate local improvements. But wider than that, no – quite a few of us find the Government’s general economic narrative unacceptable, and would not use anything that feeds that.
I agree, but if you elect an MP for your area, how can it be any good that he will only take on certain issues?
Not much point if you have problems other than pot holes, being thrown out of your home because of the bedroom tax, is not on the agenda or the need for house building. We have disquiet here on the subject of closing toilets, and empty buildings. Not very good idea toilets being closed in a city, that has many tourists.
I think this will limit the interest shown in the future, in Lib Dem MP’s.
The reason why we talk about them is that people on a large scale express concern to us about them and we believe we can sometimes get something done about them. Yes, if we only talked about potholes – or dangerous pavements or careless emptying of bins or dog mess – we’d be at fault, but one of the things well covered by Community Politics’ original theorists, and tending to be forgotten since, is how to extend from the small and local to bigger issues. For example, is the sensible solution to some very local problem blocked by the unresponsive county council or even by national law? Campaign to change it! And make the point that in a more devolved system, things would be better.
Having fought two local by-elections lately, with a residents’ survey just before the first, I can see an element of truth in Ruwan’s complaint. Broader (though still local) issues like local unemployment and regeneration tended to come out more from canvassing than from the survey, and we should be alert to that kind of difference.
I am, though, just a little fed up with the constant knowing chatter in the media about “pavement politics”, for two reasons: one, that our local campaigning covers a wide range of local issues (such as, in Tendring, the appalling record of the council in refusing to recycle all but the easiest plastic, a local residents’ concern that is obviously also a wider issue), and two, that if people are concerned about pavements, why should we ignore them?
A good PPC or council group leader should be able to link the local issues to wider ones.
Potholes and the like are serious issues. Local people are really concerned about them. Theyare dangerous for cyclists and an unpleasant experience to drive over unless you are one of those fortunate people to have an up-to-date 4×4 or similar to drive. Loose stones crack windscreens, damage paintwork and break glass covered headlights. You can claim against the relevant authority but I’ll bet it’s not straightforward so you end up paying a lot to have the damage fixed. Insurance won’t cover all the cost!
Potholes with long grass and unswept kerbs render an area scruffy..
As someone who had to retire from the 100 mile RideLondon event yesterday because a pothole tore a hole in my tyre, I can very much appreciate the importance of these menaces – but only as a specific concern, not as a political strategy 🙂
The point Ruan misses is that if it is part of a wider campaign then it can work. Potholes are highly visible examples of where things are going wrong; eg not everyone will “see” a lack of affordable housing; and potholes are a highly visible example of (fairly cheap and quick) things that local campaigners can show has been successful, thereby pointing to showing that you can be trusted on the bigger issues too.
For most of the electoral cycle I would hope a Focus was about local concerns and what local Liberals are doing about them. National concerns can be two edged, they can remind electors that we are still members of a coalition that brought in things like the bedroom tax. If we are not careful opposing coalition policy just gives ammunition to Labour for even more ‘broken promises’ attacks.
Simon, I agree. The ideas of community politicians such as Tony Greaves, Simon Titley etc who are still with us, along with countless others, either no longer “on the planet” or disappeared to other parties or none, were very much that community politics would facilitate in a First past the Post system an entry to Parliamentary success, which was simply very difficult to do in one step. Unfortunately, we had a group of parliamentarians who got impatient, and when power was offered to them, they took it on just about any terms. Had they been more patient, a time would have come (perhaps after their own careers had ended) when the circumstances would have been right to have a much bigger, perhaps majority, part in Government. Now, unfortunately, probably none of us active in Lib Dem politics today are likely ever to see anything approaching serious influence on national Government. Judging by the period 1922 – 2010, we probably will have to wait another 3 generations before we dispense with the “You can’t trust the Lib Dems” vibe.
Over time all political ideologies become debased and sclerotic. Mao Tse Tung tried to remedy this by instituting ‘permanent revolution’; Stalin by executing thousands of loyal supporters. Mandelson and Blair reinvented the Labour Party as New Labour, a trick that Ed Miliband is finding it difficult to repeat, while the Tories are past masters at morphing from one representation of conservatism to another. The one big idea that the Liberal Party had in the last 45 years was community politics: it was an ideology that arose out of the political activism of the 60s, and was still an exciting ideology when the Party adopted it in the early 70s. A cadre of activists around the country gave the best parts of their lives to implementing it in their communities and re-established liberalism in many areas where it had been extinct for generations. But by the time of the Alliance in the early 80s the ideological roots of community politics were gradually forgotten and Focus became a technique, with the same stories and graphics appearing all over the country rather than being something unique to, and serving the needs of, a particular community. The ‘pointing’ photograph is the visual equivalent of the headline stories ‘Massive Response’ and ‘Residents Fury’. None of them convey anything particular about liberalism.
