The instruments of power in a state must not be revealed to anyone. Lao Tzu
Democracy means rule by the people. It does not mean rule by corporations, capital, business, or the wealthy. Democracy means rule by all the people. I mentioned this recently on Twitter and someone mocked the idea of referendums being held on every single policy. That’s not what it means.
We don’t all have the same interests. We are meant to know which policy decisions affect us through our media. Do we? I address this right at the bottom of the article.
I have been delaying writing about this because it feels so complicated in my head but it’s not complicated really.
What is democracy?
Each group in society has the right to be represented by the people elected to do so.
This includes parents, people who breathe, people with disabilities, people vulnerable for a number of reasons, people who run businesses, who want the roads clear and clean, who use footpaths and who go to school or send their children to school. There are many categories of people and we can each fit into different slots at various times.
This isn’t anything profound. It’s just looking around and seeing that we are all different.
How does a council represent its people?
How can a council (or other form of local government) represent all those people?
It can listen to the people and find out what their different needs are. Councils have been around since 1889; that’s when the first county elections were held. They’re not that old but they’re not too new either. They’ve been doing this for a while.
Councils can listen and read what people who contact them say, and make note of the varied needs people have. Sometimes those needs conflict between different groups. That is to be expected. We have equality impact assessments we can use. Democracies include protection of the vulnerable. They are not ‘winner takes all’ forums.
Councils can meet with certain groups and pay attention to their needs and then feed those issues back into the agenda;
They can invite certain elements of a society onto boards where decisions are made and where issues make it onto agendas.
There are all sorts of ways to capture the needs of different groups of people. The council also uses surveys and consultations. These are different from scouring Twitter for mentions of the mayor; which is more of a brand awareness exercise. We can tell this because none of the issues deemed a priority to the people ever made it onto the agenda or got prioritised.
By looking to understand whether local authorities are listening to people’s needs and then acting to meet those needs, we can judge how well our elected representatives and the officers and staff we pay to represent us, are doing their jobs. The answers should tell us how well it is all working.
Who gets prioritised?
Who do we prioritise when we only have so many people and so little resource? One thing I found interesting was the mayor telling a doctor who brought a petition to Full Council to protect children from air pollution the following:
Air quality is a primary concern along with a number of other primary concerns. I’ve been at pains to say we don’t have a hierarchy of what we’re doing here. It’s air quality or it’s poverty or it’s poverty or it’s air quality.
We’re trying to do them all at the same time.
This sentiment sounds reasonable until you start to examine it.
It sounds like a clear comment about how money and resources are distributed. It does take a little squinting though to ask why you wouldn’t prioritise air quality over other things though. Surely, once you can’t breathe, you really don’t need to worry about anything else. Poor health is up there with the worst outcomes of social inequality.
When personal safety and health are ignored, buildings burn down and children die in hospitals from polluted air. So personal health and safety are big priorities.
The mayor did not respond well to that doctor. I call his tone aggressive and defensive. Councillors who were in the room went to her afterwards to apologise for his tone. She was also given no right to reply.
This type of exchange where one person in charge reacts in a bullying way to those who are more vulnerable, effectively begins to exclude people from reaching out to those in power.
How can we make our voices heard when those who control the money and the decision-making powers, attack us? It’s not difficult to see how this would inhibit engagement.
Where does the money go?
Another way of finding out whether the council is listening is to see from council spending whether some groups are prioritised or not. Where does the money go? Is it distributed proportionally between those who need it the most?
In June 2021, after the Mayor Marvin Rees was re-elected for a second term, £30k was cut from the book fund to give to the new regeneration department. £70k was cut from parks, and £100k was cut from highways maintenance. A further £100k was cut from the book fund (and other library funding) in the 2022-2023 budget.
That’s not prioritising things equally. A new post had been created and money was taken from other budgets to meet that need.
When the administration decided to approve the refurbishment of Bristol Beacon (then Colston Hall for those looking through council papers) they prioritised spending £48m on that cultural venue. The cost to the work went up to £106m and it was approved. That money is funded by us.
For every £40 million or so that we borrow, we need to service that debt with £2m a year of interest.
When the mayor chose to cut funding to public toilets to save £440k, that was a choice. When he chose to spend over £500k on consultant reports on Bristol Energy and City Leap in one year, that was a choice too. Who benefitted?
Who controls spending?
Not all choices are determined by the council. Sometimes central government determines where money gets spent; in fact, a lot of the time central government determines where and how much money is spent. We need to take that into account.
The mayor spent £110,000 over three years in finding out what people say about him on Twitter. At the same time, to save £90,000 a year, crossing guards were cut, and children were hit by cars.
These are paired case studies where we can see how behaviour affects different groups. We have been relying on anecdotes rather than long-term studies but this is what we look for when we assess whether we live in a democracy.
For example, in one situation, residents’ lives seemed hellish in Corbett House in Bristol. One woman couldn’t go to the toilet in her own bathroom because the leak was so bad.
Interestingly enough, in an interview, the mayor used an example from Corbett House to say how he could get council resources to help one of his and his wife’s friends.
