This is particularly noticeable in Cambridge but could apply anywhere else as well. In Cambridge, The University of Cambridge is this huge institution that casts a metaphorical shadow over our city, and has political and economic gravitational forces that few town people can ignore. Local history tells us that when the colleges and the University make a significant decision on the way they function – such as removing the ban on college fellows from marrying in the early 1880s, the impacts are also felt on the town. In that case it was a very positive one because it meant that the women who married the young academics happened to be extremely talented and set to work on social and political reform of our town. The Mother of Modern Cambridge, Florence Ada Keynes was one of the earliest.
One issue that has come up repeatedly in my older years in Cambridge (I also spent my entire childhood here) is how members of the University say they have no idea where power really resides in that institution.
If very few people know where power resides within the University of Cambridge, that is a significant barrier to good governance – not least for transparency and accountability.
What right does the University of Cambridge’s academic departments researching all things good governance have to tell the rest of the world how to do things when it is either unable or unwilling to put its own house (and colleges!) in order?
No, really.
Furthermore, this is where members of political parties living in and around Cambridge could make the case to their national party policy makers to threaten to legislate against Cambridge, Oxford, and similar institutions if they don’t voluntarily come up with a decent solution themselves.
Sounds radical? It shouldn’t be. Parliamentary history tells us that we’ve been here before – in particular following the Spinning House scandal when the Home Secretary told the Vice Chancellor and the Mayor of Cambridge to sit down and sort out their differences in the form of a draft bill to table in Parliament. The result? The Cambridge University and Corporation Act 1894. The result was the removal of almost all of the remaining former powers and roles the Vice Chancellor had on the Borough of Cambridge – ones whose roots stemmed from the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381 when our predecessor townspeople, tired of being oppressed by the colleges decided to burn some University papers and smash up a few things… ….and the King didn’t like it so put the University in charge of the Borough for a bit. Hence why the Vice Chancellor had to use his powers as a magistrate to bind over two top Tories in the late 1700s (including that scoundrel Mortlock) who had threatened to have a duel in a case that would have made for a great social media tale today. If any theatre group wants to make a short play of this, the newspapers of the day cover the events and there is so much room for comedy it’d be a shame not to!
Attlee’s election with a majority Labour Government in 1945 frightens the horses
One of the themes that comes out of the interwar and early post-war newspapers in the British Newspaper Archive is the absolute terror some people had of what a majority Labour Government would do ‘to the finer things in life’.
Above – Sir Humphrey Appleby’s terror over the prospect of regional government
Although I’ve not seen any evidence of it, I’d like to think that Dr Hugh Dalton, Attlee’s Chancellor and a regular visitor to Cambridge even after he moved out of the town in the early 1920s, threatened the Dons with legislation if they did not remove the ban on women graduating voluntarily.
Above – Queen Elizabeth – grandmother of Charles III (known to generations alive between 1952-2002 as ‘The Queen Mother’) was the first woman to receive a degree from Cambridge University – albeit an honorary one.
The point being that you don’t necessarily *have* to legislate in order to achieve your desired result. Just make it clear to the non-complying institution that you are both willing and able to do so if they continue. Which in the case of ministers going after South Cambridgeshire District Council, will make the Extraordinary Full Council on 20 Nov 2023 all the more interesting. In this case the minister Lee Rowley wants to take action on a council policy for Political purposes (i.e. he does not like their 4-day week trial) but does not have the full legal powers to compel the Council to halt the trial. Hence going through the very bureaucratic processes to try and get the evidence base together to show South Cambridgeshire is not meeting its ‘Best Value’ commitments. It’ll be interesting to see who can hold out until the general election. You’d have thought that as minister with responsibility for building safety as well as local government, he’d have more serious and pressing policy priorities than starting culture wars.
Ministers continue to ignore calls from teenagers for comprehensive political and democratic education
The latest call was from earlier this year.
“Young people want better political education, votes at 16 and relaxed voter ID rules to improve political engagement”
British Youth Council 24 Feb 2023
It was ministers who put in the highly controversial rules in the first place – ones that discriminated against young people by allowing older people’s bus passes as valid ID but not young persons’ photo passes.
