I wasn’t there to hear the Birmingham conference back the community politics motion on Tuesday. I had meant to be but had to go back to London early.
It was one of those pieces of sacred Liberalism that you daren’t speak against, but I would have done. I’m not sorry it was passed but the party must also understand that there is another side to it.
Community politics may be a revolutionary doctrine, but BAD community politics – and we have practised some of that occasionally, let’s face it – damages the party and damages the political process.
I know I’m on sacred ground. Criticising community politics at a Liberal Democrat conference is like criticising the Pope in St Peter’s Square. But there are four very good reasons why we must go into this with our eyes open:
First, because we’ve long since abandoned real community politics in favour of its outward manifestation – a blizzard of leaflets with no obvious ideology. Which have been copied by every political opponent for a generation.
Sometimes there is no ideology beyond the demand to stuff paper. Sometimes even worse, there is a kind of off-putting and desperate campaigning on empty.
Second, because community politics has become muddled with New Labour’s rhetoric about ‘empowerment’.
Empowerment is a nonsense for Liberal Democrats. People already have the power. Even Tony Blair, even Ed Miliband, can’t distribute it. It isn’t theirs to give. The point is to encourage people to use their power, and to teach them how.
The third reason is that the intellectual underpinnings of community politics are now riddled with dry rot and need to be renewed. We know so much more now about what works than we did in 1970. We have concepts like social capital and co-production.
There are radical ideas out there about the power shifts in public services when users work alongside professionals. There are techniques about revitalising local economics. By comparison, community politics is almost as vague as the Big Society, which basically means: ‘wouldn’t it be nice if everyone had lunch together’.
The party could not even bring itself to write a radical new localism policy this year. We ran out of intellectual puff.
The fourth reason may be very naive. But it seems to me that community politics has became infected with the corrosive language of the political classes. Some of our leaflets – like our opponents’ leaflets – are so disconnected from real life, so unpleasant in their accusations as they drop through the letter box, that many people find them repulsive. That is hard but true.
So this is what I believe. When our tone of voice alienates people – not just from one political party but from them all – then we’re not practising community politics.
Unless community politics is capable of rescuing politics itself, unless it is generous enough to embrace everyone in the community, unless it is based firmly on an ideology which includes working in public services, and economic action too – unless it does all that, then it won’t revitalise our party and it won’t work.
There needs to be the same generosity of spirit that was there in the original community politics, so that the prime purpose is to spread power – no matter which political party benefits to start with.
Don’t forget that the political crisis isn’t just ours. The total membership of all political parties is less than the circulation of a small magazine in Smiths. So the new community politics has to be different. It has to be about training everyone in political, economic and social change, locally and face to face.
Did the motion say that? No it didn’t.
David Boyle is a member of the Federal Policy Committee, a fellow of the New Economics Foundation and his new book The Human Element is published next month.
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12 Comments
At last…!
I too felt pretty disappointed with what came across. Where was the party of ideas? Where was the innovative thinking? Where- in short- was the Liberalism?
At a time of genuine crisis in the capitalist system. At a time when democracy is in tumult as Russia loses it and the Arab world gains it, the message from the party is spectacularly… pedestrian.
We should be tearing up the unenforcible tax code, not hiring another 2000 tax inspectors. We need to admit that the NHS is bust and we have to take radical steps to fix it. We should be denouncing centralization, not practicing it.
Where is our agenda for politics 2.0? It certainly isn’t going to happen with a blizzard of mendacious leaflets.
We need to tell the truth to the voters- they can handle it and they will respect us more if we do so.
“It was one of those pieces of sacred Liberalism that you daren’t speak against, but I would have done”
To anyone who has the guts to do this at conference, bravo, irrespective of the issue. Our constitution says we shouldn’t be enslaved by conformity, we are a broad church, but, all to often, people are afraid to speak out against the majority, or even vote against the majority.
One of the reasons for the economic crisis was that not enough challenged the “emperor’s new clothes” theory: that we could carry on financing increasing public spending with ever-increasing debt. So let’s celebrate the iconoclast, who challenges our cherished beliefs. Even if we end up voting them down, regardless.
And, let’s put amendments forward, putting these points of view. It’s not enough to criticise conference, if we haven’t given conference a chance to vote for what we’re proposing.
Good comment but don’t blame the motion – which I think did try to distinguish community politics from a blizzard of leaflets. And you are quite right to tie it to our poverty of thinking about localism.
Very useful blog piece, I agree with much of it. I would add a further point. We must look at the actual mechanisms. We have in Britain by far the largest most remote and “non” community based (so called) “Local” Authorities in the democratic world. I believe we must start proposing genuinely empowered community sized municipalities, like those in most other countries. My blog weblink gives some figures, but a simple google of “municipality” also serves.
Yes that does mean proposing a major reorganisation of local government.
I am not persuaded by the distinction between “empowerment” and the alternative put forward by David in this article.
Apart from that I agree with the article.
All political parties distribute nasty leaflets and I am not sure any objective study has been done to find out who is the worst culprit. It is self-serving of the other parties when they claim that we do it whether they are right or not.