Community politics was credible in the 1970s/80s because it was possible to believe that the Liberals / the Alliance were about to sweep into power. Labour stood for a failing nineteenth-century political doctrine, and would soon lose control of working class voters. The Tories were a minority of rich toffs who could be beaten in a democratic contest by Liberal / Alliance community politicians. Power could be gained simply by showing that community politicians, who of course belonged to the Liberal / Alliance party, were the people who worked harder, listened to their community, and spoke up for it. It would be today the Council, tomorrow the nation.
None of this is credible now. The big parties reinvented themselves to stay in front, of course. But more to the point, the belief that those who work harder should thereby gain power is not one that truly appeals to many. Jehovah’s Witnesses work harder. Double glazing salesmen work harder. Indeed, terrorists also go the extra mile in terms of activism and self-sacrifice, compared to conventional politicians. There is nothing terribly wonderful about shoving your opinions down somebody’s throat by being prepared to spend all day doing it.
Furthermore, it’s all very well listening to the community, but why should that translate automatically into coming up with policies that all will support? Mending potholes appeals to the community politician, because of its motherhood-and-apple-pie aspect. Everybody is anti-pothole. Consensus is easy. Getting consensus over potholes helps the community politician to conveniently overlook all those nasty real world issues where there is no consensus, where just listening and working hard is not enough, and you have to make awkward decisions which will not please everybody. You can’t often “speak” for an entire community. You can only speak for yourself and your allies.
But what about community aspirations such as improving local facilities, which do command widespread support, and are larger aims than pothole-mending? Can these rescue community politics? Well, one such aspiration that was successfully met recently in my area was the successful organisation of new allotments. A good opportunity for Lib Dem “community politicians”? Well, no, actually. A good opportunity for local gardeners, who came from all political parties and none. They would really have hated the idea of a local party politician coming along, barging in with “help”, and then trying to claim politically partisan credit!
Community politics was a noble ideal. But now it’s as dead as the dodo.
Ruwan Uduwerage-Perera
Surely the focus on these little concerns, at the expense of far more important and life-altering policies, only diminishes LibDems in the perceptions of potential voters?
As others have said, the original idea of community politics was to get people to think about politics in a different way by linking it the things immediately around them. It was to get people out of the rut of thinking of politics in terms of voting for a party because of its national leader, and reminding them that at the heart it is about democratic control of services. If people could be got out of the habit of voting for a particular party because “we always do” or “because I want to vote for Harold Wilson” or whatever, and instead thought in terms of “I’m voting for someone to represent me on the council that provides these services – who would be the best for that?” it would be the first step in getting people to think more deeply on many other issues. Start with the small things and build up. One reason for this is that many people find politics and political arguments very abstract and so switch off. If one starts with little immediate local concerns people can be got to switch on to the possibility of action through the democratic system, and can be got to see that actually things can be changed through the ballot box, you don’t have to always have the same old politicians who are more interested in arguing amongst themselves than in responding to the wishes of the people they are supposed to represent.
In many ways it was successful. It enabled the Liberal Party to break the Labour-Conservative duopoly, and in many places saw local one-party states toppled. It has led to a shift where local elections tend to be about local issues rather than purely an excuse for a national opinion poll. However, as tonyhill points out, a big problem was that community politics itself got caught in a rut, it was meant to move forward, the campaigning on potholes and so on was meant to be just a first step, it was not even meant to be solely about elections to local councils. The original idea was that the election of what was then a very strange thing – a Liberal councillor – would be a demonstration of how things didn’t have to be as people thought they always would be, it wasn’t meant to be an end in itself. After that, people were supposed to be radicalised and be encouraged to do many more things they thought could never be done. It was because it proved such a successful technique for winning local elections that after a while many took on the techniques just for this reason and did not take on the deeper ideas behind it. Another issue was that as it was developing, the whole SDP thing blew up, which resulted in a defensiveness amongst Liberal Democrats who were into community politics, they tended to plough on with it mechanically to prove the point that their sort of politics wold work better than the SDP’s top-down leader-oriented politics – much time and energy was wasted in arguing about this.
Do we really want to be viewed as pettifogging obsessives about the depth of tarmac when essential services such as schools, health, housing and social care are under threat?
The best Focus campaigns did not just stick to potholes and the like, they did move on to wider issues. However, it was important not to get into stale old political ding-dong, and instead to put things in a fresh way that would get electors to think rather than just sell politicians to them. I’m afraid the line you are putting here IS stale old ding-dong. When you write about essential services being under threat what do you mean? This is the stale old Labour ding-dong which supposes that there is no such thing as a budget to keep, so that if services are threatened it’s just because of the nastiness of Conservative politicians. The mirror image of this is Conservative politicians who go on and on about taxes, as if taxes are taken from people just to be vindictive, to attack those with money by taking it away.
