We’re delighted to have our great ally Peter Macfadyen from Flatpack Democracy write our editorial this week. Here, Peter is launching a major new campaign initiative. It’s aimed at bringing Frome’s (and its emulators’) democratic revolution to a wave of parish, town and other councils, at next year’s UK local elections.

They’re calling it Flatpack 2021, and the three-stage plan is laid out below. Please enjoy, share, and most importantly, join in!

ALTERNATIVE EDITORIAL: DIY DEMOCRACY

By Peter Macfadyen, Flatpack Democracy

My first proper job, over 40 years ago, was to listen to the voices of disabled people who wanted to be allowed to take risks in the outdoor environment. My second involved hours and hours sitting under trees, mostly in Africa, listening to the voices of some of the kindest, most generous people on the planet, seeking to find ways to change the systems that kept them poor and excluded.

Ten years ago that desire to listen and understand people’s needs had not changed when I improbably became a town councillor in Frome. Our first moves were incredibly simple: to remove much of the formality that places the people we elect into exclusive worlds where they rapidly lose touch with reality and develop little except their egos.

The word ‘alternative’ has travelled with me a long time so I am not surprised my journey has overlapped considerably with the Alternative UK (and with its inspiration the Alternativet in Denmark). I wrote up my political experiences in Flatpack Democracy in 2014, persuaded by its publisher that there was a story to tell, of ‘ordinary’ people taking power outside the Political Party system, who worked to radically change the positioning of a council in its community.

In practical terms that means changing the relationship with the community to one which seeks to catalyse and facilitate ideas which remain owned by the people, rather than the council.

As the Alternative UK declared ‘politics is broken’ and set about beginning the job of reimagining new ways to do things, they have regularly shared and promoted the ideas first tested in Frome and then in a plethora of first followers (whose evolutionary ideas are partly covered in Flatpack 2.0).

As the Alternative UK has found, promoted and catalysed ideas from all over the world it has often questioned why I and the others most engaged in trying to reshape the way local councils work from within, do not work together as a political (small p) movement. What could be seen a UK Municipalism Movement. I have resisted this because my DNA was set for horizontal movements and to resist overt leadership.

Until now.

Politics is broken – here’s the alternative...

Before describing something positive, allow me one paragraph of rant, which is not especially encouraging: We’ve never had a democracy. Nothing even a little bit like one. The Greeks defined it and used sortition to ensure anyone (excluding women and slaves) could, and often would, be in positions of real power.

There are some great systems enacted by First Peoples, but other than this nothing. Why? Because, as the Greeks noted, a voting system will always lead to power being taken and retained by the oligarchies.

There are rare moments when significant moves like Citizen’s Assemblies are promoted as an option and even play into important decision making, as they have in France’s Citizens’ Commission for the Climate, a committee of 150 randomly chosen French people that reported back recently after a nine-month deliberation. Macron promised extra funding and strong measures accepting all but three of the 149 recommendations put forward by the commission backed up with £14bn.

Ultimately, however, the system is rotten to the core with ‘representative democracy’ failing to represent anyone but that same elite; with (as Alternative UK has often pointed out) Political Party membership being only around 2%; in Britain a first-past-the-post system which results in a tiny minority; and a de facto Presidential system which focuses power on an individual and unelected advisors.

So what to do? There are no signs of the current system having any desire to change a system that keeps them where they are: why would they?

For decades we have lobbied, signed petitions and more recently upped the game with groups like Extinction Rebellion (XR) calling for a Citizens Assembly as one of their three demands. The third XR rebellion is in action as I write. While the first, in April 2019, changed the game in terms of climate change awareness, there are clear voices suggesting that the systematic changes we require may need new approaches.

Having said that, the blockading of Murdoch printing presses and other well targeted actions, with linked campaigns to make clear what the action is about, continue to have a crucial role to play in raising awareness.

If there was time for a long game plan then some of the many groups working on this might one day get there. There isn’t. Our rapacious capitalist systems are eating the planet too fast for that.

Will government move towards greater devolution and regional powers put the people in charge of the things they know about best? Are there signs of government-inspired engagement from below? The current move to abolish 213 district councils, while providing automatic planning permission to developers hardly bodes well.

There is a Catch 22 game going on here which I do understand. In 2015 I sat with the Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government, Eric (now Baron) Pickles, one of the architects of the Tory version of Localism. He said he completely understood my desire for more power and resources to come right down to local levels. While that might work well in Frome, Pickles suggested, many local councils were unfit for such responsibility.

