This piece first appeared on Opendemocracy.net.
Guess whose manifesto begins: “There is nothing more beautiful in a democracy than the love of one’s country, to which every vote that slides into the ballot box on election day bears witness.”
I’m sure you guessed it’s not Boris Johnson, or Ken Livingstone, or your local district councillor. It’s Nicolas Sarkozy , and the Olympian rhetoric is typical of a French presidential candidate. Le peuple français are not electing a bureaucrat-in-chief, they are electing their “republican King” .
“Republican monarchy” might seem very foreign to British voters, but it is the choice they have today in the mayoral elections and referendums. Boris Johnson and Ken Livingstone would shy away from the phrase (particularly the word “republican” in Boris’s case), but the role of elected mayor gives the same personal mandate, and promotes the same elevation of personality over policy.
The London mayor race is an extreme example, as both candidates are standing for the second time, and the election plays into the political media’s twin obsessions of London and potential governing party splits. Nonetheless, the candidates are universally “Ken” and “Boris”. We can Back Boris, Sack Boris, be Better Off with Ken or Stop Ken. There’s little mention of the parties – Ken Livingstone’s manifesto mentions the word “Labour” only 23 times in 100 pages, but he looks like a party hack compared to Boris Johnson, whose six manifesto chapters mention the Conservative Party exactly once – in the logo on the front cover.
Downplaying party identity and focusing on individual character is exactly how the elected mayor system is meant to work. It is intended to give an individual mandate to an individual – with party machinery a benefit, not a requirement for winning.
Voters are asked to judge the character of the candidate, not their policies – could they handle the 3 a.m. phone call? In return, they get a leader who has a far stronger personal mandate than the leader of the council, and needs to focus less on internal council politics.
The benefit of this personal power is that the mayor can become “the leader of the place, not the leader of the council” in the words of Sir Steve Bullock , first council leader then mayor of Lewisham. An elected mayor can give a stronger lead in partnerships and subregional bodies. They can use their profile to be a personal focus to the whole area. As Simon Jenkins has said, this is a particularly important role outside London, where the great provincial cities need a well-known figurehead.
Personalised campaigning also gives a boost to prominent independent candidates. Ken Livingstone and Lutfur Rahman in Tower Hamlets both led insurgent campaigns against their own parties. H’Angus the monkey mascot of Hartlepool FC became Stuart Drummond , the town’s three-time mayor . The results show that mayors can take the lift to power, rather than the stairs – fewer than one in ten councillors is an independent, but four of the fourteen serving mayors are.
The Government believes that single leaders can achieve more, and wants to give them more powers. They have proposed City Deals, containing new powers, borrowing rights and autonomy, stored in a box marked “do not open until after the referendums”. On the back of that, business leaders are promising voters “£1bn funding jackpots” if they say yes to mayors. It’s a bold promise, but given the reality of the mayor’s powers, disappointment is almost guaranteed.
Mayors can’t change the fact that local government has to handle some very difficult issues, and they are still bound – a little borrowing aside – by the same financial constraints that tie down every council.
The hard times, and the general mood of anger against politics, increase the risks of the personal mandate in the mayoral model. The powers and profile that mean Sir Steve Bullock can push Lewisham forward are the same powers and profile that Peter Davies, the English Democrat Mayor of Doncaster has been using for the last three years. Mayor Davies’s administration is perhaps the clearest example of the problems that personalised local government power brings, particularly when facing an oppositional council.
Mayor Davies has been described by the Audit Commission as not having “the capacity to make the necessary improvements in governance”. His approach to running the authority, they say, has “tended to make existing problems worse”. At the same time, senior councillors, working with officers, have tried to undermine the office and its holder by setting their own budgets and policies.
The clash of mayor and council in Doncaster – which a different elected mayor model also produced in Stoke - is one of the risks of elected mayors. The bigger risk is that elected mayors change the public face of the authority, but have no impact on the wider democratic deficit.
Mayor Drummond in Hartlepool won his third term on a turnout of thirty-one percent, only a slight improvement on turnout in council elections before the mayoralty was introduced. Mayor Davies was elected on a turnout of just thirty-five percent, much the same turnout as for the council elections of the year before.
Such ordinary turnouts, also seen in London , suggest that the personal profile of mayors has not re-energised civic and democratic spirit in their localities.
Elected mayors can provide personal leadership and representation of a place to Government in a way a council leader cannot. For many places they will be a positive change, but without deeper work to develop democratic governance and participation, they won’t be much of a change.
The challenges of localism – planning and providing services closer to citizens, and taking decisions in in neighbourhoods – push decision-making down below the public, prominent mayor into communities where supporting democratic infrastructure is underfunded or missing. In Liverpool, Sheffield, Bristol and elsewhere, good neighbourhood governance is the reform that is needed most urgently, whoever is running the council.