Bristol Energy and £43m lost by residents
Bristol Energy was a failed venture begun under the first mayor, George Ferguson, and completed under the second, and our current, mayor.
In 2019, council tax was raised by the highest amount 4.99% to raise £4.4m. We had just had a general election and unexpectedly, £12m was given to Bristol City Council. £6m was used to pay off a hole in the budget and £6m was put in reserves. The cabinet member for finances said that we had to raise money from tax and save money into reserves because our finances were still a bit ‘squeaky’.
At the same time, the energy company, Bristol Energy, that had been losing millions from the beginning of the Rees administration (Rees himself inherited £3m spent on it when he took office, and the funding envelope was for £15m.), became insolvent, from what we know.
Four days before a cabinet decision to approve its business plan in 2020 (i.e. pour more money into it), the council had to pay an emergency £1.2m to ‘avoid reputational damage’. The independent advisor told the administration not to approve the business plan.
But with perhaps the imminent mayoral election coming up, the council spent a further few million to prop up a failing company straight after raising an extra £4.4m from residents.
Note that not everyone lost out when the company went bust. Directors were given plenty of money, one had a £250k pay out while others were paid over £200k and £300k a year. These amounts were personally approved by the mayor.
Note the flow of the money here: the public paid extra while directors were given extra. Straight from our pockets and into their bank accounts.
Other examples, and there are plenty:
Other flows of money include £272,000 a year for the executive director of growth and regeneration for a part-time role; £239,000a year for an arena consultant who was employed to get the Filton arena approved and cancel the Temple Island one.
£12m paid from the council’s revenue budget for costs already incurred on the arena project that was cancelled.
£54m that would have gone to offset some of the money from the arena is now being used to clean the site for L&G’s new development project. L&G is a company worth billions, which holds trillions in assets.
To me, these are cases of spending to profit and prioritise business and capital over residents. I am very clear about this. These are all my interpretations and they are the reasons why I don’t believe we are living in a democracy at local government level or national government.
So what do we do?
What do we do about all this? You may think I’m biased and of course we all are. But I show my workings out and I tell you exactly how I reach my conclusions.
Bring your own examples. Look around. The more we discuss and understand what our collective needs are, the more we can work together to meet them. Note, this is the point of such committee systems.
There are numerous examples of where money is spent and how these decisions are made.
Here is one last example because education is a huge issue in this city. My daughter’s first school was recently shut down and the consequences of that action seem to ultimately benefit a multi-school, land-rich academy.
A small primary school in inner-city Bristol, whose students were more prone to be claiming free school meals than other schools and who came from the council houses nearby, although not only, was shut down because apparently there were not enough children.
At the same time — same administration — the Cathedral Trust was given £900k for infrastructure costs. That little inner city state school kept being refused money to fix its premises.
These examples are how we judge whether our governance is by the people and for the people—which is what a democracy is.
Or instead, have certain interests captured those in power.
The power of the media
The media is known as the fourth estate; the other three estates are the judiciary, executive and legislature, which make up the rule of law.
In Bristol, the media can only effectively be the second estate because we have no judiciary or legislature, which are the checks and balances on power.
Can we appeal to a higher authority if things go wrong? In very few cases, like in Liverpool but for the most part, no.
As I was told by the Ministry of Housing, Communities, and Local Government, “the process of arriving at having a mayor (or other governance structure) - petitions, elections, referendums, council resolutions is for the Ministry. Once a governance structure is in place, who does what is part of the functions and responsibilities of local authorities.”
If a resident wants to complain about a process, their complaint is dealt with by the monitoring officer. The monitoring officer in turn reports to the mayor.
So we turn to our only other seeming check on power: the media. This is there to help us make informed decisions.
Do they do that?
One of the things we have to look at is how far our media represent us. If the local newspapers only prints advertorials for the mayor and he refuses interviews, are we being informed? Does £36,000 of funding from the mayor to the Bristol Post’s company and monthly meetings affect how well the second estate does its job? We should know.
So democracy is not only about where money goes, it is also about the population being informed enough to know where it goes and how they can make the best decisions for themselves.
We need to be informed. That’s a huge part.
Influence in decision making
The other important part in looking at decisions is how can we change them? can we affect them? if I don’t have clean air, can I make the council clean up my air? If I go to the council with a problem, will they address it?
Who do I have to be to have my interests served?
At the moment, those who control the most capital around the city are more likely to be heard than ordinary residents. I’m happy to take questions on this. Just leave a comment.
That’s how we know we do not live in a democracy.
Will a committee system change that? Maybe.
Can a mayoral system ever change into a more democratic system? No.
What do we do about it?
This referendum on Thursday, May 5th, is an amazing opportunity to get everyone thinking about how does power work in our city and how does it affect us.
We do that by talking. Maybe part of it is by voting too but that comes naturally after we know what’s going on in our city. We should have known before the referendum but as discussed above, so many of our sources of information have been captured.
Let’s talk. Let’s share our examples. Let’s be the media so we can inform ourselves and others.
Democracy was created to help us protect our interests from those with power and money (often the same thing). Let’s hold it sacred.
It’s much more than just one vote.
An imbalance between rich and poor is the oldest and most fatal ailment of all republics. Plutarchos