On the day following last week's local elections, BBC Radio Manchester ran a talk show which asked the question 'What has your councillor ever done for you?' And, like the Monty Python sketch, it turns out they did quite a lot. People had been helped with housing issues, crime problems, neighbour nuisance, social care cases.Through this the BBC provided an admirable public service of demonstrating the range of social affairs that local authorities deal with. It also promoted an important positive image of the councillor as someone to turn to to help cut through red tape and get something done.
And yet... I have a nagging concern that such a representation of the councillor plays into the 'me me me' perspective on local democracy. How many of us have knocked on doors and been confronted with the question 'What has the Council ever done for me?'
The person who asks this question leaves their home - which the local authority may have built or even still own - and walks past the dustbins emptied by the Council, then along the pavement, swept clean by the Council. Illuminated by the municipal streelamps, they will drive along the road, maintained by the council, and drop their children off at the local council-funded school. If they do not work for the Council, they will work for a company which may supply goods and services to the Council.
At lunchtime they may have their sandwiches in the municipal park or work off the energy with a swim at the local recreation centre. After picking up the kids on the way home, they stop off at the municipal library. After tea the children may go to a youth club or sports class at the local Council-funded community centre while the parents nip to the care home to visit elderly relatives being cared for at the Council's expense.
We have also come across the person who suggest they can opt out of civic society. I am always bemused by the number of people who tell me that since they have no children and do not go to school themselves, they see no reason why they should pay for the education of others. There is a failure of the imagination: such people cannot see that they too benefited from schooling at someone else's expense and that the payback is that they do the same for others. There is a failure of perception: they cannot see that they benefit from the education of others, that having doctors, engineers and all the others with skills to help us is actually a good thing.
In every aspect of daily life, the Council is present. Yet many people do not make the connection. And this is reinforced when the main engagement with the Council seen to be the councillor in the role of adviser and advocate: securing personal benefits for the individual citizen. Don't get me wrong - this is an important role and the councillor should be there to ensure tat individual wrongs are remedied and individual citizens benefits form the services to which they are entitled. But those responsiblities of the councillor can sometimes obscure the role of determining the public good.
Councillors and political parties need to judged on their stewardship of the pubic good rather than the just the satisfaction of individual needs. And it is this idea of the public good which is oft times missing from political debates. We focus on parochial and personal issues rather than the whether what we do for the city as whole. We should ask not only what our councillors have done for us but what they have done for our city.
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