Far away, so close (a belated Europe Day post)
The European Parliament: EPP (265) S&D (184) ALDE (84) Greens – EFA (55) ECR (54) EUL-NGL (35) EFD (32) Non-Inscrits (27) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Yesterday was Europe Day, and in 364 days there will be another. Other than that, pretty much everything European is uncertain.
At various stages during the crisis, people have quoted the Gramsci line:
But that leaves unanswered the question of what “the new” is. There’s no guarantee that it will be better. A bad outcome to the crisis could give us a “new” that looks like sixty years ago – a loose collection of independent countries with their own currencies, raging mutual hostility, and a shattered economy. A more plausible scenario has the Europe muddling along until the new economies step forth to the rescue of the old. Not much “new” about that.
We have to choose our “new”. This means more than appealing to economic or trade logic, the technocratic fallacy of much pro-European comment, and more than assuming that Europe doesn’t matter or isn’t of popular interest. It means making a political and moral case for what you think is needed.
You won’t be surprised to learn that my “new” starts from democracy. The scale and ambition of the EU has outgrown the at-one-remove democracy of the Council of Ministers, and the European Parliament has not yet stepped into its role. The Euro and Europe are political projects, and need proper politics to go with them.
This pan-European debate is starting to emerge, as was seen during the French election, when Merkel almost campaigned for Sarkozy, and when the Greeks were cheering on François Hollande. More generally, watching the political debates across Europe – for example, through the excellent Presseurop service – you see multiple common themes, about services, rights, immigration, and very few issues that are purely local.
However, much of that increasing political conversation has been focused on nations and national leaders rather than on a decision that needs to be taken across Europe. “Merkozy” and intergovernmental discussions are perhaps useful for taking decisions in the midst of the crisis, but there is deep danger in framing the discussion around “Germany” and “France”, rather than the positions that each takes – there is plenty of “France” in German political debate, and plenty of “Germany” in Britain.
Political scientist Ronny Patz has said that the 2014 European Parliament elections “will be huge”, and maybe that’s true, as they choose the sole directly-elected institution of the EU, but the role that the Parliament has played in crisis decision making has been slight, at least in terms of public profile, and people will not turn out unless they know what they are voting for – as the consistent decline in turnout for EP elections demonstrates.
Others are looking past 2014. Merkel’s party, the CDU, proposes a directly elected EU President, and proposals from Irish campaigner Declan Ganley and academic Brendan Simms call for something similar. There needs to be a discussion on whether the presidential model is right for Europe, or whether a parliamentary system that de-emphasises personalities (and hence nationalities) is better.
Whether a presidential model is right or wrong, a single new office is certainly insufficient. A new European democracy has to be one that fits the emerging social model, not a replica of systems designed for a Victorian nation state. That means participation to go alongside traditional representation – ideas such as the Pirate Party’s Liquid Democracy are an interesting step in that direction.
Many people, not just Brits, would think that this is wasting effort on an institution that should just be done away with. National democracy works now, why try any sort of scheme at European level, or democratise what has always been an elite project. Better go back to the national level of democracy, and remodel the EU as a free-trade union, with the minimum powers needed to make that happen.
I don’t think that’s an adequate solution. There are issues where Europe can act best, and most efficiently, if it acts together. Climate change and energy policy are good examples, and for all the moans about red tape, there is far more red tape in twenty-seven distinct sets of product regulations than in one. Those policies and those regulations need to be drawn up in as democratic a way as possible. What’s more, Europe has created a single currency and free movement zone that could not be easily unwound – unless abolitionists would like to tell the million Britons living abroad to pack their bags and come home.
However, the alternative approach of “steady as she goes, nothing is wrong with the model” won’t wash any more either. It reminds me of a focus group I once ran with a group of UK civil servants, who insisted that the reason people disliked their organisation was that they just weren’t taking the time to understand the reasons for the policy. That seems like a realistic position only within the SW1 postcode, and people inside the Petite Ceinture evidently feel the same way.
A UK referendum, whether Farageux or Mandelsonian, seems very likely in the next few years. It might be “status quo or out”, it might be “properly in or out”, but whatever it is the pro-side will need to do more than sit back and let the opprobrium wash over them. They need a positive vision that’s more than “bicycle theory” (keep going forward or fall over). “Full federal union” isn’t going to be on offer, but a serious reform conversation might be – the sort of conversation that Declan Ganley (formerly of Libertas) and Brendan Simms of Cambridge University started with a joint reform proposal published earlier this year.
A new settlement won’t give a final answer on the balance of growth and austerity, or member-state and federal – just look at the US after two hundred years of federalism if you think it might – but it could give us a quicker, modern, democratic system in which we can make those decisions.