Revisiting the poor law: The Coalition, Liam Byrne and the language of sanction

On a hill, overlooking the centre of Brighton, sits the vast Victorian bulk of Brighton General Hospital. Many Brighton residents will be unaware that it is the former Brighton workhouse – built in the 1860s at a huge cost of £40,000, to serve a town that is far smaller than it is today (the 1831 census put the population of the Brighton parish at 40,000) and which covered a geographical area no larger than the current town centre.

Why was such a large amount spent on placing such a large, imposing building in such a prominent position? The answers, of course, were ideology and power. It was a constant reminder that the inevitable result of fecklessness and pauperism was the shame and disgrace of the workhouse. Godliness, sobriety and of course uncomplaining daily labour would ensure that you would never suffer the ignominy of indoor relief, the utter disgrace of being supported by the parish in a place whose day-to-day regime was designed to punish. And of course it was a reminder of precisely who was in charge. That invaluable repository of Brighton history, the My Brighton and Hove website, carries a story of an elderly lady due to go into the General Hospital for surgery but was unable to cross its threshold because her memory of the trauma of the workhouse was too vivid.

As an A-level history student in the late 1970s one read about such places – and such attitudes – as the remnants of a brutal and long-gone past, replaced by the decency of social welfare and the understanding that economic failure was systemic, not a matter of individual fault. We lived in altogether more rational and civilised times; out of the failures of the past came the Beveridge principles of universality and the belief that a decent sufficiency was a matter of right, not of desert.

One can no longer afford to be complacently optimistic. In the past decade attitudes towards welfare appear to have shifted decisively back towards the values of the workhouse, with rhetoric from the leaderships of all three main Westminster parties that fits strikingly with the Victorian rhetoric of the deserving and undeserving poor, and its underlying imperative that the provision of support should be punitive because the causes of poverty are down to the individual, not to the systemic economic failure. It was of course Labour that introduced the concept and rhetoric of workfare into social provision, but the Coaltion has pursued it with a ferocity that is astonishing. Moreover, even away from the concept of benefit provision, all major parties appear to have adopted the language of “hard working families”, of “aspiration”, with its poisonous implication that citizenship is something that is earned through your behaviour, rather than a matter of right; the implicit belief that you participate fully in society – and derive your social legitimacy – insofar as you do paid work (where do carers fit into this vision?), or live and procreate in the approved manner. I have said here before that of all the tropes of modern politics, the rhetoric of “hard-working families” is, in my view, among the most deeply obnoxious.

It is a framework that does much to explain the vote in Parliament earlier this week on compensating those who were illegaly sanctioned under the Government’s work schemes. Faced with the appeal court’s decision that sanctions had been applied unlawfully the Government’s decision was not to repay what they had unlawfully taken but to change the law retrospectively to avoid compensating those who had suffered loss. In other words, those who had been wronged were to be denied their legal recompense. And, to its infinite shame, Labour refused to take a stand but abstained on the vote.

The rationale, as set out by Labour’s DWP spokesman Liam Byrne in the House of Commons, is instructive and revealing. He deployed two arguments; that sanctions were necessary and should not be undermined, and that the cost of compensation would undermine the public finances.

The second of these is wholly fraudulent, and Byrne, as a former Treasury minister, knows it. The cost of the compensation would be £130m – barely the rounding error on a major Ministry of Defence procurement, in other words, and an insignificant sum compared with the DWP budget as a whole, and a small fraction of what the DWP gains through underclaiming of benefits. Moreover, the doctrine that Governments can use affordability as a reason for defying legal process and introducing retrospective legislation to undermine the judiciary is, to put it at its mildest, novel. Byrne’s argument is not only disgraceful in itself but gives succour to the implicit neoliberal belief that economics trumps considerations of due process and democracy. It reveals much about his banker’s mindset that it is this £130m, not the principle that those who are treated unlawfully have the right to redress, that really concerns him.

The first is more significant. It is obvious that Byrne is desperately anxious to retain a system of sanctions in the face of a system in which the DWP has effectively been turned into a gangmaster providing free labour, paid for by the taxpayer, for a number of undertakings including vast – and vastly profitable – supermarket chains. Sanctions have been at the heart of Labour’s visions of workfare ever since the Blair government introduced it – even where those concerned have a lifetime of national insurance contributions behind them. The rhetoric is indistinguishable from that of the Victorian Poor Law Guardians, arguing that relief for poverty must be made so undesirable, so humiliating that to seek support should put one beyond the pale of decency; Ian Duncan Smith differs from this only in that his rhetoric about “job snobs” is more clumsily explicit. The contempt is the same; forced shelf-stacking in Tesco for benefits, taking away paid jobs and undermining competing local business, has become the workhouse of late capitalism, with benefits reduced to a level where the day-to-day decencies of living are unaffordable. To have an extra bedroom is deemed luxury beyond the desert of the poor, and, as I have blogged before, Labour’s concerns have been about the implementation rather than the principle.

