Friday, 21 January 2011

Big society debate video

Back in October I took part in a debate about big society at the Battle of Ideas (short account here) and a video has now been published. My five min chunk starts here. Plenty of interesting stuff in the discussion.

Other BoI debates here.

21 Jan 2011 08:41:19 | Citizenship and democracy, Governance and participation

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Inactive democracy was always a bad idea: street reps and new forms of governance I spent the whole of yesterday afternoon in a traditional oak panelled, leather-benched council chamber in Shipley, Yorkshire, with a group of practitioners discussing their work with street reps across the district. Symbolically, the room was dilapidated and its pomp had been subjected to un-ceremonial uses. Conceptually, the meeting served to accentuate the anachronistic surroundings, exposing many of the issues of our accelerating transition from the age of authority. If not perhaps a defining moment, certainly a moment for defining. (The pic is Blackburn Town Hall, not Shipley, which is similar but the seating is red). The immediate cause was to review some community development work carried out by Groundwork in various neighbourhoods. But for the area neighbourhood management coordinators and street wardens sat round, it was mainly just another meeting working out how to tweak detail, and exploring the raw niceties of probable futures – fewer staff, less resources, recession-hit residents with accumulating problems. Several of those present probably do not know if they will have a job in three months’ time, and yes, emergency exit strategies were mentioned. But still it felt like a privilege to be there, because I’ve been witnessing the ungainly, messy emergence of the new order. Discussions about the role of street reps, as I’ve suggested before, are about adjusting the relationship between citizen and state, with an emphasis on co-production; understanding a less formal, more everyday kind of democratic action-in-place; about resisting attempts to formalise and prescribe what people do but supporting them in doing it; acknowledging that targets and performance measurement are at best unhelpful and inappropriate; that networks not organisations are the key but that you can’t make them accountable, and so on. It’s a whole sticky messy tangle of contemporary theoretical policy spaghetti… These are the kinds of issues that exercise the minds of political theorists and people in think tanks right now - and people who, can you imagine, are not embarrassed to be called ‘thought leaders’ - who are looking at screens or reading reports but not listening to folk like these in rooms like this in towns like this. Thought leaders my arse. So I listened and was able to appreciate that behaviour change needs local exemplars, plenty of nurturing by local practitioners, and lots of time: just like community development. What these practitioners are trying to do, in some pretty downtrodden localities, is to help networks develop which have credence and weight but do not become cliques, which are open and reflect an informal participative democracy based on local people’s interests. What these practitioners are trying to do is exactly what this government would like and what it needs to understand. Some of the issues for practitioners are old familiar tensions of course, like whether the politics of intervention are broadly universalising (as typically under Tory councils) or targeted (as under Labour authorities). The question is as sharp as ever when it comes to resources for supporting street reps. Should street wardens be equally involved in...
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Audrey's shovel Audrey said I hope we don't get any more snow, I got fed up shovelling it. She told me how she'd made a shovel. Her saw was broken she said, so she had to use a bread-knife, to cut a flat piece from the side of a plastic box. She put a hole in it with a hammer and nail, and screwed it to a broom stick. Matter-of-fact-proudly she described how she shaved a little off the bottom of the broom stick to make it smooth underneath and scrape flush with the ground. Audrey's in her seventies. She gets about indoors with one of those stable three-footed walking sticks and uses an electric scooter when she goes out. 'And I was the only one in my street who cleared the snow.' Other vignettes and fictions

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