"Independents have taken initial steps in showing what can be done by committed and organised locals outside of Party Politics, looking to change the focus to inclusive participation and ownership of decisions by the community."

Four years ago, at the last local council elections, there was a lot of noise being made around the rise of independents:
Futures Forum: The rise and rise of independent candidates

Subsequently, there has been a lot of coordination between the independents:
Futures Forum: A national policy framework for independent candidates?

Especially in the South West:
Futures Forum: Independents in the West Country

This time round there appears to be even more energy, as reported by the founder of the Flatpack Democracy movement and leader of the Frome independents:

Rights of Spring

2 APRIL 2019

PETER MACFADYEN

Social activist recent Mayor and Leader of Frome Town Council, undertaker, international development consultant, new grandfather...

As comedians Laurel and Hardy said: “Well , here’s another nice mess you’ve gotten me into “….. Why so many? Why endless dead ends and unanswerable conundrums? If we’d written fiction to demonstrate that the Party political, system with elected ‘representatives’, is totally unfit for purpose, it could never have been as well put together as the farce we see before us.

Elsewhere that mashup of fact and fiction is becoming reality as 41-year-old Volodymyr Zelenskiy, who plays a president in a popular Ukranian TV series, gained twice the vote of his nearest rival in the first round of Presidential elections. He’s following in the footsteps of M55 Five Star Movement in Italy, founded by comedian Beppe Grillo, which gained more votes than any other party in 2018 elections.

Do the people really want to have comedians in charge? Well, if it’s going to happen, why not have a professional comedian rather than those who fall into that role by mistake? A similar idea comes from Greta Thunberg ‘….and since our leaders are behaving like children, we will have to take the responsibility they should have taken long ago’. Let the children and fools step up. Her powerful words remind us constantly that the system and leaders we have somehow chosen are simply not capable of dealing with the complexities of Brexit, let alone climate change.

At the root of all this is the gap we have built between the representatives and the people. (Which is inextricably intertwined with the ever increasing gap we have created between rich and poor.) The latest of John Harris’ Anywhere but Westminster short films comes from Wigan where a significant majority voted to leave the EU. Despite everything we now know, most of the people John talks to would still vote leave. He concludes that ‘the tragedy of Brexit is that places like this have been all but forgotten in the Westminster drama, more than ever they have things to tell us and we ought to listen’.

Listening is the key. The energy of 6m people voting and 1m marching last week is all redirected into anger and frustration when it is met with someone’s fingers in their ears. The tragedy is that this will not change quickly. I don’t see it change with a different government either because they are all so entrenched in the current system. The new Independent Group of MPs ‘Believe that our parliamentary democracy in which our elected representatives deliberate, decide and provide leadership, held accountable by their whole electorate is the best system of representing the views of the British people’. Based on current form, they are simply wrong.

We cannot wait to be ‘consulted’ then ignored. On the largest issue life on earth faces, Extinction Rebellion (XR) has clearly recognised this and head for London on April 15th to demand change. And at a local level, Frome’s Independents (ifF) have taken initial steps in showing what can be done by committed and organised locals outside of Party Politics, looking to change the focus to inclusive participation and ownership of decisions by the community. Placing these together in one paragraph is very deliberate. If we have any chance of facing the climate emergency without extreme chaos, it will be through political engagement at a community level (the sort of work the Alternative UK and her partners are embarked upon in Plymouth).

IfF return to the polls on May 2nd, along with at least 40 other groups of Independents in other towns – committed community activists who have had enough of not being listened to. I believe both these Movements are essential, the high profile approach of XR, alongside a steady tidal wave of people reclaiming politics. Reclaiming it not only from the Political parties, but from the money which funds their dominance.

(The Rights of Spring poster is available from www.flatpackdemocracy.co.uk)


Rights of Spring - Flatpack Democracy
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Towns need to be run completely differently

Our high streets are in trouble:
Futures Forum: Is it the end of the road for the High Street?

Central government could help:
Futures Forum: How to revive the health of Sidmouth's high street >>> East Devon MP's on-line survey

And the council could perhaps be doing something:
Futures Forum: Save our high streets: "Isn’t it time our council did an audit and come up with a strategy for their future?"
Futures Forum: Councils and business rates: "their short-term focus on raking in money could end up destroying town centres weighed down by huge tax burdens"

As could the wider community and businesses:
Futures Forum: The shift in economic importance away from the high street "represents an opportunity for policymakers, businesses and communities to proactively choose a new direction"
Futures Forum: The 'Amazon tax' won't save the High Street > 'The nature of the offer on the high street is going to change over time. There's going to be less retail, more leisure, bars, community facilities.'
Futures Forum: How to revive the health of high streets > "We want vibrant centres in our cities and towns. But not streets lined with identical collections of outlets of the same chain retailers. Think of high streets as community hubs rather than shopping malls."

