Cllr Anna Smith (Lab – Coleridge) made the point following last week’s Greater Cambridge Partnership Assembly where her neighbouring councillor Cllr Sam Davies MBE (Ind – Queen Edith’s) was given an abrupt response by its Transport Director.
You can watch Cllr Smith’s full remarks below:
Above – this followed my own PQ [see here] that should have been dealt with at the previous meeting but for a software error.
Some of you will have read Cllr Sam Davies’ blogpost here – the key points of which are featured in this week’s printed version of the Cambridge Independent (14-21 Sept). (For those of you interested in staying up-to-date on local democracy in/around Cambridge, it’s easier to subscribe. For those of you who are unable to afford to, you can read the paper versions for free in any local public library in/around Cambridge).
“Why public questions important if they move the locations of meetings to places where public transport services are all-but-non-existent?”
You’ll have to ask the Tories about that one. They invented the Combined Authority and they decided to move the county council out to Alconbury on the other side of Huntingdon. But then at a national level they were warned about the impact of policies like Voter ID. And the Electoral Commission in their recently-released report raised more than a few problems experienced during May’s local elections – in which I was an independent candidate in Cambridge.
Above – you can read the report here
This was picked up in left/liberal media outlets such as The Guardian here, and the Byline Times here. (Which reminds me, the latter (which is volunteer run) is looking for people in Cambridgeshire to help them cover local issues)
Not surprisingly and as ministers were warned, the requirements would have a disproportionate impact different cohorts in society.
Above – from p22 of the Electoral Commission’s report, Sept 2023
There’s more to increasing meaningful public participation than urging people to send in public questions – much as I appreciate Cllr Smith’s statement.
I come back to my blogpost citing Qasir Shah’s 2020 paper on the lack of formal learning opportunities for the general public to learn about how their towns and cities function. (In my case, Cambridge, the city of). Furthermore, we’ve lost the lifelong learning infrastructure that used to provide opportunities for residents to take subjects such as law and politics at both GCSE and A-level. At the same time, Anglia Ruskin long since pulled its old module catalogue, something I think it really should bring back.
Because I’ve gotten nowhere, I’ve scheduled my first pilot workshop at Rock Road Library on 30th Sept from 12:15pm to provide the space to get people talking about the future of our city and finding out the essentials of how it functions and malfunctions. It’s a *very hard sell* because who wants to spend a Saturday lunchtime talking local government? (Hence I’m trying to make it as interactive and group-work focused as possible!)
Above from the old AS Citizenship Studies by AQA (scrapped in 2017) – What does your community look like and who is responsible for what?
I did the above exercise with a group of homeless and vulnerably housed people in Cambridge for Winter Comfort nearly a decade ago. The diversity of responses from the different groups on how they described their community was striking as much as it was a learning experience for me. (i.e. seeing how others view my home town – also the home town for many of them too)
Part of the challenge is making it easy for the public to ask questions – and ask meaningful ones that generate substantive answers from senior officials and elected holders of public office.
That cannot be done with our city’s existing broken governance structures.
Hence the challenge for Labour members and activists is to put enough upwards pressure on their party’s shadow ministers and their advisers to come up with something better not just for Cambridge but for local government across the country. I’m not convinced Sir Keir Starmer is willing to open up what Westminster sees as a massive can of worms that local government reform is historically seen as. Lord Redcliffe-Maud can tell you more about said can of worms.
The second part is educating the public on targeting the institution/decision-maker responsible for whatever their issue is, and familiarising them with how to frame the questions in order to get a substantive answer.
One of the frustrating things about public questions is you get one attempt only – follow-up questions being culled over the years by more and more institutions. Which is very frustrating. Because it means no one can carry out a barrister-style grilling that we have seen used to excellent effect at the Grenfell Tower Inquiry by Richard Millett KC and team.
Familiarising the public with democratic systems and processes beyond the ballot box won’t happen overnight. Furthermore, a book that arrived today underlined how limited things like academic qualifications will be. Although published in 2009, Kate Brown who authored the book took a look at the numbers taking GCSE Citizenship Studies and concluded that this is not the way to get a critical mass of people familiar with engaging routinely in public policy. Just over a decade later and the numbers in Cambridgeshire have hardly improved. Yet as I mentioned in that and previous blogposts, the GCSE in Citizenship Studies is ideal for those less academically-able students because it’s the practical work that the course requires them to do that will make the real difference rather than taking the exam. The inevitable problem is trying to persuade a school of this because the system judges them primarily by exam results. So as things stand I can’t pretend that the exams don’t matter. Because they do.
What hope do the teenagers have if we cannot persuade a critical mass of adults in decision-making roles about the importance of having a democratically and politically-literate society? Hence trying to do something that – yes, I’ve done before, only this time in a very different social and political context. And it might fail. But in a strange way, I’m sort of prepared for that.
Food for thought?
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