On a hunch, earlier this year I did a little research ahead of writing a blog post for Liberal Democrat Voice: how often is the phrase “community politics” used by the party’s national spokespeople since the May 2010 election?
The answer was far worse than I’d feared. Looking through all of Nick Clegg’s major speeches, all the news release from him and also all those from others issued via the Liberal Democrat press team, I could only find one use of “community politics” – by Paul Burstow. Andrew Stunell deserves an honourable mention for using it in an LGA pamphlet as well, but that was it. No doubt there have been some uses in other places but, particularly bearing in mind that I searched through every national press release, this is a paltry showing.
With other phrases such “Big Society” to use, some may wonder if bemoaning the absence of “community politics” from our political vocabulary is much like bemoaning the absence of penny farthings from our bicycle lanes. Has the world just moved on?
But it does matter – and for three important reasons. It makes for the wrong political symbolism, it is symptomatic of a deeper problem, and those other phrases are not adequate alternatives.
Both “localism” and “Big Society” get plenty of mentions from Liberal Democrats currently, yet one is a New Labour phrase and the other is a Cameron Conservative term. It symbolises a lack of confidence in our own beliefs to meekly adopt the vocabulary of others.
However, it would be wrong to single out those who do not use our own phrase for individual blame. Rather, it reflects a wider party cultural issue. Nick Clegg, for example, is of a post-1970s political generation, and the absence of community politics from his rhetoric reflects how little it was used in the party at the time he was getting attuned to what motivates and persuades in Liberal Democrat circles.
That wider cultural issue matters because “localism” and “Big Society” are not simply synonyms for what “community politics” should mean to Liberal Democrats. Moreover, with the challenges of maintaining our own identity in coalition – not to mention the opportunities it gives to enact our beliefs – now is a spectacularly bad time to act as if they were.
The difference should be one about power. Devolving power within levels of the state should not leave liberals satisfied. Nor should granting greater opportunities to individuals. Community politics takes a third crucial step – that of helping individuals to come together to wield power in their own communities.
Power is about more than who provides a service, which is as far as the Big Society goes. A group of residents collaborating to run a library is one thing, an active residents’ association pushing and prodding different service providers in the interests of the local community is another.
As The Theory & Practice of Community Politics, the seminal 1980 pamphlet from Bernard Greaves and Gordon Lishman puts it, community politics “is about people. It is about their control of the exercise of power. It is about the distribution of power, the use of power, the dissemination of power and the control of power.”
Community politics, for example, should be about making it easier for residents to combine to influence planning applications – not just giving powers to individuals in the process. It should be about planning that does not just design out crime but designs in the ability for communal political action in form of leafleting, stalls and protests.
Giving individuals not only power in their own right but also the confidence, capacity and opportunity to exercise power in cooperation with others leads into all sorts of policy directions that are largely unmentioned. To give one simple example – why should it not be part of the planning requirements for new housing developments that the developer has to kick-start the creation of a residents’ association?
Or as The Theory & Practice of Community Politics puts it, “Our aim is therefore the creation of a political system which is based on the interaction of communities in which groups have the power, the will, the knowledge, the technology to influence and affect the making of decisions in which they have an interest. Even more, we want those communities to initiate the debate, to formulate their own demands and priorities and to participate fully in agreeing the rules by which their relationships are regulated.”
There is, perhaps, a glimmer of light on this issue. Not only did Paul Burstow (now a minster but previously an ALDC staffer) use the phrase “community politics” in his health speech at Sheffield spring conference, he used it twice. Moreover, partly thanks to my earlier Lib Dem Voice blog post, the phrase made it into the foreword by Nick Clegg to a new pamphlet on localism from the LGA.
But on a subject such as community politics above all, we should not just wait for others to take action. Community politics is our phrase and our beliefs. It needs to be adapted to fit the modern sense of community, but it should be as important to us now as it ever was.
A slightly shorter version of this piece appears in the latest edition of Liberator.
UPDATE: As if by magic… this week’s Liberal Democrat News brings an excellent piece from Party President Tim Farron about the importance of community politics, ending: “Lots of us are guilty of having lost our community politics zeal, but this is the time for our liberal soul to be rebooted and fired up once again”.