People-oriented politics, politics that was as much about educating people and getting them to think as it is about winning elections, wouldn’t use stale old slogans like this. Instead it would get people to understand the real issues – the need to balance taxation and spending, the arguments on both sides, and the idea that it is up to the people themselves to come to the balance that suits them. It would be honest about the pressures in society that are leading to more expenditure on these services, and honest about the need for more taxation if they are to be kept. Regrettably, that sort of honest people-oriented politics does not seem to have developed. Most of what we are seeing from Liberal Democrat HQ now is misleading ding-dong sloganising.
@ Matthew Huntbach
While I am not sure that in the 1980’s “time and energy was wasted in arguing about” the benefits of community politics, but I know by the end of the 1980’s it was the accepted method by both ex-Liberals and ex-SDP people. However I do like the idea that instead of defending a position that we should in our leaflets present both arguments and then discover what people think after having all the facts. (I am sure my local Focus writers would reject this and say the article has too many words and not enough pictures.) If I ever work an area again hopefully I will remember this and practice it.
Ruwan Uduwerage-Perera
I think you have just been reading badly produced/edited Focuses. I have written and edited many in my years of service to the party (sadly like others I have just down-tooled recently), but I cannot recall ever including pot-hole photos. I certainly put in photos of councillors and candidates at stations when there were local transport issues; pictures of Lib Dems next to open countryside when we were campaigning against an unwanted road; pictures of candidates next to piles of rubbish when their were environmental issues etc. No doubt had pot-holes been a burning issue in my ward I would have included them too, but I always found space for comment and mention of national issues and policies in each edition. As a former district council housing spokesman I would CERTAINLY have commented upon the loathed bedroom tax. I also recall that Focuses would often be either a district edition or a county edition. In this way education issues (nationally or locally) could be covered in greater depth in the county edition. Focus is simply a tool to communicate; thoughtfully balanced in its production, it can comment on minor local issues of concern to a few, as well as the county-wide and national issues.
At the last count, you did not have one member in the All Party Group on Child Abduction. Do you feel that pot holes are the only problems as a Party you will face in the consistency?
I would say no, more children being taken abroad illegally, and we still have border control problems.
You could ask? Is it important? to those is happen too, yes.
There will be be other major issues too, complex issues. To remain in the Commons you must have interest in other subjects.
There was not even an acknowledgement on the subject of the little boy beaten to death at the hands of his parents, no one saw anything. Again, another similar case to Baby P.
I am sorry relying on word checker, it should read constituency.
I feel a couple of other errors, my sight is not great today, have once been totally blind.
Amalric
While I am not sure that in the 1980’s “time and energy was wasted in arguing about” the benefits of community politics
I was there and I remember it. At that time I was quite mobile, so experienced the Liberal-SDP debate in several places. It was the same everywhere I experienced it – the SDP poured scorn on what they considered amateurish election material, and insisted they would show those silly Liberals how to win elections with glossy professionalised branded stuff, and the Liberals dug in with a “we’ll show you” mentality, and mostly they did. This was a cause of great resentment, which you can probably still feel in my tiffs with David Allen even though he and I are on the same side of most arguments in the party today. We in the Liberals felt the innovative approaches we were taking to politics just weren’t getting the recognition they deserved, as the national media continued to paint the Alliance as if it were just the SDP doing all the work and winning the votes with the Liberals a fringe element, when at grassroots level it tended to be the other way round. Persuading the SDP about what we were doing and why we were doing really did take up an enormous amount of energy which would have been better expended not just doing the community politics stuff, but developing the idea that led to it.
but I know by the end of the 1980’s it was the accepted method by both ex-Liberals and ex-SDP people
Yes, because it worked – but it took the 1983 and 1987 general elections, and all the local elections at those times to get the SDP people to see that.
However, your use of the word “method” here is significant, because it illustrates how the theory and idealism behind it got lost. Community Politics WASN’T meant to be a “method”. The Focus newsletter was meant to be just one surface element of a much deeper and radical approach to politics. It became widely adopted because it was such an effective election-winning tool, but without the idealism of the original theory of community politics was just a shadow of what it ought to have been. If you believe it to be just a “method”, that illustrates just how much you have missed the point.
@ Matthew Huntbach
You are correct my use of “method” is significant because I have always seen the Focus newsletter as a method of winning local elections and not changing the way people think and act. This might be because the only councillors in my area were ex-SDP people.
Matthew – your historical perspective is absolutely accurate in my experience. I remember the struggle to persuade SDP candidates that printing their leaflets in black, red and blue on glossy paper was a waste of money (and it was a lot more difficult in the days before four colour litho presses and digital print allowed the mass use of colour). The SDP candidates who adopted Liberal Party techniques were the ones who began to get elected. However, most of the Liberal councillors and candidates also saw community politics as a method of getting elected; very few Liberals, SDP members, or Liberal Democrats seem interested in ideology.
