A few days old, but I enjoyed this article in the Guardian reporting on the New Zealand elections.

The Times is running a story at the moment arguing against direct election for police authorities (see also Jackie Ashley in today’s Guardian) . The story picks up on the BNP’s claims that they are going to seize control of police authorities if direct election is introduced. The BNP are quoted as saying

We have a staunch core of voters who are guaranteed to turn out and there could be enough of us to win seats in these circumstances.

Perhaps I’m going to be proven grievously wrong here, but I think the chances of the BNP taking control of any police authority are nil, and the Times and the Guardian should stop reprinting BNP hype as fact.

Let’s first dismiss the idea that the BNP have a meaningful core of voters anywhere except in a small number of deprived urban areas. A list of BNP councillors serving before the 2008 election cycle demonstrates the small number of seats where the BNP are really competitive. It fields candidates in only a tiny number of wards - 744 candidates in 2007 - and holds fifty seats out of 22,000 across the country.

So, the BNP does not have a core vote to speak of. But might it snatch a surprise victory in areas where it is strong? Very unlikely. The areas of strength for the BNP are often white working class areas, which are usually in former metropolitan counties (Burnley, Barking, etc). These metropolitan counties have large ethnic minority populations, and many prosperous suburban areas where the BNP message gains no traction. There is no chance that the BNP are going to overturn the hold of the major parties in places like Bromley or Camden.

What about outside the metropolitan areas? Police authorities are still huge - many provincial forces are multi-county such as Thames Valley, Devon & Cornwall, and Mercia. Even smaller single-county forces like Hertfordshire or Kent cover populations of a million or more. On such a scale, the BNP vote is going to be swamped (ho ho), even if it can put up a showing in Loughton (Epping Forest) or Coalville (NW Leicestershire).

And finally, what about a low turnout? Could the lack of interest in local democracy give the BNP a way in? Unlikely. Let’s get down and dirty with some data.

This analysis is based on the most recent election in Epping Forest, one of the BNP’s areas of strength. That Council elects by thirds, so only 33% of the seats were available.

This year, the BNP received 2,391 votes (8.597% share, fourth place). It won one seat and came second in a couple of others, all in Loughton. The Conservatives did best with a share of 44.757%, and a total vote of 12,448. The Liberal Democrats came second, and the Loughton Residents Association third.

Turnout was 37.4% overall - about average for local government, perhaps a bit on the high side. The BNP stood in 12 of 21 wards, and won in one of them. The ward in which they won had a 37.2% turnout. Wards where the BNP stood but did not win had an average turnout of 39.8%, perhaps because of media attention or an effective Stop the BNP campaign. So the BNP don’t seem to be relying on a low turnout, at least in Epping Forest. They are just contesting the wards they think they might win.

The BNP’s low vote overall is a sign of the mountain they would have to climb to win a police authority vote even in such favourable terrain as Epping Forest. Imagine that the whole council area had one seat on the Essex Police Authority, which is plausible. The BNP need to suppress the turnout among the other parties to win the most votes in the council area.

Let’s start by giving the BNP some unlikely advantages. Let’s imagine that the Loughton Residents’ Association aren’t interested in standing and (although they don’t seem to be a right wing group) half their votes go to the BNP and the other LRA voters don’t vote. That gives the BNP 4,392 votes. Let’s say that UKIP and English Democrat voters also all vote for the BNP (this is a gross slander on those parties, of course). The BNP are at 4,720. Now let’s imagine that the BNP have a really charismatic candidate, who increases their vote by 10% - that gives them 5,192.

Even if every single one of those 5,192 voters turns out, that still only gives the BNP the votes of 7.3% of the electorate. To win the most votes, they need to defeat the local controlling party, the Conservatives. At the 2008 district elections, 12,448 voters turned out for the Conservatives, meaning that even with our favourable assumptions above, the BNP need to persuade 58% of previous Conservative voters to stay home. A 58% reduction in turnout for all main parties, plus 5,192 votes for the BNP gives a total turnout in a BNP victory of 19% - an implausibly low number, particularly if, as is likely, the police authority elections are held alongside other local elections.

Remember, too, that we are putting favourable assumptions on the BNP vote in an area with sitting BNP councillors. Across the whole of Essex, turnout figures would have to be in the low single digits to allow the so-called BNP core vote to take the election overall. This is not going to happen.

None of this is to say that people should not worry about hard-right parties. They should not worry, however, about elected police authorities falling under BNP control.

A Slate reviewer assesses a new book on the US Constitution, which sounds very good. Extract:

This fall saw the publication of The Invisible Constitution, Laurence Tribe’s effort to explain to ordinary Americans that when it comes to this cherished founding document, what we see is much less than what we get. This book is a kick in the shin to textualism and originalism, in that Tribe begins from the principle that the written, or ‘visible’ Constitution so revered by conservative jurists is, in fact, only a small part of what Americans think of as the Constitution. He notes that the text of the Constitution contains words that are not even constitutional—original language that has been amended but that still appears in the document. He points out that some of our most cherished constitutional convictions, such as ‘one person, one vote’ appear nowhere in the text. In other words, by fetishizing the words alone, we lose sight of the enormity of what the document does.