Byrne now argues that the decision to abstain is justified by the concessions wrung from the Tories, but, as Owen Jones points out in a fine and angry piece in the Independent, the promise of an independent review of the sanctions system is useless when Byrne is as notable an enthusiast for sanctions as any die-hard Tory backwoodsman.

I have blogged before about the theory of how austerity has sought to change the concept of citizenship to exclude those who are not economically “productive”; what we are seeing now is the practice, and Labour’s abstention in this week’s Parliamentary debate is a reminder that the neoliberal consensus at the heart of contemporary politics is enacting that denuded concept of citizenship with a speed and brutality that demonstrates its importance to the neoliberal project. And it is as much as anything a definitive statement that Labour’s leadership has no place for the party’s original purpose – to speak for working people, and defend and improve their living standards.

So, in my home town of Brighton, perhaps the best way to understand the temper of neoliberalism in general – and of Labour’s leadership in particular – is to look up to the big building at the top of Elm Grove, and to recall that the ideology of the workhouse is alive and well, and is once again mainstream; and to reflect on the way in which New Labour, or One Nation Labour, or whatever meme is current this week, has been complicit in destroying the decencies it once fought so hard to provide.

Seven Dials Elm reprieved – for now

I blogged yesterday about the extraordinary row concerning the removal of a healthy elm tree to facilitate the Seven Dials Roundabout improvement works in central Brighton.  The good news came this afternoon that the Vernon Terrace elm had received a temporary reprieve while further discussions take place about its future. Other parts of the improvement works will be taken forward.

I was up at the tree at lunchtime today and there appeared to be an slightly edgy stand-off in the drizzle between the protesters and a digger that had been brought in to pull the railings out of the roots – which would have caused considerable damage.  It was a calm, good-natured protest and the intervention of Caroline Lucas was obviously hugely appreciated.  And my admiration for the two protesters in the tree was boundless – you really needed to be there to see just how high up they were.

Some pictures:

It’s obvious what local people and Green Party members across the city want. Let’s hope that officers are being given clear directions to find a way to save the tree.

One elm tree and a big Green dilemma

As I write, an extraordinary and symbolic protest is taking place under – and apparently in – the branches of an elm tree in central Brighton.  Brighton and Hove’s Green administration has embarked upon a major and hugely welcome redesign of one of the city’s least loved junctions – the Seven Dials roundabout, a traffic hub in which traffic crosses from sundry directions.  It’s unsightly and dangerous – especially for pedestrians and cyclists – and the fact that the Green administration has got to grips with a problem that previous administrations have chosen to ignore can only be welcomed.  Whatever the fate of Brighton and Hove’s Green administration, there is little doubt that one of its big legacies will be a range of transport schemes that have firmly shifted the balance in favour of pedestrians and cyclists, and rightly so.

Unfortunately, in Seven Dials, there is collateral damage.  The scheme as agreed involved the cutting of a magnificent healthy elm tree at the top of Vernon Terrace.  It is that tree that has become the focus of protests.  Local people collecting signatures have been joined by Green MP Caroline Lucas and some of Brighton’s seasoned Green activists have been actively involved in defending the tree.  Some have climbed it – including veterans of the recent Coombe Valley protests against the A27 Bexhill by-pass.

The concept of Green activists protesting against a Green council’s proposal to cut down a tree to facilitate a traffic scheme – even one as welcome and fundamentally green as that in Seven Dials – would be in any event farcical.  But there are other issues in play that compound the problem.  First, this is an elm tree – and elms are of particular importance in Brighton and Hove.  When Dutch Elm Disease set in across England in the 1960s, it was visionary and decisive action by the town’s arboriculturalists that ensured that Brighton was shielded from the disease; doing so involved a drastic programme of cutting trees pre-emptively but the result was that Brighton has one of the largest collections of mature elms in the country.  For many of us, a mature elm tree is one of the most powerful symbols of Brighton, and part of our collective heritage.  The simple fact is that these trees matter to people in the city.  Diseased elms are cut down occasionally, and although people are saddened by the necessity everyone understands why it has to be done.  But this is a healthy elm.

Morevoer, the tree is – just – inside Regency ward, represented by the Council leader, and close to the boundaries of two other  key Green-held wards (Goldsmid and St Peter’s).  A decision that has managed to alienate key supporters across three wards looks like bad politics at a purely party level as well.  The point is that implementing the Seven Dials scheme would have been a huge win for the Green administration; a sign that it can deliver against a horrific fiscal background.  It looks awfully as if it has blown it.

The arguments for cutting the tree are that it will obscure sight-lines on the approach to a pedestrian crossing; that the roots are breaking up the road and pavement surface, the latter causing problems for passing pedestrians and in particular buggies and mobility scooters.  The Council argues that the issue was covered in the consultation, but campaigners claim to have been unaware of the loss of the tree.  None of these points is of itself invalid – but these look like the arguments of officers, not politicians. And moreover, consultations – valuable and important though they are – are no substitute for political judgement and sensitivity.  It does seem astonishing that the implications of taking this tree have slipped under politicians’ radar, to the point where the most prominent Green politician in Britain, Caroline Lucas, finds herself being interviewed in front of a tree that she’s defending from her own Green-led local council.