Yes yes yes, you Liberals knew a few things about campaigning, boy didn’t you tell us so, boy aren’t some of you still determined to go on telling us we were rubbish, even now, a generation later. Well, the SDP were far from perfect, but they knew a few things about governing, and about credible national leadership, and about credible policies at above the pothole level, all of which impacted on our 26% vote in 1983, our highest percentage vote ever. Too many Liberals were just not interested in any of that, and saw no reason why allocating the SDP all the black hole constituencies wasn’t going to be quite fair. Maybe if more Liberals had been better as Alliance team players, the whole team would have played better, and the SDP would never have ended up electing that quintessentially non-team-player, Owen.
It’s interesting that Steve Griffiths says that “Focus is simply a tool to communicate”, whereas Matthew Huntbach argues passionately that it wasn’t “just a method”, and Tony Hill seems to be lamenting the decline of community politics into mere electioneering while not really suggesting that the process could be reversed. I think some rational thought, rather than nostalgia, is called for. Focus was certainly a good technique. Beyond that, the idea of electing councillors who would actually do a proper job of scrutiny and community representation rather than climbing into bed with the council officers a la Yes Minister also had and has a lot of merit. But when historians evaluate the broad sweep of ideas over the centuries – Marxism, Socialism, Islamism, whatever – then “Potholism” is just not going to cut the mustard.
Community politics, however romantic, simply didn’t address enough of the really big issues to engage the rapt attention of a nation. The reason it “got caught in a rut” was that the “deeper ideas behind it”, that people would be “radicalised” and “encouraged to do many more things they thought could never be done”, were mostly just fantasy politics. If something can only be described in terms of high conceptualism, if (like many of Miliband’s ideas) there is nothing there that’s truly tangible, then it doesn’t really exist. Flower power faded, as inevitably it had to do. So did community politics.
To expand on SDP leaflet production: I didn’t see much of the multicolour stuff, which I agree was silly. What I saw a lot of was black and white, earnest, factual, political analysis, presenting detailed SDP policies to the public, and putting detailed arguments to them.
As an SDP newbie I had no idea whether that was brilliant or terrible, and I still don’t! On the one hand, it looked suspiciously like a bunch of academics prating way over the heads of most voters. On the other hand, we genuinely faced a big job telling people what we stood for, and persuading them to support us. Our opponents had already had a century to do that. We were starting from scratch. We knew that the commonest accusation flung at the Liberals (fairly or otherwise) was “we don’t know what you stand for”. The SDP was determined not to be written off for the same reasons. Hence the earnest “educational” leafleting, and the flood of policies.
Did it work? Clearly it didn’t win council seats, the way Focus did. However, the Alliance in 1983 got its highest vote share of the century, and clearly the SDP had brought the crucial new support. How much of that was due to its style of campaigning, I have no idea. But it wasn’t obviously stupid. To suggest that it was, and that one of the two old Alliance parties had a monopoly on wisdom, is frankly offensive and un-called for.
Presumably, David, you would put flower power and community politics fading in the same category with “If you can remember the Sixties, you weren’t doing it right!” And, no, I haven’t even been on the beer tonight, let alone anything else…!
Sadly no Tim13, I didn’t do all these formative things in the sixties, I spent too long studying instead. Youth is wasted on the young…
Interesting post David. I have argued previously on here that I think that community politics was a credo of its time, so I agree with you about that, and that the SDP brought a lot of good people into politics and changed the dynamic in many places, including in my constituency where although the Liberals were strong we seemed to have reached a plateau. Having been involved in negotiations about which party should fight which seat I don’t think that your suggestion that the Liberals tried to dump the SDP into the black hole seats is correct, at least in my county. I think we do need to be aware of our history, but yes, rational thought about how we can once again become relevant and inspiring is what is needed now (though that might be fantasy politics as well).
David Allen
Yes yes yes, you Liberals knew a few things about campaigning, boy didn’t you tell us so, boy aren’t some of you still determined to go on telling us we were rubbish, even now, a generation later.
