/diary0004Failure • Tony Blair must now confront the failure of his Northern Ireland “mission”. True, he has moved on to other to other assignments, but in Belfast he leaves a record of failure behind him. Blair’s strategy was to generate a momentum for peace, by playing a constitutional game. He appealed to the instincts of David Trimble (who is a law lecturer, specialising in constitutional law) . His strategy was to use the carrot of Assembly Government to generate agreement between the Parties: if they wanted provincial independence enough, he thought, they would compromise to achieve it. If they could then only sit down together in Stormont and run the country together, so the reasoning went, they would learn to get along together and live in peace.
Without local government • The strategy had
much
to commend it. But it lacked an essential precondition, namely integrated, democratic local
government. Since 1970 (in particular, since the Local Government Act 1974) elected local
authorities in Northern Ireland have been stripped of all relevant powers. After 1974, they
were left with nothing. The great city of Belfast was reduced to less than the Dibley
Parish Council. Political migration • No Councillor or officer of ability will consider entering a powerless system. Politicians of authority simply migrated, pursuing careers in “parties”, or “movements”: they were not required to sit down together to run their own communities, because their powers had been stripped from them. There was nothing worthwhile for them to do. The politicians, having nothing to bring them together, drifted further and further apart. Without the shared disciplines of housing administration, highway maintenance and refuse collection, they had nothing to do but makes speeches, issue statements, take positions. Personal distance increased, and there was nothing to counter that destructive process. There was none
Personal cooperation • I have served both as an
elected Councillor (in Hackney, in the 1970s) and as a Chief Officer (in Swansea, in the 1980s), and
the framework of local government is very familiar to me. My father served all his life as a
Councillor on Cardiff Rural District Council. Local government is in my blood. And I know that
its disciplines, including the practice of personal cooperation, are invaluable elements in the
body politic. No understanding • Blair does not understand that, because he has no respect for, no love for local government and its ways. His Northern Ireland strategy failed, simply because the personal divides between the politicians of Northern Ireland had grown too deep, too wide. Experience had given them no practice, in how to cooperate and work constructively together. Without effective local government, there was a vacuum, both at the heart of the Constitution, and in their experience of exercising power. The “peace process” proved insufficient to overcome that systemic drawback.
Starting again • Labour will have to start again.
Local government must be re-built. There will be no peace in Northern Ireland, at provincial
level, until its politicians learn to manage Belfast together, and Londonderry, and Dundalk.
Peace takes practice. Northern Ireland is an awful example of what can happen, if the
processes of participatory community government are truncated, bypassed. Emasculation • Labour is now running similar risks with their emasculation of local government in England, Wales and Scotland. The Local Government Act 2000 is wreaking havoc with morale and motivation, in local government. Provincial assemblies are no substitute for effective, representative government in our cities, and throughout the communities in which we all spend out daily lives. Blair himself, for reasons of limited experience, lacks sensitivity to these matters of communal governance. It is for others to make good that deficiency.
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