Liberals & civil society 2

Launching a civil society initiative on local election day might not be the best way to grab the attention of the party political, so I thought I’d mention the Fair Deal for Your Local campaign by CAMRA and other groups.

This is essentially an opportunity to contribute to the government’s consultation on Pubco reform (filling in the online survey doesn’t take long at all); although there are also other elements to the campaign – yesterday there was a demonstration yesterday outside a pub in Witney where the landlord is threatened with eviction.

Pubs at their best are based on face-to-face local communities, where commercial transactions are embedded in a wider social framework.*  However, the big Pubcos have consistently undermined this, taking an unfair slice of their licencees’ revenues by their arrangements for selling beer, and the rents they charge.

The Pubcos rely on an uneven distribution of profits between the local productive economy (pub landlords and their staff) and an anonymous exploitative financial sector – so they encapsulates many of the wider problems of our economy and society.

I find this a refreshing campaign (in every sense), because it goes beyond a reactive demand to ‘Save this’ or ‘Defend that!’, and make some practical proposals:

“We support the principle that a tied licensee should be no worse off than a free-of-tie licensee, join us in calling for:

 Market Rent Only (free of tie option) and Guest Beer Options for licensees of large Pubcos

 A powerful Code and Adjudicator to monitor large Pubcos and end abuses

The fundamental problem is that the large pub companies are taking more than is reasonable from the profits of each pub. A fair deal will result in the average tied pub being £4,000 better off annually.”
The campaign isn’t party political, but it has a liberal feel to it.  The government’s consultation itself is a result of Lib Dem influence.  And it is worth noting  two of the liberals  involved in the campaign: Greg Mulholland MP (Chair of the Parliamentary Save the Pub Group) and Gareth Epps (who is also Co-Chair of the Social Liberal Forum).

Click here to fill in the government’s consultation, it only takes a few minutes.

*Rather than the social sphere being subordinated to the financial, as market fundamentalists prefer, or the commercial being regarded as inherently alien to the social, as many on the left would have it.

Not the local elections

I’m fortunate to live in an area with a strong Liberal Democrat presence so (although I’ve not had a lot of time), I can have the satisfaction of helping some splendid county council candidates with a serious chance of getting (re-)elected.  

 

But for many thousands of party members this isn’t possible.  They live in areas where we have little or no chance of retaining or winning seats this time around, still less of having a major say in the council chamber.   And this year more members than ever won’t even have the opportunity to cast a vote for a Liberal Democrat candidate.   All credit to our candidates and activists battling away against the odds.  Even being a paper candidate, getting the nomination papers signed in an unhopeful ward, flies a little flag for liberalism (and for democratic politics in general).  But this can’t be very satisfying in itself.

 

Partly this encapsulates a general feature of British politics: as the Electoral Reform Society’s Rotten Boroughs campaign shows (and Strange Thoughts provides a case study).  ERS’s policy solution – extending STV for local government from Scotland to England and Wales – is clearly sensible, but it doesn’t answer the immediate question for the Liberal Democrats.

Connect offers only a limited response: one can help with telephone canvassing anywhere.  But this doesn’t provide the satisfaction of participating in the life of the community where one lives (and I suspect is really appealing only to fairly experienced campaigners).  There are some very good national party groups/campaigns (such as Liberal Democrats Against Secret Courts), but again these offer something different to engaging in a local project.

If party membership doesn’t offer a tangible way to participate in the local community, and the national leadership is relentlessly disappointing, then what is a liberal to do?  Perhaps the answer is not to centre local party activity on elections.  (Of course this isn’t anything new: as Bernard Greaves and Gordon Lishman put it in The Theory and Practice of Community Politics, ‘If elections and the holding of elected office become the sole or even the major part of our politics we will have become corrupted by the very system of government and administration that community politics sets out to challenge.’)

There are dangers here, though.  I’m not advocating encroaching on the non-party-political nature of civil society groups.  I’ve seen Labour and the Greens and leftist sects try to hijack local organisations, and it isn’t pretty.  The Liberal Democrats I’ve known have been scrupulous in avoiding this, but that re-opens the question of why a liberal should be involved in the party at all, rather than an active local civil society group. 

Another danger is the limitation of ‘Save our X’ campaigns.  These might be worthwhile in particular circumstances, but ultimately are purely reactive, part of the politics of anger rather than the politics of cheerfulness.  (Although sometimes they can generate more positive projects, as with Suffolk libraries).

 

What a local Liberal Democrat non-electoral project might look like would depend on individual circumstances.  A fairly common but very modest example is having a party presence at a Pride event.  Another possibility: there are plenty of party members who are school governors.  It would certainly be undesirable to make parent governor elections party political, but perhaps Liberal Democrat governors in given city or constituency might meet a couple of times a year (with any other interested party member, including school pupils!) to think about their tasks in liberal terms? Something beyond a ‘pizza and politics’ event on schools, which also entailed practical action.  I’d certainly be interested in going along to something like that.  But then I suppose then I should I try to organise it myself…

 

Liberals and civil society 1

James Hargrave, a sometime council candidate from Suffolk, left the Liberal Democrats in January 2012, his resignation letter raised tuition fees, ‘free schools’, and benefits – an all too familiar trio of concerns. 

His blog also details his involvement with the new civil society entity (an Industrial and Provident Society) which now runs the county library service in Suffolk.  This emerged from the campaign to prevent library closures or privatisation, and seems a really interesting, promising, bottom-up, participatory way to provide (not ‘deliver’) public services.  As James puts it:

‘The way libraries are now run in Suffolk may not be what everyone wanted but it has been my view for some time that the IPS offers the best future for Suffolk’s libraries. With a Board able to negotiate as good a deal as possible in funding and independence from some of the more annoying aspects of County Council control the IPS has an opportunity to make the most of the funding available.

My experience as a school governor has shown me the benefits that local autonomy can offer. The relationship with the council becomes more of working together and simply having a cheque book means schools can buy what they need without all the bureaucracy of a large organisation.’ 

This seems a very appealing project (in accord with the best traditions of British liberalism), which I’ll follow with interest.

There is a wider issue here, too.  Political liberalism has long gone hand in hand with wider civic participation.  (Interestingly, Liberal Party members in the 1980s were much more likely than their SDP counterparts to be involved in other civil society groups).  Almost all the Lib Dem activists I know are also involved in other activities: perhaps this has something to do with the liberal instinct that there are numerous worthwhile facets to life, which can’t be reduced to class conflict or religion or anything else, even liberalism itself.    

But there is also the fact that participation in civil society projects can often provide a much more satisfying sense of agency – of control over one’s own life and immediate environment, often in very small but very tangible ways – than can party politics.  When party activity revolves around winning elections, there is the danger that this ends up passing agency on (to councillors, council officers, Deputy Prime Ministers etc), rather than spreading it around.  And we all know the frustrations that can lead to. 

I’m sure that James Hargrave is one of very many former Liberal Democrat campaigners whose energies are now directed more towards civil society, and the party’s response can’t lie only in the field of policies.