Direct election of mayors sounds a good idea. Not so, argues Nick Cohen, who detects the start of a new era of council secrecy and unaccountability
The great local government scandal of the moment is running in Doncaster. Twenty-seven councillors and officials have been arrested to date and seven have been found guilty of fraud. The police have investigated worthies for everything from expenses-fiddling to receiving refreshers from developers who not only supplied the traditional inducements, but also ran a prize draw that saw - in a stunning twist of fate - the name of a council officer pulled from the hat.
With cases pending that involve millions, maybe tens of millions, of pounds, it is too early to provide a comprehensive narrative. But everyone who has looked at the Doncaster affair agrees that rottenness festered because the council was taken over by a cabal with the innocuous name of the Mining Community Group. The public and press were barred from its meetings - indeed, they did not know that the group existed, let alone where and when it met. Deals were cut in private. Councillors excluded from the governing clique were bullied or squared before the perfunctory open sessions.
There aren't many places more old Labour than Doncaster. New Labour despises such relics. Blairism is committed to modernity and building unbreakable bonds of trust with the public. All of which makes it surprising that our perky Prime Minister is legislating to ensure that all councils in the country will have the opportunity to impose a Mining Community Group of their very own on luckless citizens.
Hilary Armstrong, the local government minister, doesn't put it like that. She is tired of "the status quo", she told the standing committee currently discussing her local government bill, and wants "openness and accountability" to bloom.
Her legislation will do the opposite. Cities and towns will be allowed to have elected mayors, free of the control of the ordinary members of their party or the full council. As only the mayor can make decisions, members of the public will be unable to monitor what goes on unless they develop the skills of mind-readers. Alternatively, the mayor or council leader will have a cabinet which can meet, if it so chooses, in secret.
In theory, voters will know in advance what topics are being discussed and have a chance to protest. But agendas must be released only when they are in "final form". Cabinets will be free to dodge the restriction by keeping the agendas as drafts or by publishing final versions at the last minute when it is too late to organise opposition. Even if you find out, for instance, that a proposal to close your child's school will be decided in secret, the odds on your councillor being involved will be slight. An average council has between 50 and 60 members. A mere ten will be in the cabinet. The rest will have fairly powerless scrutinising roles (and doubtless the already grim failure to get the bright and energetic to participate in civic life will be exacerbated as a result). In the unlikely event of your councillor being in the cabinet and having responsibility for education, you won't be able to check that he is representing your interests by watching his performance at cabinet meetings.
In 1960, the young Margaret Thatcher promoted a private member's bill that allowed the public and media access to council committees. The right to see agendas and policy papers followed. It says much about new Labour, Thatcherite in so many of its prejudices and follies, that it is destroying her sole democratic achievement.
Pilot tests of closed cabinet government have proved so unpopular in Islington and Brighton that they have been suspended in the former and abandoned in the latter. The contest to be Mayor of London had several charismatic candidates - even the Liberal Democrat had some life in her - and choked the newspapers and airwaves for months. A mere 34 per cent of the electorate voted. (This shouldn't have been a surprise to Simon Jenkins and other boosters of monarchical mayors. Turnouts in mayoral contests are pitiful in the US, partly because the ample opportunities that the unaccountable office presents to the corrupt and incompetent inspire general disgust.)
Local papers are outraged by these developments. Pressure groups as varied as the Council for the Protection of Rural England and the Campaign for Freedom of Information are alarmed. Yet new Labour is not friendless. As in Doncaster, the political and managerial classes have combined to support local oligarchy - although without criminal intent this time.
The New Local Government Network was founded in 1996 and has since become one of the most powerful lobbying groups around. You see it at every party conference, hustling for "best-value partnerships" with business (or privatisation, as we used to call it), for mayors and cabinets whose members, as the front page of its shiny Network News drooled in December last year, need "not necessarily be drawn from the [elected] council".
Its mailing list of opinion-formers is in front of me as I write. It begins with Andrew Adonis, an adviser in the Downing Street Policy Unit, and finishes with Phil Woolas, an ambitious Labour MP and Third Way hard man. In between are the names of Labour Party aides, Home Office special advisers, MPs and council leaders. The Network is very well connected. Guests often bump into Armstrong at Network receptions, which must be a home from home for the minister. Her partner, Professor Paul Corrigan, is on the Network's steering group. Beverley Hughes, an environment minister, is helping Armstrong push the local government bill through the Commons. Until recently, she was a member of the Network's steering group. Armstrong and Hughes are being helped by Lord Filkin, a new Labour peer in the Lords. He is a member of the Network's steering group.