One place where things are happening is Frome:
Futures Forum: "Time for a change! What’s happening in local politics" >  
Futures Forum: Frome becomes Best Place to Live in the Southwest - again
Futures Forum: FLATPACK DEMOCRACY >>> sharing a vision of how we can change the status quo > 

The Guardian's John Harris has been looking:

Towns need to be run completely differently

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 Flatpack democracy: the new English political revolt

The Somerset town of Frome is 14 miles from Bath and has a population of around 25,000, split between relatively recent incomers attracted to its newly fashionable reputation and people whose backgrounds reach back into the town’s industrial past and its recent experience of neglect and hardship.

Frome has pioneered a new idea known as “flatpack democracy”, centred on the town and parish councils that form the English system of government’s lowest tier. We explored it two years ago.

The idea has two key elements. First, it aims at running as many local amenities and services as possible from the absolute grassroots. Second, and equally important, it is about opening up decision-making to the maximum level of local participation. As the idea’s inventor, Frome councillor Peter Macfadyen, puts it: “There are other town councils where the clerk walks in first, and the members stand, the mayor comes in behind, and they then say a prayer. The public have to write in beforehand, saying they want to speak. And it’s all just lost in some sort of Victorian past. It’s just insane.”

The idea of flatpack democracy, or something very like it, has been adopted in towns and villages in Bedfordshire, Devon and Cheshire. In the small northern city of Preston, an energetic Labour council is blazing a trail for something comparable but even more ambitious: the so-called Preston model of local government, whereby as much council spending as possible is aimed at boosting the local economy. Since the Brexit referendum, we have regularly wondered whether these ideas could be tried in the kind of towns whose experiences of deindustrialisation, political neglect and latter-day austerity have all highlighted the extent to which one their biggest issues is power, and the lack of it.

Wherever we go, with good reason, most people we meet have no sense of which bit of government is responsible for this or that aspect of their lives – only that the forces making the decisions are remote, seemingly unaccountable and rarely interested in where they live. Many urban areas have been recently boosted by the creation of “city regions” governed by “metro mayors”; in Scotland and Wales, devolution has brought power closer to people’s lives. In most English towns, by contrast, systems of power and accountability are pretty much as they were 40 years ago.

What this does to people’s connection with politics is clear. To quote a report by the recently founded thinktank the Centre for Towns, “on average, people living in cities are much less likely to believe that politicians don’t care about their area. Those living in towns are, in contrast, more likely to think politicians don’t care about their area – and won’t in the future.”

There lies the biggest issue of all. The future of our towns will only partly be decided by the high-octane rituals of Westminster debate, and general elections. What really matters is whether they might finally run a much greater share of their own affairs – and, to coin a memorable slogan, take back control.

“Politicians may finally be catching on: towns now hold the key to Britain’s future” | East Devon Watch
Politicians may finally be catching on: towns now hold the key to Britain's future | Cities | The Guardian
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The death of local democracy

We have been seeing the gradual starving of local government finance:
Futures Forum: Dropping the Local Government Finance Bill
Futures Forum: An uncertain future for local government finance

And the reason seems to be an ideological aversion to independent local government:
Futures Forum: The assault on Local Government: The Strange Death of Municipal England:

Even though central government says it wants local government to be 'independent' - and to rely on business rates only:
Futures Forum: Business rates: promising a 'fundamental reform of the system'

With potentially disastrous consequences:
Futures Forum: Councils and business rates: "their short-term focus on raking in money could end up destroying town centres weighed down by huge tax burdens"

But perhaps the most disturbing consequence of starving local government of finance is that it will dis-empower any notion of local democracy. Not that anyone is noticing in particular:
“The national calamity we don’t hear about – the death of local democracy” | East Devon Watch

John Harris reports from Devon in today's Guardian:

Opinion 

Local government

The national calamity we don’t hear about – the death of local democracy

John Harris

Cuts and closures underline the flaws of a system dominated by Westminster’s power. From health to schools to housing, we need an urgent rethink

 @johnharris1969

Tue 10 Jul 2018 06.00 BSTLast modified on Tue 10 Jul 2018 08.17 BST

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 Illustration by Eleanor Shakespeare

‘We cannot survive as we are beyond this next financial year. There is no money. I am not crying wolf. I never cry wolf.” So says the Conservative leader of Torbay council, in Devon: a local authority that delivers the full range of services but can no longer function at even the most basic level.