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8 Comments
Unfortunately you are right that “community politics” is a lost phrase amongst too many Lib Dems today and even some of those who do use it have failed to understand what it really means, hence, as you say, too many comments that ‘The Big Society’ or ‘localism’ are simply synonyms.
I’m not convinced its a post-1970s political generation thing, but certainly true that too many of those who have become involved in the last 10 to 15 years are unfamiliar with both the term and the practice.
But how do we revive “community politics” amongst our activist and councillor base and amongst today’s MPs?
The term community politics was used a lot in the 1980s as well. I joined the party having never heard of it, and never being that interested in local politics or even being aware of what local government did. Soon after I joined I found that this was something I had to have a point of view about, so I bought the fabled book, was thoroughly convinced by it and have been plugging it ever since.
Given how much the party relies on our local councillor base, including in Sheffield, I do not see that we have any choice but to be interested in it. Otherwise without a philosphical underpinning to what we are doing our local council candidates will be engaged in nothing more than mindless activism.
One thing I think we should be concerned about is a term I saw recently by a Tory MP; “Double Devolution”. Devolve power from central government to local government (which is good from our point of view) and devolve power from local government to “people and communities”. I suspect what he had in mind is free schools, and I remember Nick Clegg making a similar point at the 1 day conference in the LSE in 2008.
This second devolution opens up questions around accountability and funding which I think goes against the principles of community politics.
In the debates around community politics in the early 70’s it was common place for people to say that one of the communities in which people should get together to exercise power was at their place of work. Communities are not only geographical. If there has been a dramatic decline in the talk of community politics it has been matched-and then some more -by the almost total silence on the plans the Liberal Party had for co-ownership and Employee ownership.It is as important that we rediscover this important strand of policy especially now that some in Labour and the Conservatives are beginning to embrace a watered down version. Such a policy would help to redistribute wealth, build sustainable long term businesses, and stop the destruction of so many jobs and services sacrificed to the rampant neo liberal economic policy that some folk have adopted
We still use the phrase in Hammersmith and Fulham:
http://hflibdems.org.uk/en/article/2011/487610/17000-vote-for-av-in-hammersmith-and-fulham
Hmmn, if it’s to be rediscovered, then let it go back to its roots. I was active in the 80s (urks and all) and more recently, but now there are too many salaried staff who don’t live in the area telling us what to do and say, usually ungrammatically. Focus leaflets generally now are much too formulaic.
The worst thing of all though about the religion that became community politics was that the party began to think of its members as free postmen and postwomen, and not much else – and if you didn’t deliver Focus regularly (because you couldn’t or didn’t want to) you mattered less and less.
Vince Cable used the phrase in a Local Party meeting on Friday. I have been active here in Twickenham for 24 years: what grieves me is that today’s councillors see no need to produce a ward based Comments telling their residents what they’ve been doing on their behalf; our Comments are now produced centrally by our organiser with only limited space for ward based stories.
Instead, they consider that they are already doing enough to communicate via email and phone with those who contact them and they forget about the silent majority who never contact them from one year to the next but would support them if they knew what they were doing for them in their street.
At the end of the day, ‘all politics is local’. Our Tory adversaries seem to have grasped this better than we have: http://www.richmond.gov.uk/all_in_one
Well done Mark. Once upon a time ALC and then ALDC saw itself among other things as the think tank for and promoter of Community Politics. And ALC’s support from the Rowntrees Trust was a response to this ambition.
For whatever reason ALC has reduced its priority in this direction although it did publish David Boyle and Bernard Greaves’s Theory and Practice of Community Economics in 2008. – on sale here: http://www.aldc.org/shop/
This means that there is a space for a new body to take up the challenge.
My own stab at what it is all about and why we should be using our influence in the Coalition to both practice it and campaign for it was published here:
https://www.libdemvoice.org/opinion-so-what-is-this-community-politics-all-about-then-24274.html
https://www.libdemvoice.org/opinion-how-can-the-community-politics-approach-reform-the-coalition-24275.html
Community politics seems to be about subsidiarity in an EU context and system one in an organisational science context.