For all the warm words from MPs and ministers at the recently-held session of the UK Youth Parliament in the House of Commons, their policies and actions towards young people were nothing but ice cold.
The lack of education in how our institutions of state function (and malfunction) also means that students are potentially several steps behind when they arrive at university – whether Cambridge or elsewhere. This came up at the recent town-gown meeting of the Cambridge Climate Society, hosted by students at Clare College, Cambridge. Students said – quite understandably that they wanted to get active on local campaigns amongst other things. But what hope do they have on running effective campaigns on lobbying local government if no one has educated them on things like:
- What local government is
- What local councils do
- How local councils got there
- What legal powers and financial resources councils have
Hence one of the things I’ve taken away with me (metaphorically) is figuring out how students can learn while/by doing, rather than learning by being lectured at – something they said they get more than enough of on their courses!
The fragmentation of social media – a case study
Instead of going off on another rant about local government structures, I’m going to pick up on something the satirical news site News Thump posted several days ago here.
“Yesterday we posted one of our most popular topical stories in quite a while. It was about a recently fired woman shopping for a tent. You might even have seen it? Over seven thousand of you ‘liked’ it, and almost four thousand of your shared it.
“However, only 80-thousand people actually saw it in their feeds. That might sound like a lot, but it’s only about 20% of our audience on here. A few years ago, Facebook would have shown this story to about a million people, easily.
“What this means is that 80% of the people who’ve chosen to follow NewsThump DIDN’T see our most popular story in months. This is what FB has become.“
NewsThump 14 Nov 2023
Jon Worth also noticed similar things, and came to the same conclusion that I did: We don’t know how to respond.
“We’ve got a broken social web (or at least the bits of it I liked are broken) – and I don’t know what to do”
Jon Worth, 16 Nov 2023
In my case I find myself in a city where I no longer know anyone or have any close friends who I went to school with because so many either left the city to seek their careers and livelihoods elsewhere, or have been priced out of the city. I can’t even afford to be priced out of the city, let alone cope because of my disabilities and chronic illnesses. (Hence having boomeranged back to my parents after my health imploded).
With house prices being what they are in Cambridge, there are many that cannot move out for a variety of reasons, while global markets mean homes designed and built for families in a different era are snapped up, sub-divided, and put into the poorly-regulated short-term lets market overseen by cash-strapped local councils and powerless and overburdened legal systems that successive Conservative ministers have chosen to underfund. As a result, I find myself sort of stuck between generations – children, teenagers, and students 20 years to the left of me, and people of my parent’s generation 20+ years to the right of me. With little in between.
In the meantime, I look at the things that are put – in particular in town for young people, and notice that what’s on offer seems to be far smaller than what was on offer for my generation of teenagers in the 1990s, even though the population of Cambridge within its 1935-era boundaries has grown by nearly 50%.
We can hardly blame local councils who have been forced to cut, and cut, and now cut again. Ministers and The Treasury continue to maintain the ban on local councils from raising revenues via alternative means despite the continued calls to decentralise the state, break up the silos, and enable a democratically-elected local tier of government have powers of oversight and co-ordination of public services across the piece so we don’t end up with new housing estates that lack GP and dental surgeries, or limited public transport, or minimal community and social infrastructure facilities enabling community life to take root.
One thing I’d like to see from political parties in the run up to the general election are some case studies/visions of how their policies are supposed to fit together to create and build that better future. Part of that will involve some substantial analysis of what is going wrong now and how people can see and feel this in their own communities.
The problem is that there’s little incentive to do this in the current political and media climate. We’re still stuck in soundbite TV-land – the polls reflecting in part the repeated messaging from Labour that, while boring to regular political watchers, is clearly breaking through with a public that does not spend its time watching Parliament TV!
“Is that analysis something that could be tested in Cambridge, with an event at the end where people can use it to populate a new piece of legislation?”
We could try it.
“The Mayor of Cambridge and the Vice Chancellor have politely requested that town and gown get together to take on the shared challenges of our city and return with a draft bill for the Borough Member (as Cambridge’s MPs used to be called!) to table before Parliament!”
Any takers for an early 2024 series of events?
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The Cambridge Town Owl 