After years of bone-crunching austerity, by 2020 it will be faced with another £12m of cuts – so the most obvious option is to downgrade itself to a district council, hand over its most essential work to the bigger Devon county council, and hope for the best. Whether this will improve anything is an interesting question: since 2010, in real terms, Devon’s funding from government has been cut by 76%.

 How can we protect our libraries from closure when the council ignores us?

Poppy Noor

 

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Northamptonshire’s council has already effectively gone bankrupt. Somerset, Norfolk and Lancashire are reportedly faced with comparable problems. And in our big cities, similar stories have been unfolding for years, as the great cuts machine set in motion by George Osborne in 2010 continues to grind away, while both costs and demand for basic services increase.

Bristol faces a £108m funding gap by 2023, and is cutting services accordingly. Having already hacked well over £200m from its budgets, Leeds is in the midst of making £38m of savings in a single year. In Newcastle, by 2020, insiders reckon that over half the city council’s spending will in effect have been slashed within a decade. Many authorities are putting up council tax, but that doesn’t come close to easing the economies they have to make. And the results are obvious: less comprehensive child protection, less dependable care for older people, fewer children’s centres, more rubbish in the streets – and yet more dire damage to a social fabric that has been pulled apart for nearly a decade.

Why is this national calamity so under-reported? Some of the answer is about the continuing tragedy of Brexit. Political journalists who work themselves into a lather about this or that item of Westminster gossip hear the dread phrase “local government” and glaze over. It is some token of Whitehall neglect that confusion still surrounds the Tory plan to abolish the core grant given from central government to local authorities and make them completely dependent on business rates and council tax. All told, senior politicians routinely treat non-Westminster people as a mere annoyance: last week, for instance, it was revealed that though the government has commissioned an updated official assessment of the likely effects of Brexit on Greater Manchester, it will not let the people who run that part of the country see it.

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 ‘Northamptonshire’s council has already effectively gone bankrupt.’ Photograph: Leon Neal/Getty Images

There have been times when the UK’s deep tendency to centralise has been momentarily held back, as evidenced by the devolution to Scotland, Wales and London, and Osborne’s encouragement of the rebirth of city regions and the arrival of elected “metro mayors”. But even in those cases – let alone when it comes to the counties, boroughs and districts where devolution remains off-limits – Whitehall’s habit of clinging to power and the effects of austerity have got in the way. Moreover, as evidenced by the calamities that have befallen health and education, particularly in England, politics has tended to revolve around grand schemes authored by politicians who have Bonapartist ideas of controlling everything from the centre – which, in the midst of a society growing more complex and unpredictable by the day, are usually bound to fail. 

Yet here is a remarkable thing. For all their travails, some people in charge of councils are among the most inventive, energetic politicians I have ever met. Figures such as Manchester’s Richard Leese, Newcastle’s Nick Forbes, Leeds’s Judith Blake and Plymouth’s recently re-elected Tudor Evans – all Labour people – are located where their policies play out, deeply familiar with local nuances and complexities, and able to move fast. (Weirdly, they are now under attack from their own side: the people at the top of Labour have plans to end the system whereby council leaders are elected by other councillors, and impose one in which their selection would be in the hands of the party’s newly expanded membership – a brazenly factional move that may well be illegal, misunderstands how councils are deeply collective bodies, and threatens constant tension and disruption, just when the people concerned are in the midst of their most difficult era in living memory.)

Meanwhile, at the other end of the local government hierarchy, an experiment in participatory, non-party “flatpack democracy” in my adopted hometown of Frome, Somerset, highlights the revived belief in the power of truly local government, as does the related rebirth of town and parish councils in other parts of the country.

How would such examples of energy and creativity become the norm? Everything ought to start with an acknowledgment that the system is now an incomprehensible mess. It amounts to a random archipelago of town, parish, district, county, city and borough councils, new city regions, police forces and elected commissioners often based on completely different geographies, local enterprise partnerships and an array of other bodies – not to mention an increasingly centralised education system, and a health service now so complicated that very few people understand it. All this feeds into the sense of popular bafflement that defines a country that is simultaneously the UK’s most populous component but also its most powerless: this, it seems to me, is the essence of the modern English condition.

Any political project with radical intentions ought to consider the contrastingly clear, comparatively simple models in most of western Europe: the Spanish structure of municipalities, provinces and regional “autonomous communities” isn’t a bad place to begin. Learning from such examples should lead on to genuine financial independence for councils, based on a decent share of income tax and the ability to raise funds for big projects through bond issues, and a drastic redrawing of the responsibilities of national and local government – not least in the area of basic public services.

