The new localism – a new, yet ancient, idea

Citation

Coleman, J. (2005), "The new localism – a new, yet ancient, idea", European Business Review, Vol. 17 No. 6. https://doi.org/10.1108/ebr.2005.05417fab.004

The new localism – a new, yet ancient, idea

Abstract Purpose–An argument against political and economic centralisation, taking as its starting point the ideas presented by a group of young British Conservatives.Design/methodology/approach–Political and historical analysis, based primarily on UK politics, but with reference to the United States, the Soviet political experiment and the dilemmas facing European policy makers.Findings–The principal mistake of twentieth century political economy was centralisation. This century offers us the possibility of dispersing power to local communities and smaller states. Global communications help us to do this, rather than making centralisation inevitable.Originality/value–Questions whether centralisation will always fail.Keywords Centralized control, Government, United Kingdom, EuropePaper type Viewpoint

When Marx and Engels wrote to each other they frequently used the expression “we centralists” and on the whole big capitalists also like power in the hands of big governments. And both would have said, as an aside, so long as their own hands were on the levers of power. Is it any wonder that “the man on the Clapham Omnibus” has lost faith in political parties and feels that all he can say is, “Whichever way I vote the government always gets in”. The Conservative Party is particularly sensitive to the frustration they know the electorate feels. Tony Blair is a master at inspiring confidence in people and conservatives are tempted to follow his modernising example.

But a group of young conservatives feel that their elders are clutching at straws and want something much more substantial. A new book has come out recently, Direct Democracy – An Agenda for a New Model Party. The idea is really to let go the levers of power and let the people at the parish pump pick them up, not give them to obedient bureaucrats in artificially created regions in the name of devolution. The recent referendum in the north-east of England demonstrated what the voters thought about that.

The book expresses exactly what the seminal work of Leopold Kohr, The Breakdown of Nations, expressed although in reality even Kohr took much from what St Augustine of Hippo advocated in his City of God, on which the civilisation of the Middle Ages was framed and which at its zenith practiced and preached the saint's ideas, until the church itself followed humanity's inevitable pattern of drawing political power into itself. Corruption and self-aggrandisement grew until Martin Luther took the only course he thought open to him, and the Reformation split Europe in two and religious wars followed as a sad, but unavoidable consequence.

What these new conservatives are saying is that the whole direction of the twentieth century was towards more and more centralisation and that was wrong whether it took the conservative or socialist path. The crying imperative now is therefore to reverse that direction. Let power, real power, go down to the parish council or at least to the lowest appropriate body where the most significant decisions are made and where the brightest men and women are needed. The book looks at taxation. Why not have taxes collected locally and an appropriate proportion of that taxation passed up to the higher levels of government? This process would be subject to local satisfaction with the way the country is being run. After all money, as Nietzsche said, is the crowbar of power.

The book also considers in some detail how the police force should be reorganised. A force which is organised apart from the body of the local community easily becomes a tool of centralised government whereas the policeman should be no more than a figurehead for the policing power of the local community whom he represents. The police do not really have power to enforce law and order. The community has that power and the policeman is no more than their instrument, albeit a highly useful and necessary instrument. The community must exercise its control over upcoming generations before it becomes necessary to throw them into jail. It is not just the job of individual parents, vital though their role may be. It is about something more than discipline. It is about the child's instinctual concern to relate to the community into which it is born. The greatest wish of every child is to be like the grown ups it knows and this drive needs to be utilised and developed. The mind of the average child is not “child-centred” as so many of the educationalists of the twentieth century preached, but adult-centred. Again this was better understood in the Middle Ages when apprenticeship was the basis of education and a deliberate effort was made to find apprenticeships for boys in appropriate trades and those with more academic inclinations were in effect apprenticed to their tutors in the universities. Regular inspections by the magistrates kept a check on their progress. Nor in such small communities are the women left out. They are at the centre of the action, whether as the wives of farmers, weavers, bakers, candlestick makers and the rest. They grew up knowing the kind of role that lay ahead of them, as did the boys. The whole thrust of education was towards creating effective adults and children were enabled to see it in that way.

That system collapsed with the effects of industrialisation. In 1870, when waifs and strays were roaming the streets and lanes of England, an education system was constructed for good humanitarian reasons. Unfortunately, however, it developed at a time when the idea of mass production in factories was dominant in the minds of the political and commercial classes, and schools became factories for education. The Tudors took strong steps to protect the small craftsmen and farmers against those whose moves towards monopoly threatened them and threatened the conservative base of the country. Florence Nightingale warned that if the three Rs were taught without true moral education, you could add a fourth R, rascaldom. I sometimes wonder if that oversight is not what we are now suffering from at every level.

In medicine also the advantages of the New Localism could also be exploited although this is clearly a more complex field. Much needed research may require a few large teaching hospitals. Nevertheless, small cottage hospitals and community care centres within the communities they serve – and there is already considerable movement in this direction – could possibly respond better to the needs of the National Health Service.

What is clear is that with this new localism the rule must be that as healthy political organisations grow their power should diminish in inverse proportion to their size. This, of course, is what Leopold Kohr in his Breakdown of Nations and Sir Richard Body in his Breakdown of Europe have been arguing for many years, not just for Britain but for the whole of Europe: a community of city states. And that would automatically be the case if the European Union really meant what it says about “subsidiarity”.

As these new conservatives see it, the time had come to turn the tables on New Labour by stealing their clothes as Labour has stolen theirs. Tony Blair has left his left flank unguarded. The strength of the early Labour Party lay not just in its links with employed working people, but even more with its association with collections of small independent proprietors who were craftsmen and who certainly regarded themselves as working people – who were truly the strength of England as the yeomen had been before them – as a politician such as Bryan Gould well understood. They were owners and workers and were essentially conservative. New Labour likes power and is tempted to align itself with the interests of big business. The Communists had done the same, or rather they became the only big business. Had they followed the path of New Localism in Russia, the system might have been successful and lasted a lot more than 70 years. I once read an article in Soviet News from the pre-Gorbachev era by the Russian Minister of Agriculture. He pointed out that 5 per cent of the farmland in the Soviet Union, the small plots of land which the peasants were still permitted to own and work, produced 25 per cent of the food consumed in Russia.

The Chinese are making the same mistake: as the authorities take away the lands of the small farmers there are widespread outbreaks of rioting all over China. As I was travelling through California a few years ago, I saw vast fields stretching into the invisible distance. Occasionally I saw a single man, probably a poor Mexican, moving in the middle of the vast area of crops. How was this different, I asked myself, from the collective farms of the Communists?

Will we ever learn the lesson of the twentieth century that centralisation will always fail in the end? Perhaps only the terrorists will force us to perceive the truth that by centralising we ourselves create the targets for them.

Direct Democracy – an agenda for a new model party can be obtained by visiting www.dirct-democracy.org.uk Its authors include Daniel Hannan MEP, Chris Heaton-Harris MEP and Michael Gove MP.

John ColemanNew European, London, UK