Danny Burns

The Revenge of the Poor : The anti-poll tax campaign in Britain

movement in the UK. In announcing to the House of Commons his intention to abandon the poll tax the Prime Minister, John Major, explicitly admitted that the primary reason for this stunning about-turn was the fact that the tax had been made uncollectable. The anti-poll tax movement had, by 1990, become possibly the largest mass campaign of civil disobedience in modem British history and this has been achieved without any support, indeed in the face of opposition, from the organised Labour movement. In this article we seek to provide an anatomy of the movement based upon our experience of it in the South West. We also attempt to look at the responses of Labourism in all its guises orthodox, soft, hard and municipal to this movement, a movement which despite being alternatively ignored or despised may well have provided the basis for Labour’s future electoral success.

Citizen Participation: Theory and Practice

In Chapter 2 we argued that local authorities need to concern themselves as much with improving the quality of government as with improving the quality of local public services. In fact, these are not separate tasks because, ultimately, the quality of public services depends on there being a set of pressures for service improvement which reside outside the state. A cursory glance at the failed communist regimes in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union reveals how the absence of such pressure resulted, amongst other things, in poor service performance and ineffective public planning. Vaclav Havel, president of Czechoslovakia from 1989 to 1992, spoke for millions when he argued that vigorous efforts need to be made to widen citizen involvement in public affairs: The schools must lead young people to become self-confident, participating citizens; if everyone doesn’t take an interest in politics, it will become the domain of those least suited to it’. (Havel, 1991, p. 118)

Neighbourhood Decentralisation and the New Public Management

The purpose of this chapter is to provide new ways of understanding the changing nature of management in local government. First we provide a context by examining the radically new approaches to the organisation of the production of goods and services which have emerged within both the public and private sectors during the last decade or so. Specifically we seek to examine some of the components of what has become known as ‘the new public management’ and to locate neighbourhood decentralisation as one strategy for giving particular shape to this. We provide a conceptual framework for neighbourhood decentralisation in which its four components — localisation, flexibility, devolution, and organisational culture change — are envisaged as interlocking and mutually reinforcing. We explore these four dimensions of decentralisation in some detail and offer numerous examples to illustrate how various models have worked in practice.

Rethinking Local Democracy

Recent debates about the role, form and function of local government have tended to focus on local authorities as mechanisms for delivering services. Yet we have argued for some years that while local government does offer a range of ways of providing good quality service, it is about much more than service delivery (Hambleton, 1988; Hambleton and Hoggett, 1990). If local government stands for a notion of community, if it is concerned to foster a vigorous civic culture and to improve the quality of life in the broadest sense, then attention must focus on the welfare of the local polity. Councillors and officers need to devote energy, time and resources to strategies designed to improve the quality of government, as well as the quality of service.

The Crisis in Local Government

Local government in the United Kingdom is currently undergoing a profound shift in the way it organises its activities and the way it relates to the public it serves. The changes of the 1980s and the 1990s have catapulted local government from relative obscurity into a highly visible role at the centre of national political debates. Indeed, it is possible to argue that the public services in general and local government in particular have become the most consistently contentious sphere of politics in Britain in the period since 1979. Driven by pressures from consumers and citizens at local level, by a maelstrom of legislation emanating from Whitehall, and by new thinking within the political parties, local authorities are being forced to change as never before.

Local Democracy beyond the Local State

Local government in the UK is in deep trouble. In Chapter 1 we outlined the main dimensions of the current crisis and explained how the Thatcher government, elected in 1979, introduced a series of measures designed to undermine the power of local authorities, to slash central government financial support to local government and to introduce market principles into the process of public service management. In this final chapter we revisit some of the key political themes we have discussed earlier in the book and outline a vision of a strong and reinvigorated local democracy. In this vision, locally-elected authorities would have much more power than they have atpresent, but we want to stress at the outset that we are not advocating a return to a glorious, possibly mythical, municipal past. A vibrant local democracy for the twenty-first century requires a powerful enabling capacity within the local state, but this does not imply a return to state domination of local decision-making and service provision.

Shaking up the Bureaucracies

In this chapter, we assess the degree of organisational change achieved in Islington and Tower Hamlets and, where possible, the impact of this upon service delivery. Do the new arrangements constitute a radical departure from the traditional bureaucratic forms that Weber (1948) outlined? In classical terms, bureaucracies have been perceived as ordered hierarchies of centralised command, relying heavily upon specialisation and formal procedures. In the context of governmental institutions the bureaucratic form has influenced the development of a particular kind of social relation between these institutions on the one hand and individuals and communities on the other — one characterised by the remoteness and impermeability of the organisation.

Enhancing Participatory Democracy: Islington

In this chapter we examine the experience of the London Borough of Islington in developing a network of neighbourhood forums. It can be claimed that the council has gone further than any other local authority in the UK in attempting to improve the quality of public involvement in local government. While the bold steps taken by Islington are clearly tuned to the local environment, the innovations developed there will be of wider interest to the local government community because they offer practical insights about how to strengthen the democratic roots of local government.

The Character of Local Political Innovation

In this book we seek to outline a vision of a responsive, flexible and above all democratic approach to organising public, and specifically local government, services. As we explained in Chapter 1, decentralisation may assume a variety of forms, but in the context of local government the dominant form will tend to be one which gives emphasis to spatially-based forms of decentralisation — ones built upon the catchment areas of particular facilities such as schools and leisure centres, or upon the spatial distribution of subjectively defined neighbourhoods, or upon political boundaries such as electoral wards.

Extending Representative Democracy: Tower Hamlets

In examining the forms of local democracy to have emerged in Islington and Tower Hamlets it is important to discern the particular meaning given to local democracy by the political groups in control of each borough — then we can examine the formal arrangements developed for participation and the functions they have performed. In the previous chapter we discussed the Islington approach to neighbourhood participation. In this chapter we examine the neighbourhood committee system developed in Tower Hamlets. We will examine specifically the extent to which a greater level of representation has been generated and the extent to which this participation has included the variety of different communities and groups residing in the locality. We consider some of the costs associated with the extension of democracy and examine whether the model may put too much power in the hands of small groups of local councillors.