Council cuts are putting the vulnerable at risk, Tory peer says

 

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If the NHS is to survive, it is going to have to decisively shift from treatment towards prevention, something that can only be organised at the social grassroots. It is high time we broke up the dysfunctional Department for Work and Pensions, and handed the administration of most benefits and the jobcentre system to local actors who know what actually works. Education urgently needs to be re-localised. If our troubled high streets are to find a new role, it will be people living next to them who will have to be given the power to find it. To even begin to solve the national housing crisis, we will also have to allow local, city and regional politicians to take the initiative. So, we should pay them properly, and allow them the parental leave, holidays, pensions and sick pay that most of them currently do without.

Across the board, we need to leave behind the lingering fantasy that our fate is wholly in the hands of national politicians who can somehow blow the dust off the failed institutional machinery of the 20th century and save us. That world is gone, and its passing ought to be marked with a collective recognition that at the point when councils ought to be in the midst of revival and reinvention, they are actually being killed. God knows, Britain is now well used to the politics of self-harm, but how amazingly stupid is that?

• John Harris is a Guardian columnist

The national calamity we don’t hear about – the death of local democracy | John Harris | Opinion | The Guardian
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"Time for a change! What’s happening in local politics" > event at Honiton Beehive Centre > Saturday 26th May > East Devon Alliance > Flatpack Democracy > Devon United > Buckfastleigh Independents

There is new leadership at East Devon - elected from the majority party:
Futures Forum: The new leader of the District Council sets out his 'vision for transforming the council'

Meanwhile, the largest opposition grouping in the District will be holding a conference:
Futures Forum: Independents' Day > EDA 'Time for a change' conference > Saturday 26th May

We are talking about local democracy:
Futures Forum: East Devon and democracy: "if you stymie local decision-making, then people are just not going to bother getting involved"

Here's a note from County Councillor Claire Wright: 

Time for a change! What’s happening in local politics - event at Honiton Beehive Centre - Sat 26 May

Thursday, 17 May 2018 by Claire

The new phase of balance at EDDC is good news for East Devon, and a healthy situation for District Council Leader, Ian Thomas, as he takes over from Paul Diviani this week.

Independents are now the main Opposition Group at the District Council, thanks to the shockwave of votes in 2015 (next election due 2019). Independents now represent Exmouth Haldon; Feniton, Gittisham and Buckerell; Newton Poppleford and Harpford; Ottery St Mary, Town (2) and Rural; Raleigh; Sidmouth,Town (3), Rural (1) Sidford (2): and Woodbury and Lympstone (2) . And in 2016, the first East Devon Alliance of Independents (EDA) candidate , Martin Shaw, was elected to Devon County Council where he is a strong voice alongside Claire Wright. Martin represents Seaton,Beer, Branscombe, Colyford,Farway, Northleigh, Offwell, Southleigh and Wilmington, see https://seatonmatters.org

Come and find out more about why and how local politics is changing, and what it means for YOU, at a free event on Saturday 26th May , 10-1.30, at Honiton Beehive. Speakers at this ‘TIME FOR A CHANGE’ people’s conference, will include County Councillors Claire Wright and Martin Shaw; and Pam Barrett, Chair of the Independent Buckfastleigh Town Council and regional expert on transforming democracy from the bottom up (‘Flatpack Democracy’) .

Reserve your place (as spaces limited) via this link https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/east-devons-time-for-a-change-peoples-conference-tickets-45482525458 or on the eastdevonalliance.org.uk website.

Time for a change! What’s happening in local politics - event at Honiton Beehive Centre - Sat 26 May 

And more information from EDA Councillor Martin Shaw:
‘Time for a Change’ in East Devon – @EDevonAlliance holding conference to bring together everyone fighting on health, environment, planning and other issues « SEATON & COLYTON matters

The other speaker will be Pam Barrett of Buckfastleigh:
Buckfastleigh Independents Group - think BIG, act local - Home | Facebook 

In Buckfastleigh in Devon, the Buckfastleigh Independents group have followed a similar path. “This isn’t an affluent community,” says the town’s new deputy mayor, Pam Barrett. “It’s a working-class town that’s been suffering from a real loss of services.” Fired up by the possibilities of localism and their experience of fighting – successfully – to keep open a library and swimming pool, she and other residents resolved to stand for town council seats that had not been contested for “20 or more years”.

People Power Brum aims to put local power in the hands of citizens | Our Birmingham

And of the Flatpack Democracy movement:
Flatpack Democracy - Home | Facebook
How Flatpack Democracy beat the old parties in the People’s Republic of Frome | Politics | The Guardian

And of Devon United:
Devon United - Doing Democracy Differently - Home | Facebook

This is all very much part of a very much bigger thing:
Futures Forum: Networked cities as resilient platforms for post-capitalist transition > case studies Frome and Buckfastleigh
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