The thing is: he’s right. These lower levels of local government have been so deprived of proper support and training that most can only tick over doing what they always did.

What’s more, support to the National Association for Local Councils and similar bodies who are meant to keep the whole show vibrant and thriving is so minimal that they too can only largely grind on, propping up a system designed decades ago and unfit for a modern world. How many councils ceased to operate during lockdown because the idea of Zoom was way beyond them? (Answer: a lot.)

And if council practice is so stuck in a distant past, with language and procedure inaccessible to all but the most diligent, why would anyone get involved as a councillor? Why indeed. Many good people have stepped forward, to be defeated not only by the systems but by fellow councillors and sometimes clerks, for whom the status quo is very comfortable (though totally inappropriate in providing for the people they purport to serve).

So what’s the plan? To catalyse and support a swathe of ambitious effective parish, town and community level councils to emerge through a campaign we are calling Flatpack2021. We envisage three steps.

Step One: Get Them Elected, Fast

Move fast to get a new generation of people elected as councillors into the 10,000 councils we already have. 2020 elections were all cancelled so there are more than usual in May 2021.

Build on the new levels of engagement that have emerged during lockdown and beyond. Many Mutual Aid groups that sprung up during lockdown have found the local council to be inadequate in their responses. They have the capacity now to step into a broader role.

Do this in full partnership with the many well-established groups that exist to support women, younger people and those from black Asian and minority ethnic backgrounds. Use the examples we already have of single mothers and other unlikely people who have already stepped up, to encourage people who can properly connect with their communities.

What works best is groups of people who are united by values but not by a manifesto. That will mean being prepared to put aside national-political-party allegiances to create space for real ambition to create positive local change and transform ineffective, corrupt and undemocratic councils.

Step Two: Reframe the role of councils

Frome and others of the early movers have already tested ways to rebuild the system from within. The first thing we did was to effectively ‘suspend the constitution’. It turns out most of the rules aren’t rules but ‘guidance’.

Instantly all of the nonsense that prevented engagement can go. The councillors in suits or fancy dress, the need to book in as a member of public and speak for a limited time, the language no one understands... Tradition is essentially ‘peer pressure from dead people’.

At the core of this is turning around the relationship with the community so that the council is constantly working to support the people to know what they need and then to then support them do it, rather than wait for people to come with ideas which they reject.

This is best illustrated by the council not only providing financial and organisations training to voluntary sector organisations, but also professional fundraising support to help them bring in very significant funding from other sources.

This means putting genuine participatory democracy at the core of how the council operates. Again, Alternative UK has written extensively on this and shared initiatives from around the world as well as close to home including their own Citizen Action Network concept and the work of V-Taiwan.

The concept and reality of ideas like Participatory Budgeting (PB) are now so mainstream that even the Local Government Association has links to it and the Scottish Government allocates 1% of local spending to PB.

But this can be so much more and it turns out local councils can choose to engage much more widely in ways which have real power.

Frome created ‘People’s Panels to seek out the wisdom of the people to define whole areas of strategy (most recently in how to respond to the climate emergency). Torridge Common Ground used ‘People’s Assemblies’ to work out exactly where priorities lie and continue to do so in ways that approach ‘direct democracy’.

As before, we know what to do—but after years of systematic disempowerment, we’ve lost the confidence to think we have answers.

Step Three: Trust the people

To an extent Step Two has already demanded this. In catalysing new ambitious councillors to step forward, Flatpack2021 cannot control what they do once elected (although the people can…).

There will be casualties—there already have been, amongst the early movers. But my experience is that if the new council is genuinely embedded in its community, they won’t easily let it revert to the old autocratic ways of failed representation.

Step Three takes this a stage further. If communities can reclaim the decisions that affect their lives, then I trust the people to put our survival at the top of the agenda. A group of people coming together with the sole intent of improving the lot of those in their community will share many fundamental values.

Top of the list is the healthy survival of their children and grandchildren. That will come out in many ways, but how interesting it has been to see people’s positive reflections on Lockdown, highlighting their discovery of walking and nature and being able to breathe cleaner air. (And yes, I realise that for very many people lockdown was an unmitigated disaster with little if anything positive to report.)

When there is even more widespread understanding of both the imminent impact of climate change and also of how little time we have to avert cataclysmic disaster, I believe the local level will come even more into its own. In part this will bring intense focus onto the neighbourhood groups already developed, new ideas like neighbourocracy, and well-established projects around wellbeing.