It’s already a situation in which the Green administration has been damaged.  The spectacle of a Green-led council forcibly removing its own activists from a tree before cutting it would destroy the administration, and probably Caroline Lucas’ prospects of re-election.  Finding an alternative is a condition for the administration’s political survival. It’s also horribly damaging for the Green Party as a whole.  But there are more fundamental questions about what happens when Greens – or any other group trying to challenge the hegemonic values of our political culture – obtain office (especially in where that administration is in a minority).  It shows the desperate importance of  (excuse the pun) remaining in touch with your roots, and not allowing your natural political instincts to be thrown off by the demands of office.  There are fundamental strategic issues here that Greens in Brighton and more widely must consider very carefully.

If the Green administration in Brighton and Hove can reconnect with its roots, it could emerge stronger from this.  But in many ways this is the most important test it has faced, and the fate of one much-loved elm tree could seal the fate of Brighton’s Green administration and hugely damage the Party as a whole.

Twenty’s already plenty in Brighton and Hove

Earlier this week Brighton’s local rag, the Argus, was working itself into one of its usual small lathers of indignation over the fact that many of the road signs related to the forthcoming introduction of the 20mph speed limit across much of the city were already in place – despite the fact that the new limit does not come into effect until April.

Leaving aside the fact that doing things in good time for deadlines is what efficient councils do – imagine the furore from the same imagination-challenged journalists if the signs were not in place come the big day – the reaction is interesting and typical.  In fact, I was out in Hove yesterday afternoon and saw the effect at first hand.

Yes, motorists were seeing the signs and actually slowing down.  Pedestrians and cyclists were getting the benefit of the changes weeks before they were due to become mandatory.  And there was no mass panic, no chaos, no distress.  People were getting on with their lives, traffic continued to move, and the benefit was already noticeable.  In a small way, the balance was already shifting from motorist to vulnerable road users, and the quality of life for all in our city just improved that little bit.  Is there any real evidence that those motorists who are now driving at 20mph rather than 30mph on our city’s streets are suffering any real disadvantage in doing so? Given the levels of congestion and the number of junctions in our city, are their journeys really getting disastrously longer? And after all there is no resident driving in Brighton and Hove who is not also a pedestrian too.  And even the motoring lobby – consumed as ever with paranoia in the face of what are often desultory efforts to get them to obey the law – have to admit that nobody’s going to be the subject of premature enforcement action.

The Argus has a long tradition of backing the car lobby – some cynics have pointed to the vast quantity of advertising it carries for local car dealers – and, to their shame, some local politicians who ought to know better have jumped on the bandwagon.  Moreover, the Argus’ hyperbole, its ability to find crisis, shock and fury in mundane events, is legendary. But for this pedestrian and cyclist, the arrival of those signs mean that all of us – including motorists – are getting the benefits of the new 20mph limit early.  And how can that be a bad thing?

Equality, citizenship and the privileging of faith

A Green Party internal panel in Brighton has recommended the expulsion of Cllr Christina Summers from the Green Group on Brighton and Hove Council after she spoke out against – and voted against – a Council motion supporting equal marriage.  Equality has long been a Green Party commitment; Cllr Summers argued that her faith meant she had to speak out and vote as she did.  Without going into the detail – the internal panel has yet to publish its reasoning and the Green Group has yet to vote on the recommendation – it is claimed that Cllr Summers breached an agreement signed by all Council candidates that she would not oppose Party policy on this issue, and also that she took part in protests outside an abortion clinic in Brighton.

Cllr Summers clearly sees this decision as discrimination against Christians, and as an assault on her freedom of speech.  In the BBC report linked above she is quoted as saying:

“It’s discriminatory against Christians. It’s a typical symptom of prejudice, blatant prejudice.

“It raises a big question – can Christians serve in the public realm? They are saying don’t bring your faith into politics.”

It’s an argument we hear time and time again from fundamentalist Christians – and adherents of other religions – in the face of secularism. Without going into the details of the Panel’s recommendations there are  important general issues that this case illustrates about the clash between private and public values, the nature of citizeship and the pursuit of privilege.

There is obviously a clash here between public values and private faith, As a party Greens believe that discrimination on the grounds of race, gender, or sexuality, is wrong.  We also believe that the harrassment of vulnerable women outside abortion clinics is wrong.  Neither of these is incompatible with members holding strong views about, for example, abortion in private.