I wouldn’t feel so compelled to if it were not for my feeling that as time goes on it needs to be recorded while those of us who were around at the time and can remember it are still here. That what happened then has been forgotten is shown by all those posters – and even media commentators – who write of the Liberal Democrats as being made up from the SDP and the Liberal Party, and draw from that the conclusion that the free-market extremists who have taken over its leadership are the heirs of the Liberal Party stream and the rest of us are the heirs of the SDP stream, which is laughably untrue, but it’s not laughable when it seems most people who were not around at the time believe it. I occasionally take a look at the politics textbooks in the university where I work, and I find they write this history – as it is history now – in the way it was so wrongly reported by the media, that is, that the SDP were doing all the running in the 1980s and the Liberal Party was just a sleepy historical remnant. It just isn’t true – the big turnaround of the third party vote was in 1974, not 1983, and though it dropped in 1979 there were reasons for that (e.g. the Thorpe affair), and my recollection of the Liberal Party when I joined it in the late 1970s was that it was buzzing with ideas and building up an expanding network of activists whose strength came from being involved locally.
I don’t think the SDP was rubbish at all. However, at the top it had people who came from the Labour Party often from places where the vote just rolled in, so they didn’t have much idea about going out at local level and winning votes. At the bottom it was starry-eyed new recruits, who saw politics as it was reported in the national media, and so assumed it as all about a good national image, and all you had to do was promote that and the votes would come rolling in. However, there was little in the way of real ideological difference between Liberal and SDP people. Whether you were in the Liberals or SDP was mostly just down to accident – someone would be in the Liberals if they happened to have been around in a place where the Liberals had become active and so had discovered what they were about, or they would be in the SDP if they hadn’t. By the time of the merger we had mostly accepted we were all the same sort of person and it was silly to maintain two parties. The differences between the two parties were NOT (mostly) about political policies, they were about organisation, that was the reason why I voted against merger because I did not like the top-down leader-oriented way the SDP was organised, which it wanted to – and did – impose on the merged party.
It is this centralised leader-oriented model of party which has enabled the Liberal Democrats to be taken over so easily in a coup organised from the top down. I don’t believe Clegg and the Cleggies would have had such an easy ride if we had the sort of decentralised activist-oriented party we radical Liberals wanted then, but in those days “activist” was a dirty word, as it still is for the Cleggies.
David Allen
Community politics, however romantic, simply didn’t address enough of the really big issues to engage the rapt attention of a nation. The reason it “got caught in a rut” was that the “deeper ideas behind it”, that people would be “radicalised” and “encouraged to do many more things they thought could never be done”, were mostly just fantasy politics.
Of course, it’s easy to romanticise the past. Yes, there was a lot of naivety amongst radical Liberals then. As I keep saying, one of the reasons community politics got caught in a rut was that it was TOO successful as an election-winning technique, and so the methodology was soon taken over by many who did not share the idealism that was originally behind it. Not only that, but it meant people started getting elected and got bogged down in all the details of running the council. Here is another lesson for today. It is worthwhile and rewarding to hold office, but once one does it so easily to get sucked into that and be dismissive of those who got you their and the ideals they had when they helped get you their, and your own ideals as you were getting there.
For why I believe the community politics idea still has much to give, though it has largely been forgotten, you need to remember I am a southerner (despite my West Midlands surname), born and brought up in Sussex. The south saw first what we now see more widely across the country – the depoliticisation of the poorer half of society, and so the dominance of the wealthy. Back in the 1970s, the north still had the heavy industry and trade union culture, out of which came the Labour Party, and for all its many faults did build a political strength amongst poorer people, organised them, made sure they were listened to because of their voting power, gave them a voice in national politics. In the south we had none of this. Poorer people were already dropping out of even the minimal involvement in politics of voting, feeling that politics was nothing to do with them, which was giving the Tories an easy ride, and resulting in local politics dominated by their interests, and the poor being rendered invisible by having no voice at all. What little there was of the Labour Party (my home town of Brighton was one of the few places in the south where it had not dwindled to almost nothing) was already being taken over by trendy middle-class types who were more keen on using it as a vehicle to pursue their own obsessions than as the voice of the working class.
I first became aware of the Liberal Party with the 1973 Hove by-election, an early exercise in the community politics method, with Des Wilson, then and for many years after a darling of radical Liberals, the Liberal Party candidate. Community politics seemed amazing. Here, for the first time, was someone who seemed to be speaking our language, who seemed to care for us, who had ideas we could relate to, and in this way looked like he might defeat the Tories and end their dominance where we lived. OK, now older and wiser, I recognise the tricks behind it, but I could see the potential and still can. We need that sort of politics now to work with those who feel politics is nothing to do with them, to get them to use the power of the ballot box to end the way our society is getting more and more unequal, the way our country is becoming a colony of the international wealth club. The sort of politics we are getting from the Liberal Democrats now – top-down, leader-oriented, ad-man’s stuff isn’t doing that – and that’s before you get to the policies (which are what we in those days called “Thatcherism”).
