Federalists, communitarians, mayoralists - three tribes of thinking about where the locus of power should be in the UK
An interesting report (Options 2040) from Demos and Nesta, surveying opinion about where power should best operate in the UK. From their sampling and workshopping, they’ve come up with three tribes of thought (about which we’ll have more to say at the end):
Federalists
Want to see power distributed through major constitutional reform
Believe power should sit with regional government, mayors and local authorities
Want to give control over public services, and devolve fiscal powers, to local and regional governments
Communitarians
See power and place through the prism of local, and often hyperlocal, social and civic institutions
Believe power should sit with citizens and community groups
Less focussed on constitutional reform
Mayoralists
Focussed on the transfer of power from Westminster to political leadership at the local level
Believe power should sit with a single champion, whether a mayor or combined authority
Less focussed on constitutional reform
More explanation from the report site:
Clarion calls to formalise the constitution, give greater power to communities or devolve more power, faster, to mayors have been around for decades and show no sign of abating. So, the experts we spoke to agreed that the tribes were a useful frame to highlight the complexity of the choices.
Aligning with Demos’ research, not all people we spoke to saw themselves as fitting neatly into one camp, but most agreed that the mayoral tribe represents views that are currently in the ascendancy.
As one expert explained, the mayoral camp could be regarded as a wedge that may be able to drive change in other parts of the British political system, in a way that might achieve constitutional reform and also bring power to local communities – two outcomes that they considered critical to the long-term success of England’s devolved political system.
Experts we spoke to also said there were broadly two structural views on where power should be held. The first is the statists: advocates of a political system in which the state has substantial centralised control over social and economic affairs (the British tradition). The second is the communitarians: those who favour a bottom-up approach to power.
But again our experts told us that these two perspectives should not be seen as binary choices and that pitting them against one another is unhelpful to progress. Instead they advocated that any focus for the next Westminster government should be on closing the gap that currently exists between the two groups, and thus between formal political institutions and communities – and how to bridge it meaningfully.
This could either involve stronger political institutions at community level, or greater representation for community groups within existing political institutions, or both.
Despite the varied views tabled, many agreed that it was time that England had meaningful centres of democratic power in places (cities, towns, counties) outside of London. A key choice for any future Westminster government will be how to determine a path forward that might establish them.
More here. At Alternative Global, we are also keeping an eye on the possibilities for democratic innovation that a new UK government will bring.
We would still emphasis the deep importance of processes that stay as close to community self-determination as possible, built through artistic, participative and socio-technical practices (the CANs we have been tracking for years).
But that also are cosmolocal - able to connect to others, and to repositories of good ideas, by means of the web and network society. For more on this, see our “Yes We Can” page, its summaries and links.