In Brighton and Hove Greens ask their candidates for public office to affirm their support for equality, and campaign accordingly – indeed, part of the reason why Greens have emerged as the leading party in Brighton and Hove is their unequivocal and vigorous support for equality on the grounds of race, gender and sexualtiy.  But as soon as we make an exception on the grounds of faith, we are no longer respecting faith; we’re privileging it.  We’re in effect saying that we only expect our elected representatives to uphold those values – the values on which they were elected and to which they signed up when they became candidates – insofar as their private convictions allow.  And that seems to me to be an untenable position.  Where does it end?  Because faith is of necessity a private, personal matter it could be used to justify almost anything.  And I’d argue that the moment we privilege faith we have ceased to respect it, because you have created an environment in which the public idea of respect  – based on a common and mutual acceptance of public values and evidence, and the compromises that are necessary to make a civil society work – cannot function.

What this means for Greens and for anyone else involved in promoting equality is that, to be serious about equality, you simply cannot accept a position where faith is privileged in this way. It blurs the private and public in a way that is, in my view, unacceptable and dangerous.  It means that political debate moves from an understanding of common responsibility and respect  to a shouting match based on personal and private conviction.  It is dangerously close to that most fascistic of political errors, the cult of sincerity.

To argue that Christianity is being driven out of life in Britain is arrant, self-evident nonsense.  We remain one of only a handful of countries in the world in which the state religion is guaranteed representation in Parliament.  Although religious observance has declined, there is no sense in which worship is restricted.  Christians are not harassed in going about their daily lives, or their observances.  This is not a debate about religious freedom but about power and privilege, in which Christians appear to be arguing that they have an exemption from the disciplines and compromises of public, democratic life and a right to assert their values in a privileged way.

It is in the assault on the division between public and private, rather than in the requirement that Christians become, in the broadest sense, citizens that the real route to authoritarianism lies.  I’d argue that one of the prime duties of a civic society is to protect the right of all citizens to hold and practise their beliefs, to the extent that it does not affect the rights and freedoms of others; once you cross that line between public and private it seems to me that you are on the way to authoritarianism.  In refusing to privilege faith, we are in effect protecting it.

Community politics revisited: Greens and Liberal Democrat tactics

The results of the Green Party’s leadership election are due to be announced tomorrow.  In anticipation, the Independent has today run a piece which suggests that Greens should follow the Liberal Democrats’ tactics for capturing local election seats, leading to Parliamentary gains.  It argues that disillusioned Liberal Democrats are likely to turn to the Green Party in greater numbers than Labour voters.

It’s a plausible and attractive argument.  Its proponents could point to the fact that the Green Party’s biggest successes have been in Brighton, which returns the party’s sole MP and has a minority Green administration.  In many ways, Brighton looks like a Liberal Democrat town; affluent, educated, with its two universities, its temper of diversity and its modern economy – the sort of place where Liberal Democrats tend to do well, and where it is mainly the fissiparous nature of the local Lib Dems and their tendency to fight each other into oblivion at the merest sniff of electoral success that has prevented them from making electoral advance.  It’s a narrative that Brighton and Hove Labour iteslf often uses, claiming that the Greens have mainly prospered in middle-class wards (a narrative that conveniently ignores big Green gains in traditional Labour wards in last year’s local elections).

It’s also a reminder that for many years the Liberal Democrats – and most notably the Liberal Party before that – were proponents of community politics, which brought together vigorous local campaigning with a set of beliefs about community and political representation which, in theory at least, went far beyond simple electoralism.  The essential text of this movement was a pamphlet by Gordon Lishman and Bernard Greaves, The Theory and Practice of Community Politics, published by the then Association of Liberal Councillors in 1980, which brought together ideas that Liberal campaigners had developed over the preceding decade.

As the Green Party thinks about strategy, and in the context of a call to use Liberal Democrat tactics, it’s a fascinating and important read.  There is much in it that goes to the heart of Green beliefs – about empowering individuals in communities, about democratic accountability, and about participation.  And there are ominous omissions and issues – revisiting the pamphlet thirty years after first reading it, its hostility to Government and advocacy of voluntarism sits surprisingly comfortably with the Con Dems’ Big Society agenda.  It is powerfully hostile to Trade Unions. Above all, like so much pre-Orange Book Liberal and Liberal Democrat thinking, it has almost nothing to say about economics – a crucial weakness in a text that claims to offer a systematic ideology.

The authors write emphatically that community politics was not a strategy for winning elections, but something far wider than that.  But this is what was lost, and this is what allowed the Liberal Democrats to be captured for neoliberalism.  It seems to me to be precisely the lack  of any theory, combined with the way in which Orange Bookers could appeal to the radical individualism of Greaves and Lishman and turn it into a consumerist economic narrative – that allowed the neoliberals in the door.  And it was the use of the term “community politics” to justify unthinking electoral opportunism that inhibited the development of a coherent and confident body of theory that would have given the old Liberal Democrat left a hope of resisting the neoliberal Orange Book tide.  It also of course compounded the problem that Liberal Democrats were often (with good reason) regarded as cynical opportunists for whom the end justified the often very dodgy electoral means.

