A short blogpost to let you know the videos from the livestream are now up
The videos (which I’ve only labeled the speakers, topped-and-tailed, and clicked on the ‘auto-enhance’ option) are:
The candidates listed are:
Candidates for by-election for King’s Hedges ward, Cambridge City Council, on July 4, 2023
- Zarina Anwar – Labour
- Jamie Dalxell – Liberal Democrats
- Mohamed Delwar Hossain – Conservative
- Elizabeth May – Green Party
You can contact them/their campaigns via Who Can I Vote For
You can also listen to all four candidates being cross-examined by Trevor Dann on Cambridge 105 on Sunday 02 July from 12pm
What I’m not going to comment on
I’m not going to comment on the responses of the candidates nor what I thought about them. Watch the footage, judge for yourselves.
I’m not going to comment on who did and didn’t turn up to the event, nor speculate on the reasons. I was not party to the exchanges between the organisers, the chair, and the candidates/their party representatives. I was just the bloke with a camcorder and a mobile phone. The former had audio issues with being close to the speaker at the start (schoolboy error – do a proper sound check in good time) so I’ve used the footage from the latter to get something half-decent up for the voters to view and in good time.
The general public is passionate about politics that affects their day-to-day lives – it’s our systems and structures that are failing them
Don’t think that the King’s Hedges residents who turned up to the hustings were any less passionate than those that turned up to the Queen Edith’s hustings a couple of months ago. If King’s Hedges had the social infrastructure provided by the Queen Edith’s Community Forum chances are their turnout percentages would be much higher. That’s not to blame them for not having one. It’s not fair to compare the two in that manner. Cambridgeshire Insight tells us why:
Above – Cambridge Insight indices of multiple deprivation 2019
The southern edge of Queen Edith’s (bottom-centre) is one of the most affluent parts of Cambridge, while one of the wards in King’s Hedges is amongst the least affluent. Inevitably this means the relationships that the majority of residents have with their local councils are not going to be the same. That inevitably influences individual attitudes towards both the financing of and the provision of public services. Whether it’s the very affluent family for whom generations have been educated at elite private schools wondering whether they should get a tax rebate for not using state schools to those living in housing estates with few community facilities asking why ‘the council’ does not provide them. The latter came up as an issue with a call to open a permanent youth club in King’s Hedges.
“What do newspaper archives say about youth clubs?”
There was one once in King’s Hedges
Above – the Cambridge Evening News 08 July 1985 in the British Newspaper Archive
There was also a King’s Hedges Youth Project in the mid-1990s.
Above from Cambridge Evening News 03 Feb 1994 in the BNA
Do any residents remember what happened to it? You can contact any of your existing councillors (See https://www.writetothem.com/) to discuss this.
The one thing in common that nearly all of the issues raised by the residents had was that few of them were the full and direct responsibility of Cambridge City Council – even though the by-election is for a vacancy on that council. Furthermore, it wasn’t clear to anyone why different tiers of our complicated governance structures had responsibility for some but not other things. Finally, there was no one to answer for the decisions – ones which ultimately were signed off by ministers. When put like that, you can begin to understand the despair that people have in what report-after-report acknowledges is our over-centralised and over-complicated system of governance. Furthermore, it’s something that public policy conferences seem unable or unwilling to address. (Will this event by the Institute for Government on devolution address it? – you can register to watch and send in Qs)
Cambridge is failing to organise the events / create the spaces where residents can fully engage with the debates on the future of our city.
Furthermore, those that are organised are not done so for the convenience of those that are all-too-often overlooked, but for the convenience of the institutions or stakeholder groups with vested interests that don’t necessarily align with those that live here or have to commute in (and without whom our city would collapse). Listening to the non-party activists in the audience, there were points I could feel the tension and their frustration with how convoluted some of the explanations sounded to them – not their fault because they didn’t commission, design, or sign off the governance system that we have. Furthermore, for those of us of a certain age, no one has educated us on how our political system functions and malfunctions. It’s one thing saying ‘ignorance of the law is no excuse’, but if you weren’t taught about the concept of the rule of law in the first place…exactly. This is why Arthur Greenwood’s book Education of the Citizen published in 1920 still chimes today – over a century later. It would be another eight years before universal equal suffrage was achieved. One of the arguments opponents used against giving all adult citizens the vote (i.e. to restrict the classes of people who could vote) was that it would give illiterate and uneducated people the vote. Hence the movements in the interwar era to get people educated in citizenship, democracy and democratic processes. When did we lose that culture, why did we lose it, and how can we get it back? (Or is it a historical myth I’m peddling? What does the academic research/social history tell us?)
What would local democracy workshops look like and be like?
I wrote about this back in May 2023. Listening to questions coming from the audience seemed to re-enforce my point about having workshops where participants can explore how our city functions, who provides what public services, how they are funded, and how they are held accountable and to whom. And also how to go about changing things when things go wrong or where we think they can be improved.
Food for thought?
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