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.

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.

Although it’s appalling, it’s also worth mentioning the rank partisan rage and hate that Free Republic brought to the news that Barack Obama’s grandmother had died. This is what echo chambers do to the political space.

Whatever your political views, the nightmare result of tomorrow’s elections in the United States is another drawn-out court battle about the results. Although elections have to be conducted under the rule of law, courts are not meant to be democratic spaces. It’s a sign of failure to have election results decided there.

Unfortunately, some of the elements that brought the 2000 election to the Supreme Court are still present in 2008. Beside the hotchpotch of voting technologies, the oversight of elections is in partisan hands in most states. Politico has an article assessing the benefits to the Democrats that control of election business brings them in five key swing states.

Meanwhile, efforts to ensure voter registrations are accurate have fallen foul of the self-evident fact that different databases can’t be relied upon to store identical information about individuals. It’s astonishing that simple data errors might bar legitimate voters from voting (or force them to cast provisional ballots), and this issue has inevitably ended up back in the courts.

Richard Hasen of Election Law Blog has a longer analysis at FindLaw that goes into detail about what has and has not been done since the days of Bush v Gore.

Norman Geras discusses a recent article on why people vote.

No, obviously not, would be the response of most. Charlie Beckett of Polis considers the question in more detail, in an extract from a new book.

Tim Erickson has a vaguely depressing post on something happening Stateside called the American Citizens’ Summit. Personally, I would have thought that November 4th was the ultimate American Citizens’ Summit, but it seems not: this event is being held in February.

The event is all about transpartisanship, which apparently:

acknowledges the validity of truths across a range of political perspectives and seeks to synthesize them into an inclusive, pragmatic whole beyond typical political dualities. In practice, transpartisan solutions emerge out of a new kind of public conversation that moves beyond polarization by applying proven methods of facilitated dialogue, deliberation and conflict resolution.

This long blurb seems to English into “transpartisanship is about getting people to stop fighting and start agreeing”.

Now, I admire attempts to get beyond boring partisan wrangling, but I am strongly suspicious of intellectualising approaches that try, as this summit does, to “synthesize views into an inclusive, pragmatic whole”.

There are a couple of reasons for this. First, it’s rather patronising to suggest that if you frightful oafs would only stop SHOUTING AT EACH OTHER for a moment, we clevers could come up with a nice sensible compromise. I don’t think it’s necessarily evil that people who broadly agree with each other should form themselves into parties.

Second, in most big political debates an ultimate synthesis is unimportant, or at least less important than the debate itself. Discussion challenges positions and brings about better thought, as long as it’s between a sufficiently broad group of participants, but that doesn’t meant that everyone has to agree at the end. It is sufficient if opposing views are tested and moderated, in fact that’s probably preferable to the creation of unchallengeable syntheses. I prefer alternation of political parties to the dictatorship of reasonable people with flipcharts.

Third, and most important, there are plenty of big political issues that are not reducible to pragmatic things that everyone can compromise on - in fact, “things not reducible to pragmatic compromises” is a reasonable starting definition of “big political issues”. How, for example, would transpartisanship handle issues like the death penalty, or climate change? Is there some set of facts, or a mind map, that will convince Ian Paisley that maybe the Republicans are onto something?

Overall, I admire the idealism about democracy and rationalism, but democracy has to be a balance between popular passion and rationalism. Too far one way, and you have mob rule. Too far the other, and you have transpartisanship: the arrogant belief that clever people can facilitate a compromise to every tricky issue, without any of the mob’s passion or anger. It feels rather like the sixth-form debating society telling the first XV how to play rugby.

Coalescing people around centrist views is fine, but don’t kid yourself that centrism isn’t in itself a political - partisan - position.

An five-month-old blog post by Will McInnes sparks some thoughts.

Will’s post considers consumer/company relations (but by extension, online and political relations) as passing through three epochs. The first, the Age of Control, is past. In that period, consumers were disaggregated and organisations operated from a position of control. Now, we are in the Age of Snark, where consumers can aggregate their feelings of frustration and create echo chamber effects, but organisations have not retooled enough to be able to use those frustrations constructively. Will looks forward to the Age of Dialogue, the dawning of which he places in 2012, where companies will have the organisational capacity to listen and respond in the right way, and with the necessary agility to reduce consumer dissatisfaction.

The parallels with political debate are obvious, but there is another parallel. Here is the graph that Will uses to illustrate the movement:

And here’s a model historical graph showing the historical demographic transition (birth/death rates):

You may remember from GSCE history that, as societies modernised with the introduction of medicine and better nutrition, death rates fell first. Behavioural change (having fewer kids) didn’t happen immediately, so birth rates started to drop later, and in between the population went through an explosive period of growth.

I think Will’s Age of Dialogue is a hopeful future view, and quite possibly something that will come about, although 2012 seems early for the large-scale behavioural change in organisations which would be needed. It’s not guaranteed, however. A particular risk in the political arena, is the noise balance between 100 vociferous people who are hurt by a change, and 100,000 silent people who get a slight benefit from it.

While on the topic of dialogue and a great coming together, a more recent blog post worth reading is Nick Carr’s on The Centripetal Web. Carr describes the drift of people towards big web service sites such as Google Reader and Google Blog Search, and away from the smaller originators such as Technorati and Bloglines.

The two ideas in combination suggest that a single politics place, with a reputation as a place where the discussions happen and big enough to generate centripetal force, might be one of the ways in which we get past snark and towards the age of dialogue.