All this is powerfully instructive for a contemporary Green Party that is facing many of the issues confronting Liberals at the time that Greaves and Lishman published their pamphlet.  In some respects the stakes are far higher than they were for Liberals in 1980; not just the urgency of climate change but, in the UK context, a Westminster political system dominated by three national parties (plus the SNP) who fundamentally believe in variations on the same ideology which is wreaking havoc on our society.

But it is instructive at a time when Greens in Brighton are facing their first taste of minority office. It’s a daunting prospect being Green trailblazers; a minority administration of the only national party opposed to cuts and austerity, trying to deliver progress against a background of savage cuts in local government funding.  Despite the cuts, despite the minority status, there are real gains being made: particularly in transport and public realm issues, in preserving subsidised bus routes and in attracting funding for innovative traffic schemes aimed at making the city more liveable.  In fact in Brighton it’s Labour that is following traditional Liberal Democrat oppositionist tactics; backing Tory budget cuts and supporting Eric Pickles’ council tax freeze con, opposing for the sake of opposition to the point where they casually ignore the legal and financial constraints under which the council operates to score easy points.  If you ever wanted a demonstration of electoral opportunism devoid of integrity, responsibility or intellectual engagement, you need only look as far as Brighton and Hove Labour.  As a Green, I’m fairly sure that the party that I want to be part of looks nothing remotely like that.

For me, the key task for Greens is not to chase the Liberal Democrat lost votes, but to understand why political participation has fallen, and in particular why Labour lost five million votes between 1997 and 2010.  I think the answer is fairly  straightforward – that Labour has embraced neoliberalism, remains a pro-cuts and pro-austerity party, and those – often the poorest and most vulnerable in society, who look to a strong state for support and empowerment – for whom this agenda offers nothing have walked away from Labour, and from electoral politics generally. These are the people whose daily life experiences are wholly outside the mainstream of political debate in the UK.  And as I wrote in an earlier blog post on the Green Party leadership election, these are the people to whom Greens, as the only significant party with an alternative to neoliberalism, must look; it is their voice that we must become.  It’s why in the leadership election that has just finished (and whose result at the time of writing I do not know) I voted for Peter Cranie as the candidate best able to break out of our middle-class comfort zone and reach out to those who have been left behind by the British political system.

So grass-roots activism is essential.  I think there is an argument for something that matches the finer aspirations of Greaves and Lishman, although I think we need to recognise that the spirit of community politics is something that died out long ago in the Liberal Democrats.  But I think we need to be more ambitious than reaching out to ex-Liberal Democrats.  Greens should aspire to be the voice of all of those who have been disenfranchised by the neoliberal consensus

Queers Against Cuts and a failure of Pride

Brighton’s annual Pride procession is one of the City’s great events – a day when the City can collectively let its hair down in celebration of its diversity. Sadly, at today’s Pride, a line appears to have been crossed that suggests that the event has lost its soul.

The issue concerns the treatment of a group called Queers Against Cuts, who, having been accepted by Pride organisers as a participant in the parade, were subjected to what looks like disgraceful and spiteful treatment by organisers and police.  The organiser of the group tells the full story here but in summary, it appears that having been accepted by the Pride organisers as part of the procession, the Group was, at the insistence of the police, moved to the back of the procession directly in front of police and made subject to some sort of police containment – the group say they were kettled, the police reject the use of the word, but this looks more like a case of semantics than substance.  Whatever the case, they were subjected to treatment that was rather different to that afforded to other participants.

The Pride organisers have started to talk about politicisation.  It’s a feeble argument that does them no credit.  The four main political parties in Brighton had floats – even the Liberal Democrats, of whom nothing has been heard since last year’s local election rout, managed to field a presence.  Of those four parties, three are explicit supporters of a cuts agenda; the fourth, the Green Party, runs a minority administration in Brighton that is reluctantly making cuts.  Trade Unionists were out in force; the Queers Against Cuts float was due to be immediately behind the NUT.

It is to Green MP Caroline Lucas’ immense credit that she intervened on Queers Against Cuts’ behalf, but the damage was done.  And on Twitter and elsewhere, the Tory trolls have been out; QAC demonised as a small group hell-bent on disruption, spoiling Pride for the majority.  Except they weren’t – there’s no evidence to support that contention.  As far as I can see QAC were out to make a point and make a bit of noise – no different from other participants.

Moreover, the “politicisation” angle misses an essential point.  Pride is political.  A public event that celebrates equality and diversity must be political in the society in which we live, when inequality and prejudice remain that society’s default mode.  Pride started as a demonstration for equal treatment by the police, in the days when targeting gay men was still an officially-sanctioned tactic, and when the then Tory Government was entrenching homophobia through the notorious Section 28; as debates about equal marriage and issues like the way in which society treats disabled people or the homeless rage in modern Britain, it remains that any event that celebrates equality and diversity must be political.  The organisers, now perhaps mesmerised by that offensive phrase “the pink pound” seem to have lost sight of this.

