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Politburo
Local Government
Chronicle - 1
October 2006
The situation quickly turned ugly. The farmers laid siege to the building. Tractors blocked access and exits. The usual piles of fruit and veg were dumped on the road. The megaphones blared a discordant message of anger and frustration.
That was 25 years ago and it was a standard farm union protest at the time of the annual European Community price-fixing. What stays in my mind is not the protest – after all, years later half the British fishing fleet sailed passed the party conference in Bournemouth hanging me in effigy, a much classier affair altogether – but the cartoon which I spotted in the British farming press. Whilst continental farm unions were cheerfully rioting the NFU team was sidling along the pavement bearing the inflammatory placard: “Please can we have a little more please.”
This little vignette came to mind when I met Richard Best to discuss the role and workings of the LGA. Lord Best, LGA president is heading an independent commission to establish what the LGA needs to do to sharpen its performance as it girds its collective loins for the devolution debate.
The fact is that the LGA and the NFU are similar organisations. Both have to deal overwhelmingly with a single interlocutor (the Government); both are, consequentially, preoccupied with their access to ministers; both have to invest a lot of energy in persuading their members that they deliver results.
And both tend to lose sight of the world beyond. As a result the world beyond tends to see local government through the prism of the council tax and farmers through the well muddied lens of subsidies. Both bodies tend to use the vocabulary of complaint – the annual revenue support grant, unreasonable government impositions, inspections and targets/ commodity prices, supermarket power, increasing regulation – much more frequently than the language of opportunity.
The message both organisations want to broadcast is often diluted by the compromises necessary to agree a consensus. In addition, the LGA’s Politburo style condemns it to repetition from its party leaders, however substantial the message may be. It desperately needs its own Digby Jones able to get a powerful message out in Today Programme-speak (a new role for Paul Coen?) and to push some young, articulate councillors with real personality (and not all men!) to the fore. Above all it needs to spend less time talking about what government ought to be doing for councils and more on what councils can do for people. In fact, Peter Kenyon, the young new NFU President might offer a good example of how to develop a narrative with connects farers with the wider community.
All this matters because there is a real opportunity to re-launch both LGA and NFU. Both can be key players in the new politics. The new politics for farmers is sustainability. The new politics for councillors is devolution. The food supply chain can make a huge contribution both to meeting the agendas for healthy eating and addressing climate change. Local Government can provide a route-map to bring people back into political engagement.
In one sense the NFU may well have the easier task: the sustainability agenda is compulsory whereas devolution is optional. But delivering environmental programmes which may fundamentally change farming practice will be seriously tough. It may cost more than one president his head.
Having set out its challenge in People and Places the LGA must have the determination to respond sharply and unambiguously to the White Paper and Lyons and, of course, to the eventual Brown project. It must recognise that the city region model which is emerging as the front-runner of its members poses very significant questions for the present sub-regional arrangements to which Gordon Brown appears to be strongly wedded. Its problem will be getting the chance to deliver.
That is why the LGA needs to speak both to government and to the people. In the battle of ideas the fact that councillors are elected is irrelevant. History is full of turning points (or, more fashionably, tipping points) which declined to turn. The NFU and the LGA may both be standing on the threshold of a great opportunity.
Not a time, really, for please can we have a little more, please!
© Local Government Chronicle
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