Harringay, Haringey - So Good they Spelt it Twice!
Will 2014 be the Year of the Crowdsourced Independent Council Candidate?
In another unapologetic hijack of Nesta's 2014 predictions, I was very interested to see the story of an area in Australia, the population of which was so fed up with the representation they got that they created their own party.
The article concludes with the following:
Communities need not settle for the limited range of platforms on offer by major political parties, but can create their own and then find the best candidate to prosecute their case.
In the lead up to the next UK General Election, there has never been a better moment for local communities to start a different conversation about the needs they have and the kind of representation they are looking for. The experience of Indi might be worth studying and replicating.
What, I wonder would existing political parties make of such a challenge to their hegemony in the UK? What indeed in Harringay?
Read the full Nesta article here.
Replies to This Discussion
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Permalink Reply by Michael Anderson on
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While many Residents' Association candidates have been elected to local council seats around the country I can't recall any (except perhaps the famous occassion when Martin Bell ousted Neil Hamilton at Tatton - now held by George Osbourne) getting in to Parliament in England - unless someone knows better
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Permalink Reply by Hugh on
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I hadn't realised that about local council candidates, Michael. Thanks for the tip off. A quick Google brings up a number of results including one in Croydon.
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Permalink Reply by Alan Stanton on
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Let's assume Michael is right and that the most fertile ground for new initiatives to spring up is in local council elections. In which case, Haringey's borough elections in May could seem an ideal opportunity for change; and to elect new people with fresh ideas. After all, we now have a council leadership up the creek going round in circles with a broken rudder - never mind missing the proverbial paddle. While our opposition parties are, if anything, even more inept and unpromising.
But then read the three articles about the victory of Cathy McGowan of Voice 4 Indi. And consider how far any of the factors are present in Haringey. Ignore the NESTA fluff and the references to the role of social media in Occupy and the Arab Spring. Though NESTA's points about Facebook and Twitter facilitating organising do make sense. Especially in a huge constituency like Indi in Victoria. (28,000 square kilometres compared to Haringey's 280 km2. Indi has 98,000 electors; compared to Haringey's approximately 150.000.)
However what struck me most was not whizz-bang online ICT stuff but the very old-fashioned local person-to-person organising. This is described by Sarah Capper of the Victorian Women’s Trust who writes about small group discussions over several years involving some 6000 people in the Purple Sage Project Which later led to many more face-to-face initiatives as part of the election campaign. (N.B. This pdf file took over a minute to download.)
I've had little time to do more than skim some of this material. And my basic sympathies lie with its model of deliberative democracy. Plainly an improvement over the diseased politics running in Haringey. But so far while I've read a lot of positive comments about process. I'm unclear how far Cathy McGowan and her supporters will be able to carry through a programme tackling the many issues they've raised.
And she will need to deliver some visible change. Her majority was 431 votes! (Source: Wikipedia)
(Tottenham Hale ward councillor)
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Permalink Reply by Chris Setz on
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Be careful what you wish for!
The existing independent Councillors might well work harder than their party-linked colleagues on local issues (who knows?), but when it comes to the sort of improved ward we all desire, do you really want someone who can never be a Cabinet member in the full Council?
Assuming they won't form an 'Independent Party', the weight of numbers needed for significant change works against the individual independent - they won't be able to do anything on the powerful committees that bring real change.
Like it or not, the reality is that nothing significant that Council can do will happen here without it being 'steered' by a committee run by local Councillors. The bigger the change, the more dominant the ruling party on that committee. No ruling party of whatever persuasion is going to stand idly by whilst opponents create vote-winning change.
The borough was one of the few that voted in favour of proportional representation in Parliament and I guess that HoLlers are among the most independently-minded people, but do you really want a council where independents with a whole range of, by definition, 'non-standard' political views impose them on a majority of elected Cllrs that oppose them?
What if the independents support the main 'party lines' - will they still be independent? It'd be hard not to - surely the difference between the mainstream policies of the two largest parties in our borough are small to begin with, aren't they? Who can name a policy that either of them have that is radically different from the agenda of trying to help people be the best that we can be? Surely the chances of an independent coming up with an enforceable policy that was significantly different from what everyone else wants too is almost negligible, isn't it?
What seems to happen is that, if a political view gets popular, the mainstream parties co-opt it according to taste, partly to defuse opposition and partly to acknowledge that, in an ideal world, policy would come from voters. If a political view is unpopular, the popular parties try to stick the opponents with it. Thus the left-wing is accused of presiding over 'light-touch' regulation of business and the right-wing have their support for state-run orgs such as the health-service questioned. The left will only increase business regulation on unpopular banksters and the right will only openly privatise what the public think is failing.
So the other parties would 'steal' anything popular an independent promoted, reducing the chance to see the independent as original, which would help to deter their re-election I suppose.
In other words, an effect of electing an independent may be to effectively disenfranchise voters and transfer away any credit ensuing from independence...
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