As I said, a line has been crossed.  Pride, long a part of Brighton life, has become mainstream – more than one watcher commented on the commercialism of this year’s procession.  Add to that  a system of police intelligence-gathering that sustains and justifies itself by the collection of information on “activists” – the majority of whom have not been arrested and have no criminal record – and you have the recipe for events like today’s, in which permission to participate stops at the boundaries of political consensus.

It is ironic that organisers and police working together as they appear to have done today would have excluded, by the same rationale, the founders of Pride.  Perhaps today has seen the end of Pride as we have known it; a once-radical event made safe for neoliberalism which allows participants to congratulate themselves on being “edgy” while challenging nobody. When one sees reactionaries tweeting in defence of the spirit of Pride, one senses that the game is up.  And, as a Brightonian for more than a quarter of a century, I’d find that ineffably sad.

Local rag in freedom of speech fury

A small storm is brewing in the media world in Brighton, with a claim that the monopoly local paper, the Argus, has threatened the Brighton Green party with “consequences” after a Green Party member set up a Twitter account and website criticising and ridiculing its standards of journalism.

The full story can be found here.  As this piece shows, the final straw was the Argus splashing a story about a prominent Green activist and Councillor, Ben Duncan, tweeting, at the height of the post-Budget furore,  that he did not “give a fuck” about pasties.  Like so many people, he recognised that this was a non-story – the real effects of a deeply regressive budget being hidden behind a pseudo-debate about hot pies.

The issue is not just the Argus’ obvious political bias – frequently its content appears to consist of little more than topped-and-tailed Tory press releases, and at times it’s not possible to get a cigarette paper between the Argus’ view of the world and the easy populism that it local Tory MPs’ stock in trade.  For example, on the difficult and emotive issue of local travellers’ sites, the Argus appears happy to follow the local Tories’ inflammatory line, without reflecting the serious attempts being made by the Council and other agencies to produce a long-term solution; it reports a call by Tory Councillor Dawn Barnett for local people to stop paying their Council Tax - and hence to break the law – without a word of consideration of the  implications.

A wider issue is the quality of the Argus’ journalism.  It’s undeniable that local papers are under the cosh financially – it’s so much cheaper to do churnalism, happily recycling the material produced by others.  The work of the police, ambulance and fire service press offices is of course particularly useful in this respect.  Accuracy and detail are not things that one readily associates with the material that Argus journalists write – I remember one story (and I wish I could reference it) which described a large fire in a Sussex town, causing all sorts of chaos, which failed to name the town concerned.  Elsewhere detail is often vague.  Brighton is one of the most laid-back cities in Britain – but even minor events habitually lead to “fury” and “chaos”.  A toxic combination of cost-cutting and political bias appears to have led to the abandonment of the most basic journalistic disciplines.

And, faced with criticism, the Argus is not slow to resort to threats and bluster.  Not long ago, it threatened legal action after a Council officer described it as “the local rag” – which I would have thought was at the mild end of the range of appropriate epithets.  I once had a run in with the Argus in which I sent them an email criticising their failure to report a community arts event in which primary schools from across the County had participated, and received no fewer than three angry emails back.  Moreover, the Argus is no stranger to the attentions of the PCC.

So it’s not surprising that the Argus should react in the way it has to @EveningAnus.  It’s often regarded as a third-rate product, hypersensitive to any form of criticism (and deeply secretive, it appears, about what are rumoured to be sliding circulation figures).  But, if the report is accurate, threatening the collective punishment of a political party over the actions of one of its members is something of a new low.  It is fascinating that commercial media seem so quick to resort to threats and moral blackmail in the face of an individual exercising his freedom of expression – the moral hypocrisy being exposed day after day at the Levenson inquiry seems to extend even into the stagnant backwaters of local churnalism.

But there’s a wider issue here – what is the point of local papers in a digital age?  If I want to find out about, say, crime in Sussex, I just need to go to the Sussex Police website, or follow the informative and useful Sussex Police Twitter feed.  Local papers do not report any more, it seems – reportage involves money, effort and journalistic craft, none of which appear to be things that the local media as a whole are willing to provide – they simply collate.  Churnalism rules – so why not go back to the original sources.  Local news is often accessible more easily through local blogging and Twitter, and without being filtered through the political bias of the local paper’s owners or editor.

Meanwhile, the apparent inability of the Argus to take a bit of criticism without resorting to bluster and apparent threat speaks volumes about its values.  I’d have thought a confident, successful local paper would have reacted very differently.

Why I’m backing Brighton and Hove’s Green administration

Last Thursday evening, Labour and Tories in Brighton collaborated to pass amendments to the Green administration’s proposed Budget that froze Council Tax – in contrast to the Green proposal for a 3.5% increase – and to make corresponding cuts.  Following the vote in favour of the amendments, the Green group on the council – with one exception – voted to accept the amended budget.