And if all these have a listening, effective, dynamic local council, suddenly there are potential funds and staff time alongside support to acquire these from outside the community.

I have already mentioned Flatpack2021’s core value of working alongside others in a flotilla of small ships on the rough seas of change. Most of the team who came together to initiate the campaign have worked with Trust the People (TTP), well described here in an Alternative interview.

TTP is the perfect partner for Flatpack2021, providing skills and commitment that can potentially seek out then support the growing number of new people who step up.

TTP was set up to help build a genuine democracy from the bottom up (having emerged as a key project of XR’s Future Democracy Hub). It was born out of a desire for change in our deeply unequal society and to help us reclaim our power in communities.

They believe that supporting community democracy can help change communities; anything from informal neighbourhood self-help groups, to formal structures such as parish wards, councils and towns.

TTP has just completed their first hugely successful and inspirational online learning programme, designed to help people share the skills to connect with and work with others to transform their local communities. If this is to work, we’ll need many others, of all kinds of shapes and sizes, to join that flotilla.

Beyond Step Three

Beyond Step Three comes another step. Two linked approaches have underpinned much of my thinking for many years. ‘Small is Beautiful’ and ‘Local and Global’. If we sort how we live where we live, in our communities and families, then multiply the same values and principles to a global scale all will be well. So the Step Beyond is to ramp up the simple and easy to assemble plan I have set out to cover other countries.

Almost everywhere has a form of non-existent democracy and some kind of pretence to make people feel listened to. If people start talking, listening and making decisions as the micro scale... EVERYWHERE… then the tiny number who have usurped our powers will be swamped by the momentum.

(Although I have written some of that with tongue firmly in cheek, Flatpack Democracy is being translated into South Korean, so someone must feel there is potential!)

I do believe that if enough people come together, with a combined voice coming from their hearts not their wallets, then local can become global and systems can be changed in the very short time we have left to do so. But I go with Vaclav Havel’s words of reassurance: “Hope is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out.”

And so we have launched Flatpack2021. We recognise it may go on after 2021. We also recognise that just getting new inspiring people into local councils is a tiny part of the work and many others, including government, will need to see the potential of what we offer.

With others, hopefully you, we will put together support for groups who want to take up the challenge or making their council effective, recognising that central government has little interest in either listening to us or meeting the tidal wave of concerns growing every day in communities around the country. If we don’t do it no one will.

In writing this in the Alternative I am very aware that many of her readers are exactly the people we seek to travel with. In some cases you will run organisations sailing in parallel directions. Others of you will be individuals with a few hours to spare and some skills, our tiny team are already fully stretched. And you may just want to get stuck in and help find people to run and create a local or regional campaign. The website invites you to join us.

Perhaps the naivety of our cunning plan is a terminal flaw. Maybe the ocean liner of our defunct and disastrous systems cannot be turned around in time. The odds are that the oligarchs will enjoy this very brief moment of Roman orgy before the palace collapses around them.

On the other hand, maybe more and more people will wake up knowing they have a part to play? What we already know is that by changing the system at the community level, people who never thought they would or could have helped significantly improve the lives of their neighbours.

I know that’s true in places like Portishead, Haswell Communities in Durham, Buckfastleigh and the collection of small towns near there and many others. Joined up, that starts to be really interesting. Working with even more it could look like a Movement.

There are 10,000 similar councils in the UK. There are countless organisations working to move the old middle-class men who make nearly all decisions to one side. I’m one of those old men, and I’m ready for my place on the sofa.

We have all the answers to how to slow this carbon-driven machine. We just need the confidence to grow the Alternatives (sic) around the dying beast. One of them, amongst all the rest, is to stop handing power to those who want to ‘represent’ us but put people into the system who are up for totally re-building it and creating the first democracy we have ever had.

It’s 3:23 in the morning, and I’m awake because my great, great, grandchildren won’t let me sleep
my great, great, grandchildren ask me in dreams
what did you do, while the planet was plundered?
what did you do, when the earth was unravelling
surely you did something when the seasons started failing as the mammals, reptiles and birds were all dying?
did you fill the streets with protest when democracy was stolen?
what did you do
once You Knew?

Excerpt from Hieroglyphic Stairway 2012 by Drew Dillinger

For more, and to join up, please visit Flatpack 2021.

Alternative Editorial - a guest post from Peter Macfadyen. Time to "Trust The People", and aim for local electoral success with “Flatpack 2021”