Liberal Conspiracy is, over a series of posts, discussing the Communities in Control White Paper.

I particularly agree with their take on the consumerist tone of much of it.

Two posts on Sarah Palin in a row - that’s not what we’re meant to be about here. So let’s talk about the state of central/local relationships in UK government.

As the case of Baby P showed, the political field of combat in the UK is definitely at national rather than local level. Over the past week, Parliament and national media have dominated the coverage, while the commentary on the case, as on wider local government issues, often implied that Haringey Council was a client or subordinate arm of national government. In fact, although elements of local service delivery are controlled by national bodies like the NHS and JobCentre Plus, local democratic mandates are theoretically independent of national ones, as I’ve mentioned before.

This idea that local government and central government were related but separate spheres was much stronger in the Victorian and pre-War era, as documented by Tristram Hunt in the excellent Building Jerusalem: The Rise and Fall of the Victorian City.

Over the last twenty years or so, more and more elements of local government have been nationalised or quangified, to the extent that even business rates are set nationally and redistributed to authorities in whatever Whitehall considers to be a fair proportion. Only 25% (on average) of local council spend is raised locally through the council tax, most of the rest coming in the form of grants with more or less discretion for local politicians.

The impact of this disempowerment on local government morale and self-image is hardly surprising. It also feeds through into turnouts for local government elections that are half that of general elections.

Beyond the woe, however, the Government has been talking a good talk on returning powers to local government. In some cases, such as the wellbeing power and the Sustainable Communities Act, there have been genuine moves in the direction of enabling local discretion and withdrawing national level interference where it isn’t helpful. Progress is halting and reversible, however, and the ideology of localism is still one for technocrats and managers rather than the press and public.

From a democracy perspective, more autonomy for local councils over local issues would be a good thing. An important part of democratic governance is getting responsibility for issues to the right level, whether European for trade negotiation or parish for the location of the new park bench. Many of the decisions that affect local communities, such as health care or skills provision, are rightly decided in the local area by Primary Care Trusts and local Learning and Skills Councils, but they are not decided with a local democratic mandate.

There are two big challenges to the further spread of local autonomy - one of them political and one practical. Politically, a new Conservative government would certainly find themselves in the same situation that Labour did in 1997: in charge of a sprawling bureaucracy whose members they don’t entirely trust, and with a set of manifesto pledges that they want to start work on right away. The Labour solution was a burst of centralism and target-setting, and for all the rhetoric in opposition, it’s hard to see the Conservative party in power avoiding a similar move. This isn’t a political point - it’s a sort of bureaucratic Kübler-Ross cycle, where well-meant enthusiasm for local solutions is replaced by dissatisfaction at slow delivery, and then harder and harder beatings to get delivery agencies to conform.

The larger, and more immediate, challenge is the practical one of balancing effectiveness and democratic accountability in delivery of local services centred around individuals. If we are moving towards a public service model centred around the user, many of the budgetary and political implications are only sketchily understood.

It is easiest to see the start of user-centred working in the health and social care fields. Consider the case of someone with moderate long-term health and social care needs - such as an elderly person who can still live at home but needs regular intensive support. This service user will take services from the NHS, particularly if she has a chronic condition, but will also take services from local government for social care needs. In theory, these services should all join up to provide a seamless service, and if this is actually achieved it will be through case conferences and better inter-service communication. There may even be an element of shared budgets or shared administrative arrangements, though these are more common for children’s services at the moment.

This isn’t a bad arrangement, and is a lot better than it was a few years ago. It’s a model that works adequately for a small number of service users, who are in intensive contact with health and social care services. There are approaches being tried in various places that can add worklessness and skills support into this joined-up service.

Even in the best examples, however, some services will be left out. The waste collection service won’t be in on the case conference, even though our patient might need special collection arrangements. Benefits agencies such as DWP are often unable or unwilling to share or flex their budgets to reflect individual circumstances, for fear of creating a ‘postcode lottery’.

Politics and accountability arrangements often block more radical advances. Take hospitals by way of an example. If hospitals were under local democratic control rather than bureaucratic control with a national democratic overlay, the country would certainly have more hospitals than it currently has. Local voters hate the closure or downgrading of hospitals, and the pressure on councils to keep them open at all costs would be immense. Even if medical opinion would suggest (as it does) that fewer, bigger, more specialist hospitals improve outcomes, local democratic decisions on hospital services would probably favour small local generalist units.

Hospitals are a big, capital-intensive example of the wider clash of mandates. If local authorities want local money to be used in one way, and the nationally-driven service providers want it to be used in a different way, who should prevail? And if local service spending is going to be joined up at an individual and strategic level, who takes the final decisions on the funding?

At the moment, the answer is a squashy consensus between local politicians and the managers of nationally-led services. This is not a long-term solution, however, and if something more stable is needed, I would suggest that the local level is the right place to take those decisions.

Go back to the hospital example. Would it be such a bad thing if local passions kept small generalist hospitals open? It doesn’t prevent the creation of large specialist units, it just requires the continued provision of services in a local physical setting that people can walk past every day and feel good about. That’s good politics.