It has been a matter of real controversy within the Green Party, both in Brighton and nationally – fortuitously the vote took place the day before the Green Party conference opened in Liverpool, and a motion critical of the Brighton and Hove Group was not debated in a move that has apparently deepened the controversy and led to resignations from the Party.

My immediate gut instinct was to side with those who argued that the Green group in Brighton could not continue in office having lost the Budget vote.  It’s worth considering the background – the administration had embarked on one of the most comprehensive consultation exercises ever seen on a local authority budget, against the background of swingeing, ideologically-motivated cuts in central Government funding for local authorities.  Moreover, the Green decision to support a modest Council Tax increase was taken against the background of what was effectively a bribe from central Government – get extra cash this year if you freeze council tax, but commit to funding cuts in the longer term.

Labour and Tories proposed near-identical amendments to the Budget (while denying collaboration, although if they didn’t the draft speaks eloquent volumes about the closeness of thinking between Labour and Tories in Brighton) and the Labour amendments were passed.  Most of the Green group then voted for the amended Budget.

As I said, my gut feeling was that the Green administration could not carry on.  But I now realise, on reflection, that their actions were right for the Party and right for the people of Brighton and Hove.

Had the Green group tried to vote against the amended Budget, their moral authority as an administration would have been finished.  Every measure they proposed, every aspiration, would have been torn apart by Labour and the Tories and their friends in Brighton’s local media on the grounds that the administration had voted against giving itself the means to do so.  It would have become a lame duck administration, its authority shot to pieces.

So why continue in administraion?  If the Green administration resigned, the Tories would come to office.  Brighton and Hove Tories:

• want every school in Brighton to become an academy;
• would overturn the city’s commitment to a living wage;
• support the privatisation of all Brighton’s care homes;
• would eviscerate the innovative Green proposals to improve Brighton’s public realm and make the city a liveable place;

and during the course of the debate

• supported  nursery closures while attacking the decision of the Green administration to sell the Mayor’s personalised number plate;
• repeated the racist lie that the city is “awash with travellers” – an inflammatory fiction that Tory MPs and Councillors continue to push, in contrast to the adminstration’s aim to produce a long-term solution to the traveller issue;
• complained that the Green group contained too many incomers to the city (see previous bullet point);
• backed an illegal proposal to remove facility time from the Council’s unions (a measure which of course provides a consultative route that makes the council more efficient and saves money)

I am wondering quite why some critics in the wider Green Party – including those proposing motions at the Green Party conference – see the installation of an administration believing these things as the best way in which Green councillors could discharge their obligations to their electors.  Of course, one can understand that none of them have had the experience of administration and the wider responsibilities that that brings; but they need to get beyond the belief that this is a theoretical debate. Like it or not, Brighton Greens took on the administration of the city in the full knowledge that they would be a minority administration facing years of cuts.  The idea that you could walk away now on a point of principle and that the electorate would continue to have faith in you seems to me to be utterly misguided.

Could a minority Tory administration do all those things?  Possibly not, but the chaos of trying to do so is not something that should be lightly dismissed.  Moreover, how could we be sure that Labour would not back them?  As I’ve written elsewhere (scroll down to comments) the really interesting thing about Labour in Brighton is the way that its rhetoric and politics  has developed in a way that aligns them so closely with the Tory position on how local government is financed – indeed on what local government is for.

Those on low incomes are hit hard by cuts in services – while a coucil tax freeze favours the better-off.  It’s a simple economic fact.  In other words, Labour still claims to speak for the poor and vulnerable but in general is advocating policies that have precisely the opposite effect. And it appears to have bought into precisely the sort of low-tax rhetoric that Pickles uses to justify his assault on local authority power. One would like to think that Labour would know better – but recent history suggests otherwise (students of urban development will realise that Labour’s urban legacy in Government will be the erosion of local democracy, the privatisation of public space, the gated estate, the private mall and the CCTV camera – in the essentials of urban policy, as in so much else, Labour and Tory are increasingly indistinguishable).

So why the inconsistencies? It is difficult to escape the conclusion that Labour in Brighton is still fighting the 2010 General Election, and still smarting at the fact that, having taken for granted that it would get the progressive vote in this city, it lost to a candidate who outflanked it on the left and continues to provide real opposition to the coalition in a way that the national Labour leadership just doesn’t appear to have the stomach for. It’s now indulding in toddler politics – still smarting over its defeat and throwing a toddler hissy fit that must be giving Brighton’s Tories quite a lot of quiet satisfaction. It looks very much like a group that has lost the will to argue for change and is content with throwing its toys around instead; and one that will do almost anything in its power to discredit the Greens.  Labour may once have been a party that knew the difference between statesmanship and an emotional spasm but pronouncements from its leaders suggest that it’s really quite comfortable with a neoliberal tax and spending agenda and that attacking the Greens counts for far more than defending the vulnerable.