A decade and a bit later I was fighting my first council election under the Liberal banner in the very constituency Des Wilson came close to winning. I used Focus as I felt it should be used. Yes, there was the pothole stuff (not just potholes, but general immediate council service issues) which served its purpose to get people reading it and not just chuck it in the bin, but also I made a conscious effort to have a little more wider discussion of general political issues, often leading from the immediate local issues. Well, I didn’t win, but I came close. The funny thing is that, having been criticised for running a campaign that was too much to the left and been told that would lose us the soft Tory votes we needed to win, I actually pushed the Tories to third place and Labour won.
Thanks tonyhill. Yes, of course there were many Liberals whose attitude to the SDP was cooperative and fair-minded, but not all. Exactly the same could be said of SDP members in their dealings with Liberals. Enough said I hope!
Matthew Huntbach,
“I voted against merger because I did not like the top-down leader-oriented way the SDP was organised,” “It is this centralised leader-oriented model of party which has enabled the Liberal Democrats to be taken over so easily in a coup organised from the top down. I don’t believe Clegg and the Cleggies would have had such an easy ride if we had the sort of decentralised activist-oriented party we radical Liberals wanted then”
These are not easy points to answer. Clearly centralisation has its major drawbacks, and clearly the Clegg coupists did exploit them. Mind you, the Militant Tendency were also coupists, and what they exploited was in many respects a relatively anarchic organisational structure. Irish and Australian politics also show examples of factionalism and dirty tricks operating in semi-anarchic environments. I am unconvinced that we should blame centralisation for Clegg. I think we should blame Clegg for Clegg.
It seems there are broadly two models for party structure: the central command model now favoured by the two-and-a-quarter main parties, and the anti-centralist model favoured by Greens, with their constant efforts to diffuse their leadership. The Greens tend to be attacked, on the whole fairly I think, as people who couldn’t organise themselves out of a paper bag and who take undue pride in that fact.
So why can’t we achieve a happy medium, with a democratic internal party structure combined with a clear leadership? I fear the answer is that it’s a good idea in theory, but it’s unstable. Over time, ambitious careerists inevitably tend to reach the top, and then they exploit power to gain more central power – as we have recently seen most shockingly in other parts of the Party (I’m keeping on the right side of the lawyers here), as well as with Clegg.
The only way to combat the centralising tendency is for activists to maintain vigilance and independence of purpose,. They haven’t been good at this in recent years. Too many people, I fear, are jealous of their own careers in local government, and hence unwilling to rock the boat. The boat needs to be rocked!
tonyhill
Having been involved in negotiations about which party should fight which seat I don’t think that your suggestion that the Liberals tried to dump the SDP into the black hole seats is correct, at least in my county.
This is another history thing. The SDP was founded by people who were leading Labour Party members. It was given a name that was intended to suggest it meant to be the main party of the left, echoing the SPD of Germany and similarly named Scandinavian parties. They really did mean it to be “Labour Party Mark II”, and expected it would take over the Labour vote, leaving Labour as a fringe far-left party, like the western European Communist parties outside Italy. I remember a suggestion being made that the SDP should fight the Labour-held seats and the Liberal fight the Conservative-held seats.
It quickly became clear this was not to be the case, and that instead the SDP was attracting just the same sort of vote that the Liberals were. That is why the sort of seat that looked a good chance for the Liberals was also considered a good chance for the SDP and called “winnable”. If the SDP had been able to meet its original claims and attract a different sort of vote that the Liberals were unable to reach, then there would have been less of a fight over which party stood in which constituency. However if you admitted what was the reality, that there was no such thing as a separate Liberal and SDP vote, then you had a problem. The obvious thing would be for the SDP to stand in those constituencies that had the sort of demographic which suggested good Liberal/SDP potential, but where there hadn’t been much of a build-up of Liberal Party organisation. Remember, the Liberal Party had been re-built in many places on personal initiative. In one place you’d have a strongish Liberal Party, because a group of people had got together and built it, in another which was demographically similar, it was a “black hole” because no-one had appeared there with the time and energy to do it. However, the SDP looked at the previous Liberal vote, which in 1979 was heavily dependent on the level of local activity, and called seats where it was high “winnable”. Suggesting they stand in seats where there had been little Liberal activity made it look like they were being made to stand in unwinnable “black holes”, because these were the seats with a low previous Liberal vote. Quite obviously, where Liberals had built up a strong local campaign, they very much resented being told they had to hand over their constituency to an SDP candidate. What was remarkable was that the two parties did manage to work out a division of constituencies, with only three left where they both stood candidates – and from my recollection none of these three were really plum “winnable” seats, rather they were three places with particularly eccentric Liberals who didn’t have much support in the wider Liberal Party anyway.