Local discretion on this sort of spend would also give local authorities a wider and more coherent field of action - why could much-loved hospitals not become joint health and social care centres, or have skills and training units attached? At the moment the iron walls between NHS and local government spend prevent it, without a long period of budgetary and legal negotiations. If local authorities did have the final say over that expenditure, the decision would be simple.

It’s also unfair to suggest that local authorities would automatically give in to voters’ desires. After all, local authorities look after schools, which raise equally strong feelings among voters, and failing schools are often closed even in the teeth of public protests. At the moment, opposing hospital closures is an easy political win for councillors, who can be seen to be battling for their constituents without having to worry about the consequences for the NHS. If service design were in their remit, they would need to be more analytical and more circumspect.

If governments local and national are going to redesign services around users, they need to break down the artificial financial barriers that give Brighton, for instance, a police station, council offices, law courts, a NHS primary care trust, a general hospital and a specialist hospital in different buildings scattered around the city. To break those barriers down, however, the decisions must be based on a secure democratic foundation, through giving the local authority the final say over the money issues. It may need hard conversations in Whitehall, and it will certainly result in a plethora of nationally-prescribed service standards, but the fundamental point remains: you can’t provide individual services to someone in Newcastle from a desk in Parliament Street.

Here’s Sarah Palin, inadvertently illustrating an interesting thing about politicians who wear their faith on their sleeve (from Salon):

My life is in God’s hands. If he’s got doors open for me, that I believe are in our state’s best interest, the nation’s best interest, I’m going to go through those doors.

Did you spot it? It wasn’t that Mrs Palin imagines the Almighty to be some sort of divine concierge.

It was that for someone who claims their life is in God’s hands, she’s pretty wary about doing what she’s told. If she has truly submitted herself to God’s will and is awaiting his call, shouldn’t she be readier to jump to? Instead, when God comes knocking, Sarah is going to have to sit down and check that the Divine immutable will is in line with Alaska and America’s best interests. Thanks, God, I’ll get back to you.

My school divinity classes were a long time ago, but I seem to recall they were the Ten Commandments, rather than the Ten Starting Points for Discussion.

Brian Goldsmith has a short but interesting thinkpiece at Politico. He argues that the results of the election should bring an end to Palin-mania. The Alaska Governor, currently in the public eye again, can be demonstrated to have harmed the Republican candidacy, and failed to deliver any of the groups she was meant to attract, including women, the middle classes, and even the Republican core vote.

Goldsmith says:

[Rather than media hype,] what matters is [Palin's] real and measurable effect on the broader American public. And if Sarah Palin were a cereal, she’d be rushed off the shelf.

Personally, I’m not so sure. Palin, like Howard Dean, excites the netroots, who will surely play a large part in the next four years of internal party wrangling. She may be a bad choice, she may have underperformed in 2008, but she has a strong media profile and a ‘true believer’ reputation. For 2012, that may be all she needs.

British fans of the English Revolution (the bloody rather than the glorious variety) can look forward to a new Channel 4 show, reviewed here at the Guardian, which promises to put some of that era’s frustrated democrats onto our TV screens.

Simon Jenkins’s column in the Guardian makes a good point about the reaction to the dreadful death of Baby P in Haringey:

How we all hate the nanny state - until nanny takes a day off. Then we want nannies galore. We want nannies with whips, nannies with locks, keys and public inquiries. Labour, Liberal or Tory nannies are suddenly the order of the day. The response to the case of 17-month-old Baby P has been a classic of incoherent social comment. The media, which normally excoriates every case of local authority meddling and red tape, has torn into Haringey council for failing to spot a dreadful case of child abuse.

Jenkins still needs to do better fact checking (Herbert Laming is a social worker, not a lawyer, as is quite easily verified) but his fundamental point is sound: people want the state to get out of people’s faces, until it transpires that they should have been in them all along.

Moreover, the thrashing around at the despatch box, on both sides of the aisle, has been a serious disservice to local democracy, which is (through Haringey Social Services) entirely accountable for the social services provided in that borough.

By coincidence, when the story broke on Tuesday, I was having dinner with one of Haringey’s former chief executives. With the realism/cynicism that comes with long experience of local government media relations, he predicted that all the attention would fall on the Council as the elected body, and very little on the NHS or the police. Moreover, he said, the national politicians would be unable to stop themselves interfering in the council’s inquiries and other activities. Even if they wanted to leave the authority to sort its own affairs out, the national media would hound Ministers until something was done, and that something would put another dent in the democratic accountability of councillors for the services their organisation provides.

And lo, it did come to pass in Westminster the very next day. Inquiries left, right and centre, threats to take over council social services, and all predicated on the double misconception that the elected council is responsible for everything, but that Governments should not let those with equal but different democratic mandates sort things out for themselves.

People worry about the status, accountability and quality of local government elected members. Vilifying them for 24 hours before ignoring them is not the way to go about improving things.

The National Leadership Survey 2007 (a production of the Kennedy School for Government at Harvard) shows that Americans have a broadly similar trust relationship with their leaders as us Brits. Politicians and the press again vie for last place.