But that is beside the point as far as this article is concerned. We should not be doing it in the first place. The reason we do is out of a desperation to win. The very thing that community politics warned against.
I am not sure it even works. I have seen leaflets put out with the expectation that it will “destroy” the other political parties only to find that they go on to win comfortably.
Gordan Lishman made a good speech at conference on this, and one person who appeared not to be at conference was Micheal Meadowcroft. I would like to have heard him speak on this as well. I hope what we will see from conference is a renewed interest in Community Politics and more people reading and writing about it. It is a shame that the localism agenda, which is meant to be ours, is associated a lot more with the Tory’s Big Society instead.
This is an extremely good piece. I became heavily involved in the party relatively recently, and I was astonished by the absence of the sort of considerations being put forward above. It was only when I read Party documents from more than ten years ago that I found the kind of intellectual juiciness I was looking for.
The non-ideological campaigning promulgated by the Campaigns Department needs to stop. Community politics is successful as a campaigning tactic when it is driven by genuine politics, not by campaigning concerns.
Good topic.
Raises a lot of important questions.
I’m definitely keeping an eye out for what kind of answers will arise.
Alex >I believe we must start proposing genuinely empowered community sized municipalities,
Here in Wales, we scrapped county councils in 1996, and gave their powers to district councils, rebranded as ‘county boroughs’.
Fast forward to 2011, and the district councils are increasingly looking to work together, to share resources, expertise etc, because it’s more efficient and cheaper than individual councils each doing their own thing.
1996 – Eight county councils, eight directors of education (for instance). Plus 37 districts
2011 – 22 unitary authorities, 22 directors of education… (at least it’s not 37).
Power devolved to more local level doesn’t come cheap.
Well said David.
I sponsored an amendment which tried to get back to what to me community politics is all about – which is power, and giving it to people, not to remote local authorities or other bodies (Alec Dauncey’s point).
You’re absolutely right, too, (by the way) to say that unimaginative, relentlessly negative campaigning (in literature in particular) does its practitioners a grave disservice. Over the years in Reading, there are numerous examples of that, from all parties, which prove that the public don’t like it either.
Ultimately the BS is all about misunderstanding that all parts of the UK have the social capital and resources of affluent areas such as West Oxfordshire. Community politics is about developing that social capital. The debate didn’t mention that it is actually a very hard job, which is why all too often people tend to revert to community campaigning as a substitute.
It is also bad to confuse community politics with localism. But that’s another article for another day.
Well done, David.
I too sponsored an amendment with Mark Pack for the reasons you cite. It was hacked about by FCC so what we were left with was still far too bland and wouldn’t necessarily result in any action.
One problem was that this was a business motion so was really about internal processes rather than the big picture of what we see as a liberal democracy. I did say that in my speech.
We do need to grasp this and start making progress. I was very sorry that the Localism policy group seemed to fall apart after May 2010 and hasn’t really picked up since. The stuff you and I worked on earlier about communities for the Localism paper disappeared. Gareth’s warning that localism and community politics are not the same is timely, nevertheless it is right that any localism policy should recognise the impact of community politics.
Though Community Politics was a theme of the conference, it was made clear in several sessions I went to that it’s more than writing and distributing leaflets. It involves being in a dialogue with citizens, both individually and in groups and leaflets alone are only half a dialogue. It many ways it’s the easy bit. Sticking 6000 leaflets through letterboxes is just time-consuming, and not even physically demanding for a few moderately fit people.
I wasnt at the conference and havent read the motion but I wrote a piece for LDV 12 months ago where I suggested it was time to slay some sacred cows in this particular field.
The trouble is ‘community’ has become the motherhood and apple pie of the centre ground in British (or at least English) politics much as David suggests.(Though his point about empowerment is semantics – empowerment is as much about exercising power as it is about holding it.) So as a political strategy it has become almost meaningless.
Lib Dems who want to think serious about this need to challenge themselves to consider three important questions:
– why is empowerment (almost) always framed in relation to the state? As Gareth says, different individuals hold different amounts of power yet most individuals’ relationship to the state has changed dramatically since the late 1960s and still we only talk about empowerment in terms of having more say over bits of government. Gareth’s aim of creating social capital seems to me to be a lot more complicated than that.
– are communities actually the right answer? After all, if you have a community you have people who are inside it and people who are outside it. We can all identify the problems that generates, especially when resources are scarce. Would it be more liberal to seek the empowerment of individuals directly?
– has community politics succeeded or has it failed? You could argue that it has been rendered redundant by its own success – the state is more open and more responsive than it was 40 years ago and people express their contentment through their indifference to it. Or you could argue that after 40 years of trying the people’s failure to rise up in a spontaneous revolution of self empowerment means its time to bin the strategy and start again. Put another way, can empowerment ever be an effective political rallying cry if real voters dont feel the need to be empowered?
One other question. Far from bemoaning the decline in party membership shouldnt we be celebrating it? Isnt it a sign that class has broken down, voters are more sophisticated and that they no longer see the need for a political party to fight their day to day battles for them? Isnt that precisely what we were aiming for?