Has Mister Localism missed the bus?

Town & Country Planning, December 2009

Is localism radical? I’ve been wondering about this since an event at Canada House last week, when I began to fear that the political tide is actually shifting in the other direction.

There I was, listening to a number of academics, mainly geographers, discussing the prospects for radical politics, marking the launch of an excellent new book of essays called Radical Politics Today.

I have to declare an interest in this. Not only are some of the essays by former contributors to this magazine (Doreen Massey and Ken Worpole spring to mind), but one of them is by me.

Still, it was unusual to see the flower of British radicalism doing their stuff in a foreign embassy. The reason was that the launch was organised by Counterpoint, the new think-tank arm of the British Council.

Why did they want to be involved in radical politics? Because they are interested in the distinction between radicalism and the all-consuming obsession of their funder, the Foreign Office, namely extremism.

Everyone is against extremism, of course (or nearly everyone). But if we rooted out extremism, and found in the process that we had also rooted out radicalism, the chances of generating any new ideas to extract us from our current global mess would be very slim.

The trouble is – and this is why I feel frustrated about this – I can feel the whole agenda of localism slipping away. Even a year ago, it was the defining critique of the government from Right and Left. It was a broad consensus, at least among radicals, that the main thing the government needed to do was to let go of the details.

Not just government either, but big corporations too – both in their distortion of local economies and in their own insistence on centralisation. Here was a narrative for politics which explained why things seem so sclerotic, why change seemed constantly to be eluding us, despite the vast sums pumped into public services.

But something has shifted over the past year, and I fear that it is simply the way in which David Cameron has used localism as the defining agenda for his own assault on the government.

It is true that his rhetoric leaves out much of the subtlety. Nor do his solutions quite fit – I am not sure that turning our schools from supplicants to local government to supplicants to central government really helps matters. But you have to welcome a return to real conservatism – town hall not Whitehall – especially if they are about to be swept into power.

What is most frustrating is the response of this by the Left. They seem to be abandoning the barricades for localism and are now busily lining up with a rather conventional defence of the state.

Even Madeleine Bunting, the Guardian columnist who has been one of the most intelligent voices on these issues, seems to have shifted her attention onto the old shibboleths.

There always was a paradox at the heart of localism, because letting go of detailed control seemed to mean surrendering our ability to act on the world. The answer, I believe, is that the kind of target driven control we have become used to – in the public and private sectors alike – just gives us the illusion of control.

In 1962, when Sir Keith Joseph first joined the cabinet, he complained that, having spent his whole career trying to get his hands on the levers of power, he now found they weren’t connected to anything. That was a generation ago: you could make the same case now multiplied by ten.

But advocates of localism really have to believe this. They need a real conviction that letting go of central control is necessary for us to find some real levers for action.

Unfortunately, and largely because neither side really believes this – they are still stuck in the old model of politics which expect us to be grateful supplicants to politicians – the alliance that was driving localism forward is fragmenting.

Maybe the state does need defending. In so many ways, we need the chance and opportunity of government – you hardly need to convince readers of this magazine of that – but my fear is this is more about the bankruptcy of the conventional Left than anything else.

There was a moment during the banking crisis when the radicals seemed to have regained the initiative of ideas. But the vision of the Left in the UK, dashing to defend the status quo again because of the prospect of a Conservative government proves otherwise. And so on, until the radicals get the courage of their convictions and make the case for real change.

In fact, Doreen Massey, a one of the essay-writers at Canada House, asked a related question: why is there no alternative narrative?

Like Saskia Sassen, one of the other speakers, I believe the new radical narrative is actually coming out of Latin America, and it is a local one.

Look at the radical democratic model of business in the Brazilian company Semco. Or the huge urban transformations that are possible when you have a mayor with the power to act, as in Curitiba.

Look also at the extraordinary shift in Cuba to small-scale agriculture on a huge scale, and with a major shift in the health of the nation as a result.

But the real irony is that David Cameron’s Conservatives may not actually be intending much of a switch to localism either. The Shadow Chief Secretary to the Treasury, Philip Hammond, just told a questioner at the SOLACE local government conference that the first term of a Cameron government was going to be “unashamedly top down”.

Plus ca change.

David Boyle is a fellow of the New Economics Foundation. What is Radical Politics Today, is edited by Jonathan Pugh and published by Palgrave Macmillan.

 

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