Onyx, Serco, MORI, Nord Anglia Education plc and many other commercial beneficiaries of privatisation and council contracts are corporate sponsors. They receive quarterly "informal briefings from high-profile speakers" in return for their donations. One potential speaker is Ben Lucas, from the lobbying outfit Lawson, Lucas & Mendelsohn. He, too, is on the Network's steering group. His associate Neal Lawson - once an aide to Tony Blair, no less - explained to an undercover Observer reporter how the firm manipulated "politics without leadership" in the interests of clients. Principles had been replaced by "non-ideologically contaminated decision-making", which was easy to exploit because "they don't know what they are thinking. Blair himself doesn't always know what he is thinking."
Many of the Network's sponsors know precisely what they are about. In evidence to MPs, Capita plc, which takes over council services, eulogised mayors and cabinets. The private sector loved the new hierarchies because "it helps if the leader is able to commit the council and have control over his or her group". Debates in old-fashioned committees in front of members of the public who might raise objections about a company's environmental and employment records or unsatisfactory performance in the past can be bad for business.
In the present culture of corporate machismo, the prospect of private and public leaders vigorously settling a locality's affairs man-to-man might not strike the uninitiated as too objectionable. The low-rent end of Lambeth could set them right. Capita took over the administration of housing benefit in the south London borough. It boasted in a letter to the Guardian that it had increased the percentage of benefit claims processed within the target time of a fortnight from 47 per cent to 70 per cent. John Whelan, the chairman of Lambeth's Housing Commission Scrutiny Commission, which does its best to monitor what the secret council cabinet is up to, replied that these were "weasel words" which "will stick in the craws of many claimants and their carers in our socially deprived bo- rough . . . The best monthly figure this year [1999] by Capita, according to official Lambeth and Capita information, was October at 55 per cent and, according to official Lambeth information, the average since the financial year started in April has been 37 per cent."
Abigail Melville is a Lambeth councillor who formerly toiled as a Millbank wonk and has worked for the ubiquitous Lawson, Lucas & Mendelsohn. She is, naturally, a member of the Network steering committee. As is a Lambeth council officer. As is David Ball of Capita.
There is no evidence of corruption here - Doncaster is a rarity. The phrase "conflict of interest" doesn't do the job, either. Rather, there is a community of interest between politicians and executives so lost in free-market ideology that the distinction between the regulated and the regulator has become all but meaningless. They are comrades - "partners", to use the cant of new Labour and the old Conservatives - in the struggle to centralise power, privatise services and conduct public business in private.
A case from neighbouring Lewisham makes the point. Councillor David Sullivan, who wants to be the borough's mayor, speaks on Network platforms. ServiceTeam, which took over Lewisham's direct labour organisation, is yet another corporate sponsor of the Network. In October 1995, Sullivan became a director of ServiceTeam while chairing the council's personnel committee. He was forced to resign when his local Labour Party went wild. Where is the dividing line between the politician and the businessman? Can anyone spot the difference?
Armstrong's apparently risible argument that she and her networking friends are promoting accountability rests on her critique of the status quo. It is a reminder, if one were needed, that abuses of office can justify the reactionary as well as the reformer.
Turnout in local elections is low, Armstong notes rightly.The ruling elites of boroughs often take decisions in secret - and few can fault her on that. But instead of increasing openness, she concludes that the elites should be legitimised as cabinets and given the right to meet behind closed doors. Instead of returning the powers Whitehall has taken from councils and making local authorities matter to voters, she claims elected mayors will fill the polling stations and ignores the enormous yawn from London.
Her ideas have been adopted with predictable enthusiasm by established orders from the decayed Labour bastions of the north-east to the last Conservative ditches in the Home Counties. They know a good deal - higher salaries and fewer pesky questions - when they see it. A blunt Sandy Bruce-Lockhart, the Conservative leader of Kent County Council, admitted to Network News: "In Kent, we have always had a cabinet or a cabal or whatever you want to call it." Bruce-Lockhart's old cabal will soon receive the majestic blessing of the law and the added bonus of a justification crafted in the bright, cod language of modernity.
Brendan Bird is a member of Hammersmith and Fulham Council and one of the organisers of the Labour Campaign for Open Government, which tries to fight the lush network on a pitiful budget. He has a pertinent question: "If this is modern, why do all the good ol' boys love it so?"
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