Again, while raising this may seem just to be bringing up old resentments, one reason for doing so is to present further evidence against the invented history of those who say there was a big policy difference between the two parties when they merged, and it was the Liberals holding to extreme free market positions, and SDP people who were like what is now the left-wing of the Liberal Democrats. There was not. BOTH the Liberal Party and the SDP were like what is now the left-wing of the Liberal Democrats, with the Liberal Party having a significant element much further to the left, more like today’s Green Party. The policy difference that caused the biggest argument was between the large numbers of Liberals (but not the party’s leadership) who wanted unilateral nuclear disarmament, and the SDP leadership who were resolutely opposed to that and in fact left the Labour Party in part because of the pressure from the Labour left for unilateral nuclear disarmament (there were a very small number of SDP unilateralists, but none in significant positions in the party).
The fact that the SDP started off supposing it would take mainly former Labour votes led to the belief – which you often see repeated to this day – that the SDP “split the vote” and so allowed the Conservatives to win the 1983 and 1987 general elections. It did not. Every survey of voters showed there were almost no voters who would vote Liberal but not SDP or vice versa, and showed also that these voters split evenly in their second preferences between Labour and the Conservatives. So, had there been no Liberal/SDP candidate, whoever of Labour or Conservative won would still have won.
Matthew Huntbach
“why I believe the community politics idea still has much to give, though it has largely been forgotten”
“The Labour Party, ..for all its many faults did build a political strength amongst poorer people, organised them, made sure they were listened to because of their voting power, gave them a voice in national politics.”
“Community politics… We need that sort of politics now to work with those who feel politics is nothing to do with them, to get them to use the power of the ballot box to end the way our society is getting more and more unequal, the way our country is becoming a colony of the international wealth club.”
I certainly don’t want to dismiss these ambitions. On the contrary, I think the challenge is to find a way to make them practical. You might well ask me – if pothole politics is not the answer, what is?
I wish I had a good response. I’m afraid I am only going to write here about why it’s difficult. If it sounds like pure defeatism, it isn’t meant to be. It’s trying to identify what needs to be overcome.
You rightly mention that one organisation that did achieve some narrowing of social inequalities – despite the way they often went about it – was the old Labour party. I fear that it was industrial strength which gave poorer people that voice. Because Britain needed many millions of labourers, Labour could raise many millions of voters. They could win elections without having to say (with Blair) that they were really acting for the middle class too, and that they would not dare to raise taxes and make the rich pay to reduce poverty. They could even adopt a rigid and outdated ideology and get away with that electorally, because they didn’t have to promise competence. They only had to promise to look after their own. To be fair, if their record was mixed, it did of course include some big successes.
None of that applies any more. Labourers with no skills beyond muscle power are a drug on the market. Working class solidarity has fragmented, as those who can have upskilled, while those who can’t have languished on benefits and been replaced by cheaper immigrant labour. We naively thought that our “classless” appeal could thrive in such circumstances, that our principles of individual freedom would gain ground as collective organisation fell back. We were probably too much in love with our own idealism, and we certainly weren’t cynical enough.
In hindsight, the way to win politically in that scenario should have been obvious. Identify with the survivors, and tell the voters that they would be survivors if they voted for your party. Thatcher bought up the votes of the upwardly mobile working class survivors, and gave them all brand new mahogany doors and brass knobs to distinguish themselves from the “losers” living alongside them on the ex-council estate. Individual social advancement counted for more than a philosophy of individual freedom, especially amongst those whose alternative could have been despair. Classlessness is a nice ideal, but it appeals more to semi-academic types like Matthew and myself than it does to those who might really be struggling to survive.
Thatcherism was, of course, the polar opposite of the class solidarity that Labour stood for, or indeed the broader but not wholly dissimilar “community politics” ideals which the radical Liberals stood for. It was deliberate divisiveness. It was not the wartime spirit of “Let’s all pull through together”. It was “Some people will have to go to the wall, but you won’t if you are one of us”.
And what was the effective counterpunch which eventually defeated it? Why, Blairism, the act of wrapping up divisiveness in a sugar coating of cool modernity and declaring that everybody, not just the fogeys, was welcome to come along and vote for this rebranded variant of Thatcherism!
So, the nation has voted for thirty years of divisive politics, of individual advancement, and a withering of community spirit. The nation is disgusted with the politicians it has voted into power in this way, but the nation has no idea how it might reverse the process. The ballot box theoretically offers immense power to roll back the “colony of the international wealth club”, but this is not recognised. Except by the likes of Cameron, whose five-yearly elections, bloated HoL and attempted devaluation of constituency boundaries are all moves to make sure democracy grows ever more sclerotic.
Perhaps Occupy and a mass of unemployed young people will rediscover the community solidarity principles we need. Perhaps.
David Allen
Classlessness is a nice ideal, but it appeals more to semi-academic types like Matthew and myself than it does to those who might really be struggling to survive.
