The Big Society – all from a bedtime story?
I had always imagined that David Cameron had snatched his ‘Big Society’ idea of local communities being responsible for their own services and being independent of Big Brother central government in Whitehall, from his own fertile imagination. Having searched my own memory though, I wonder if, while he was a little child, his mother or possibly his grandmother may have lulled him to sleep at night with stories of a golden age in a golden land where just such circumstances existed.
It wasn’t actually either a golden age or a golden land (bedtime stories don’t have to be boringly accurate!) but it is true that before World War II – which David Cameron’s grandma and perhaps even his mum – may have remembered, local communities did provide and manage services that are nowadays controlled either by central government, enormous private corporations, or large area authorities. They did it by means of local government – but it really was ‘local’ and its functions and responsibilities were very different from what is called ‘local government’ today.
Now taken over by the NHS, this was formerly Ipswich’s Public Health Department where I began my local government career in 1937. It housed a Maternity and Child Welfare Clinic, A School Clinic, and a TB Clinic as well as Health Visitors, District and School Nurses, and Sanitary Inspectors.
My first job was with Ipswich Corporation. At that time the population of the town was under 100,000 (a smaller and much more compact population than that of the Tendring District today). It had its poor and its wealthy but I think that it could reasonably have been considered to be ‘a community’. It was a community that elected its own representatives to its own Town Council. Each member was directly answerable to the electorate and liable to dismissal at the next election if it was decided that he had been a bad choice.
These democratically elected representatives of the local community ran every service that is run by any County, Borough or District Council today. They were much more independent though; deciding, for instance, whether or not they needed to build homes for letting and whether or not they would sell those homes to sitting tenants. In addition they provided gas and electricity, public transport, water supply, a sewerage system and sewage purification plant, social security (called poor law relief), a General Hospital, a Psychiatric Hospital (called a ‘Mental Hospital’ in those days), an Isolation Hospital, a TB Sanatorium and a Maternity Home, a School Medical Service and a Maternity and Child Welfare Service. That truly was a Big Society!
Despite the range and complexity of the Council’s responsibilities, they managed without a highly paid ‘Chief Executive’. They had a Town Clerk, normally a solicitor or barrister, who was the ‘first among equals’ of the professional officers – doctors, surveyors, solicitors, architects, engineers, librarians and so on – who headed the council’s specialist departments and who were responsible to the Council Committee dealing with the provision of that particular service. Even allowing for the massive inflation that has taken place in the past seventy years, their salaries were nothing like those of ‘top people’ in local government today – and they wouldn’t have dreamed of expecting ‘bonuses’ for giving the council the very best service of which they were capable.
The rot set in with the advent of that first Labour Government after World War II. I helped vote them into power and I agreed, and still agree, with their stated objectives. They believed that all public services should be publicly owned and managed. Sadly, they imagined that this could be achieved only on a national scale. They dismembered existing community owned-and-managed services like public health, social security, water, gas and electricity supply, sewerage and sewage treatment and handed them over to giant state-owned corporations. They and their Conservative opponents, called this – whether in praise or in derision – ‘socialism’. It was, in fact, ‘state capitalism’ and lent itself to the sale of our vital services into private ownership (some abroad!) with the advent of Thatcherism. Another blow to the idea of the self-governing ‘community’ came with the Local Government Reorganisation of 1974. The ‘local’ was effectively removed from ‘local government’ as, all over England and Wales, communities with little if anything in common were thrust together into a smaller number of much larger local authorities, more easily controlled from Whitehall. Brightlingsea and Harwich; even Frinton-and-Walton, and Clacton, could have been regarded as integral ‘communities’. By no stretch of the imagination is the Tendring District anything of the sort. A further development was the pernicious ‘right to buy’ legislation that compelled local authority landlords (but not private ones!) to sell off their housing heritage at bargain basement prices. More recently, local authorities were compelled to abandon their historic ‘committee’ administration and adopt either ‘cabinet’ government or – central government’s preferred option – a single all-powerful executive Mayor!
If the present coalition government really wants Britain to evolve into a country of self-governing communities with minimal central control, they should begin by breaking up existing local authorities into much smaller community-based units and according them something like the degree of responsibility and autonomy that local authorities enjoyed prior to World War II.
Somehow though – I don’t think that that is quite what Mr Cameron has in mind. So far I haven’t seen any of central government’s functions being passed down the line to ‘local communities’. However he does seem quite keen to see existing democratically elected district and borough councils stripped of their remaining powers and responsibilities. These are to be taken on by private firms or charitable organisations that may be either local or national (or international come to that!) and certainly won’t, in any sense, be either ‘local communities’ or their elected representatives.
Real community control of local affairs has been and is – ‘Going….going…..gone!’
Revolution in Libya
When, in recent weeks I published in this blog photos taken in the eastern Libyan desert in the winter of 1941/’42, I didn’t dream that that country would shortly be making front page news in our press. It was of course with eastern Libya, Cyrenaica, that I became unwillingly familiar during that time.
