Listen and learn

23 May 08
MIKE THATCHER | If Hazel Blears has her way, Utopia is just around the corner. Apathy will be banished, every citizen will be an active citizen and people will work together for the greater good.

If Hazel Blears has her way, Utopia is just around the corner. Apathy will be banished, every citizen will be an active citizen and people will work together for the greater good.

It’s a noble goal, and the communities secretary certainly talks a good talk. In a speech last week to the Local Government Information Unit, she claimed we are at a ‘watershed moment’ and that the government was casting off its old centralising approach.

Labour’s legislative programme emphasises the same theme, with its declared intention to transfer more power and resources to parents, patients, tenants and citizens. We will even see an empowerment white paper later in the summer.

But fine words butter no parsnips, especially from an administration notoriously reluctant to let go. Under New Labour, empowerment can take some strange forms.

Take the local government reorganisation that is due to create nine new unitary authorities in England. As Michael Chisholm points out on pages 24–25, this process has been pushed through in an arbitrary way and with little account taken of the views of local people.

Chisholm was not alone in his concern. The late Gwyneth Dunwoody took huge exception to Blears’ plans to axe Cheshire County Council and its six districts and replace them with two unitary authorities.

‘I have rarely seen a decision such as this, taken with such cynicism and with so little respect for the interests of the average voter,’ she told MPs last December.

A survey in Crewe and Nantwich, Dunwoody’s old constituency, showed that local people were heavily opposed to the plans. But the government carried on regardless.

Crewe and Nantwich has, obviously, been in the news for other reasons this week. Local voters would have been influenced by the 10p tax debacle, the housing crisis and debates over the growth in the number of foreign workers in the area.

But they may also have taken exception to a government that says it listens – but rarely acts on what it hears.

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