It doesn’t appeal to me at all. The biggest motivating factor in my political activity is my experience of class division and my wish to end it. I might be a semi-academic type now, but I was brought up on a council estate with working class parents, and experienced all the struggle to get where I am now that means. To me, what I think you mean by “classlessness” is like a sort of politics which refuses to discuss racial discrimination or racial inequality, on the grounds that it shouldn’t exist and therefore if we pretend it doesn’t exist, it will go away.
I believe that class division is wider in the south where I was brought up than it is in the north. The southern working class is invisible thanks to the cosy agreement between the Labour Party and the Conservative Party on the electoral system which hands the south to the Tories in return for all those Labour safe seats in the north. That along with the potential of community politics that turned me off Labour and made me think of the Liberals.
Class division has grown since I was a teenager, the turning point being the election of the Thatcher government. We ought to be having a more class based politics now than we had in the 1970s. Socialism has completely failed with this however, for many reasons. One was the electoral system which led to the Labour Party dwindling away in the south and closed opportunities for any southern-working class voice to develop. Another is the Leninist model of politics, with its idea of solidarity to a top-down party line, a model which is so easily captured by semi-academic types and turned to their own needs. I am disgusted by that type who have managed to destroy the politics of the left. That too was a factor pushing me into the Liberals, when I went to university and met all those trendy lefty poseurs, whose socialism seemed to me to be more about striking a pose against wealthy mummy and daddy rather than truly closing the class gap in society. That is also why I despise Occupy. It’s full of that type. Striking silly poses rather than getting on the street, making use of the power of the ballot box, making sure ordinary people are told of how they are fooled by the right-wing lines coming from those who dominate society – that’s what Focus should be doing – potholes are just the start.
David Allen
Thatcher bought up the votes of the upwardly mobile working class survivors, and gave them all brand new mahogany doors and brass knobs to distinguish themselves from the “losers” living alongside them on the ex-council estate. Individual social advancement counted for more than a philosophy of individual freedom, especially amongst those whose alternative could have been despair.
But it isn’t working any more. There are no more council houses to give away. The right-to-buy only worked for a time because it was based on the socialist-style allocation of housing based on need. Now, you might be a hard-working upwardly mobile type, but unless you’re very wealthy, you won’t get a house of any sort if you’re in the south. You can’t afford to buy, and you won’t get a council house as there aren’t any left to allocate. This shows what we all ought to realise – Conservatism ISN’T about rewarding hard work, it’s about the opposite of this, it’s about rewarding ownership, allowing the idle rich to live lives of pleasure while others do the work. The right-to-buy and tell-Sid privatisation were all about this, making people think making money came from owning property or shares, rather than work. Tell Sid privatisation hasn’t led to the share-owning democracy we were told, it has led to control of what is most basically vital to our existence, coming under the ownership of shadowy types not even based in this country let alone under any sort of democratic control. The “Iron Lady” made a big thing out of protecting UK interests, but she left the back door open with a sign reading “Come and take what you want” and the sort of people she said we needed nuclear weapons to stop have come in through that back door and done just that.
All of this I wrote about in the 1980s, I predicted it would turn out just as it has, I wrote about the political solutions that could combat it, based on the community politics approach.
Now, people are angry, yes, but confused, they feel things are badly wrong, but there is no-one telling them why. Instead, the political right is trying to convince them it’s all the fault of the European Union. People who took on the upwardly mobile stuff are finding if you aren’t part of the super-rich, you might as well not have bothered. You could lose your job, as many have, and you are back with the council house losers, apart from there not being the council houses any more. People I know back home in Sussex are telling me of the desperation, of the food banks opening, of how what’s being said on the streets is “this is the worst government ever”. Contrary to popular beliefs, the south is NOT inhabited solely by City Traders and top civil servants. However, people in the south do not see the Labour Party as their party or as in any way as a sort of party that champions people who are not the super-wealthy. They just see it as another bunch of aliens.
But Labour has nothing to say in response, and the Liberal Democrats are issuing material, handed top-down from party HQ, about how wonderful this government is, with our Dear Leader telling us that it is the fulfillment of our dreams, what we in the party have given our lives to creating. The zero-hours contract thing shows how out-of-touch are political class is. If we had politicians with any contact with normal life, they’d be aware of it, because that is how millions live, they could hardly avoid it. Yet politicians in all parties seem to have been taken by shock by it, just unaware of how prevalent this work-pattern is.
What is needed to get people to think through all this and see how the Thatcherism that all the major parties have adopted has failed them is something which looks DIFFERENT from conventional politics. It must not appear to come top-down, branded with party political logos and pictures of the Dear Leader. It must be seen to be the product of people like them. Being different from conventional politics also means dropping a lot of the abstract political language, and the public debating point-scoring approach. It means being honest and informative, rather than using the misleading language and dubious claims of the ad-men. Linking the wider picture to immediate little things like potholes in their streets works to start it off.