It was strange to hear Tobruk, Derna and Benghazi featuring in news bulletins, as they had - though in quite a different context – over seventy years ago! It was in Tobruk, on 21st June 1942, that I met my Nemesis when our defences were overrun by the tanks of General Rommel’s DAK (Deutsche Afrika Korps). The Medium Artillery Battery of which I was a member was preparing to make a last stand when we were ordered by the Garrison Commander (the South African General Klopper) to burn our vehicles, put the guns out of action and surrender.
Derna was a staging post in our thoroughly miserable journey as POWs, in the back of an Italian army lorry to Benghazi and thence, in the hold of an elderly tramp steamer, to Italy. At Derna I was at my lowest ebb. I had been a prisoner of war for about a week. I was unwashed, unshaven and without hope. The ‘prison transit camp’ was a barbed-wire-surrounded Muslim burial ground. I was suffering from diarrhoea and stomach cramps and, for the first and only time of my life, wishing that I had the means to end it. The transit camp at Benghazi was a little better. We did at least have tents to sleep in and sufficient water to wash ourselves. I was only there about a week until about 100 of us were picked out at random and marched through the town to the docks and our transport to Italy.
I saw little of those three Libyan towns, all of which were in the news last week, and even less of their Libyan inhabitants. They are all in an area of eastern Libya, Cyrenaica, the population of which liberated themselves from the clutches of Colonel Gaddafi. How extraordinary that, according to a BBC report, local people should have challenged airborne troops landing on Tobruk’s El Adhem airfield (which I remember well!) and beaten them off.
I wish the rebels all success and sincerely hope that they will succeed in unseating Gaddafi, and in leading their country into a free and prosperous future. At least they have a source of revenue, Libya’s oil reserves, at their disposal. Let us hope that they can distribute that oil income wisely and equitably, for the benefit of all Libyans – not just a ruling elite! They have yet to oust Colonel Gaddafi. That is unlikely to be easy. Watching him ranting on tv brought Adolf Hitler to mind – and we all know how much how much trouble we had getting rid of him!
Meanwhile as I write, a week before posting this blog, hundreds of Britons are stranded while our government belatedly fumbles ineffectively to arrange their evacuation. France, Germany, Portugal, Russia, Belgium and Holland were all days ahead of us. By next Tuesday I’ll no doubt know how effective our efforts have been.
I imagine that the leader writers, and probably most of the readers, of the Daily Mail the Daily Express and the Sun would consider it high treason for me to suggest that if we had been an active partner in a Federal Europe, all our citizens as well as all other EU citizens would probably by now be safely home.
‘Carpe Diem!’
Just another of those Latin phrases that tend to give those who use them a totally spurious aura of scholarship! It means, loosely translated, ‘Seize today’s opportunities – no-one knows what will happen tomorrow’. (I remember it because it is also the name of a very pleasant restaurant in Brussels where my son and grandson have taken me on a couple of occasions!)
David Cameron may have been a little tardy at plucking Brits stranded in Libya out of danger – but no-one can accuse him to failing to seize the business opportunities arising from the crisis in North Africa and the Middle East. He was the very first world leader to visit the ‘new Egypt’ and has been visiting other countries in the Middle East not yet affected by the wind of change there. He lectured those countries’ rulers, most of whom closely resemble those deposed in Egypt and Tunisia (if not being quite in Colonel Gaddafi’s league!) on the joys of free speech, a free press and free and fair elections.
At the same time the arms dealers in his entourage were, no doubt, impressing on those rulers’ lackeys the superiority of British-made water cannon, tear gas, rubber bullets, shot guns and stun grenades. This, of course, would be just in case Mr Cameron failed to persuade those rulers of the benefits of liberal democracy, and their subjects decided, like the Egyptians, the Libyans and the Tunisians, to take matters into their own hands.
Today is certainly be a good time to be selling the means of effective crowd control to Middle Eastern despots.
‘OLDER PEOPLE WILL BE CONSIDERED FOR ADOPTION AS
GUIDE LINES ARE RELAXED’
That, believe it or not, was a headline in the Daily Telegraph a week or so ago. What a vista of new career opportunities it could have opened up to we oldies! I had a vision of a 'professional' Grandad (I think that that may be a little more ‘Public School’ than Grandpa) living comfortably in his corner of the luxurious mansion of the new-rich family who had adopted him. A dignified figure, white haired and leaning heavily on a stick, he would emerge from his lair when required to be introduced to visitors, ‘Grandad’s one of the old school you know’. He would help himself to a large whisky and soda, dispense homely wisdom, inject something of the past into the very brief history of his new family, and then his adoptive 'grand-daughter' would explain, ‘Grandad gets tired very quickly these days’, and he would retreat to the familiar comfort of his den.
It sounded too good to be true – and it was. The Daily Telegraph’s sub-editor hadn’t been quite as familiar with the subtleties of the English language as lone might have expected. Older people will be considered as possible adopting parents, not for adoption. Never mind. I wouldn't really have wanted to be a professional grandad. Being a real one - and a great-uncle - is far more satisfying.
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