It seems to me that not the least of Labour’s offences – especially through its denial of collusion with the Tories – is to treat the electors of Brighton as if they were stupid.  It contrasts very powerfully with the Green administration’s commitment to real consultation.

In this situation, it seems to me that however painful the decision to vote for the amended Budget – and it would not have been easy – and to carry on in administration, it was the right one and the one that does most to protect the interests and aspirations of the people who put their faith in the Party at last year’s Elections.  To have walked away would have condemned the Party as a home of people who have nice fluffy ideas but run a mile when the going gets tough – and would seriously have undermined Caroline Lucas’ position as the only MP and Party Leader who is standing out against the three-party neoliberal consensus.  I have every respect for the people within the Green Party who argue that the Group should have resigned, but I am very proud indeed of our Green Councillors in Brighton and Hove for continuing the fight for the values that I and thousands of others across our city voted for last May.

This is what democracy looks like

I managed to visit the Occupy Brighton camp in Victoria Gardens for a few minutes this morning. I had been meaning to go for some time – this was the first opportunity.

I had seen in the media the extreme violence used against protests in New York and Oakland.  I had watched the Church of England make complete fools of themselves over OSX outside St Paul’s – a church that preached that Christ ejected the moneylenders from the temple, only to find themselves being pressed by the moneylenders bankrolling St Paul’s to move on a protest of which those clergymen with a bit of imagination realised Christ would probably have supported.  More locally, I had heard about Cardiff City council using archaic byelaws to move on a similar camp in Cardiff.

So the question I wanted to answer was a simple one.  Why have these camps got the establishment so rattled? What are they running scared of?

My first impressions of the camp were of a clean, quiet, calm orderly place – a few people going about their daily tasks peacefully, the calm a conspicuous contrast to the traffic roaring past a few metres away.  Just beside the camp were a number of patches where tents had been pitched, and since moved in order to allow the grass to grow back.  This was a place that was practising environmental responsibility in a very practical way.

One of the first things you see on walking into the camp is a sign pointing out that drugs and alcohol are forbidden.  This, an activist explained to me, was a collective decision – while there were some supporters who had addiction problems they were not permitted to stay overnight.  It’s a reminder that the reality of the Occupy movement is a world away from Cameron’s easy sneer about comatose protesters.

One of the things that was very clear was the public support the camp enjoys.  I was told that most people passing the camp were strongly supportive – and that local businesses especially so, providing real moral and practical support.  The police were taking the attitude that as long as the camp didn’t cause them extra costs and work, or increase crime, they were unconcerned – in fact, the presence of the camp had reduced crime in the vicinity.  Having a Green MP who unequivocally supported the right to protest made a real difference.

Talking for a few minutes to an activist it becomes clear that this camp is, as much as anything, about education – in its broadest sense.  It’s about workshops and discussions – and above all about collective decision-making and the challenges that such decision-making brings.  We talked about education, and about how young people were being priced out of the university system.  We talked about economics, and about how the camp was holding workshops on the myths of money.

We talked about the shock of getting past the lies and ideology of market economics to develop a coherent alternative – Occupy Brighton’s statement is here.

We talked about collective decision-making.  Yes, it was difficult.  Collective decisions had to be enforced, and more generally people were used to structures of authority and hierarchy.  But making collective decisions work through nightly meetings was at the heart of what the camp was about.  This was about finding better ways for people to live together.

And this perhaps was the reason why this movement has attracted so much hostility.  I’ve often written on this blog about our crisis of democratic legitimacy – both in Britain and internationally.  “Technocratic” governments in Greece and Italy, three main political parties in Britain fighting over an ever-smaller political battleground while indulging in ideological consensus – we are being told that the behaviours, structures and ideologies of market economics are inevitable and trump democracy.  Here were people who were standing up and asking hard and grounded questions, faced with a system that stared into the abyss in 2008 when the banks collapsed and is gripped with fear.  People are throwing off the shackles, and are beginning to realise that the world is both a simpler and more complex place than the elites would have them believe.  Elites talk about democracy and are content to permit it as far as it serves their interests.  Occupy protesters are eloquently advocating the real thing.  No wonder the reaction to this thoughtcrime has been violent.

Collective democratic decision-making? On a planet of seven billion people blighted by grotesque inequalities and vast environmental degradation?  It’s a tall order.  But can it be any worse than a system based on market economics, pollution and privatisation, and nationalism?

Leaving the camp, I walked up Brighton’s busy London Road.  The first shop you see is a pawnbroker.  Then – the charity shops, the pound shops, the shops leasing household goods to those who can’t get credit, Macdonalds, all presided over by the bulk of St Bartholomew’s church, that memorial to the well-heeled Anglicanism that sought to remake God in the image of the English gentleman.  And I saw people crushed by the daily grind of life under market capitalism – the mind-forged manacles, as Blake put it, still firmly intact.  Like William Morris at the end of News from Nowhere one had the sense of returning to a darker, sadder, less sane world.