Creeting St Peter - can you really go on doing things the same old way?

Our Parish Council has seen rather a lot of change lately. Two resignations have led to two newcomers joining our group, and leave me as the sole directly elected member - and I was elected unopposed, which is barely but importantly different from being co-opted. And, with our Clerk having handed in her notice - it wasn’t acrimonious, I’m glad to say - it isn’t the Council that I once chaired.

I find myself with the sense that, whilst finding a new Clerk is obviously essential, there is the question of what sort of Council do we want to be, and how do we get there?

Under my somewhat idiosyncratic leadership, we’ve possibly been more active in terms of our responses to planning applications, and my active engagement in SALC has had the benefit of opening my eyes to other possibilities. Nonetheless, I find myself wondering if we couldn’t organise things differently. That’s slightly awkward, as I am still wholly determined to stand down as Chair at our 2022 Annual Parish Council meeting.

When I first became a councillor, portfolios were the thing. I had finance and wildlife in my portfolio - I always assumed that the wildlife element reflected my almost total lack of knowledge in the field. In my second incarnation, they had been given up, and Council was more collegiate in its approach. That said, we may have devolved too much to our highly capable Clerk.

Whilst I wouldn’t have wanted to have to replace her, her departure offers an opportunity to reflect, especially with a much changed Council with a new range of skills and experience. And, given that someone is going to have to take over as Chair, it offers scope for a Chair-elect to emerge as part of the process.

It will be interesting to see who comes forward, and how they fulfil the role. Having done the job for nearly four years, I’ve learned that I really wouldn’t describe myself as a Leader figure, more an administrator attempting to maintain good order. I find confrontation stressful, and have a tendency to delay decisions until the point where they can’t reasonably be delayed much further. Here in Creeting St Peter, that hadn’t proved to be much of a hindrance - how heated can things get when you’ve got a budget of £5,500 to spend each year, much of which isn’t particularly discretionary?

That tells me that I’ve possibly found my level in local government, as I can easily imagine life at District or County level to be more intense, more stressful, with decisions that, potentially, impact significantly on people’s lives, and much larger budgets. If you like, I acknowledge that at this time in my life, I’m something of an enthusiastic amateur. You can probably get away with that as District or County level too, but I’m not sure that I’d want to test the theory personally.

But I do want to see things done well. Even though our budget is small, our discretionary spend even smaller, we can at least run our affairs and serve our residents as best we can and, with District and County Councils seemingly ever more remote, we should try to encourage residents to take advantage of the services and facilities that are available, many of which they pay council tax to support.

So, there is much to think about, even if some of it feels a bit philosophical in nature. I’m a liberal, and I believe in good governance, openness and personal responsibility. Perhaps that offers a framework for a new way of working, here in the Gipping Valley?

There is apparently an acceptable level of law breaking...

So, apparently, suggests... the Lord Chancellor? You are kidding me, right? It seems not.

What that means is one of four things;

• He actually believes that, in which case, he needs to come up with a definition of “acceptable”, and fast, or;
• He didn’t mean that, in which he needs to clarify the position, or;
• He doesn’t understand the significance of what he said, or;
• He believes that retaining his job is far more important than the rule of law, which means that he is unfit for public office.

Actually, he probably needs to go in cases 1, 3 and 4 but, given that I am yet to see that case 2 is pertinent, he probably just needs to go.

This is, for anyone in a regulatory role, more than a little troubling. If the Lord Chancellor suggests that there is an acceptable level of law breaking, there is the obvious question, “And why doesn’t this apply to me?”. It is, under such circumstances, not a wholly unreasonable question.

Now, it doesn’t take a genius to understand that, if the law is designed to protect citizens from anything from personal violence to abuse by an over-mighty state, anything that undermines it offers potential risks to us all. And yes, I do hear the argument that breaking the law for a righteous cause is defensible, but the response I would offer is, what if somebody else’s righteous cause is decidedly harmful to others? Not so sure now, are you?

And, of course, a government deciding what parts of the law are acceptable or unacceptable and trying to change them in Parliament is one thing - it happens all of the time - but doing it to an international agreement that you signed and stating publicly that you’re going to do so is quite another, especially if you’re hoping to conclude a whole bunch of other international agreements. You see, people talk to each other, they read our press, they see the statements of our politicians in real time. In other words, this isn’t a game where, if you’re losing, you can just quit playing without consequence and start again.

But then, this increasingly seems to be a government which operates on the principle that the rules don’t apply to it. And maybe, domestically, that’s true to a certain extent - you only need to convince enough people of your credibility to win a majority, and there are a lot of very trusting, or very naive, or very stupid, or a combination of the above, to allow a group of people for whom lying appears to have no consequence to hold and use power. It isn’t true internationally.

International agreements tend to hinge on two things - power and trust. If you’re China, or the United States, or the European Union, you have power, either economic, military or both. If you’re Norway, or Canada, or New Zealand, you have trust - people tend to think of you as the “good guys” whose word can be relied upon. Alternatively, you’re Zimbabwe or Venezuela - nobody trusts your government, you have no military or economic power, and you’re isolated in your misery.

Britain had both - as a nuclear power and a permanent member of the UN Security Council and as the fifth largest economy - although the value of the size of your national economy does drop off quite quickly (the United States had a nominal GDP of $21.4 trillion in 2019, China at $14.1 trillion, the United Kingdom in sixth place at $2.7 trillion). That was significantly augmented by our membership of the European Union (nominal GDP of $18.7 trillion).

That latter figure kind of explains why the European Union can throw its weight around in talks with China and the United States, and why the United Kingdom alone can’t.

So, if you can’t play with the big boys on equal economic terms, and you can’t threaten them militarily, you have to rely on your reputation and trustworthiness. can see where the problem is with having a government which plays hard and fast in its dealings with its neighbours.

In a proper government, the law officers are there to ensure that the law is adhered to. Their advice should be above reproach, untainted by politics. Here, that really can’t be said, which means that there is nobody to say, “hang on a moment, you really can’t do that”. And when a Cabinet Minister gets up in Parliament and says, “we are breaking the law”, and the response of the Lord Chancellor is to quibble about the extent to which the law is being broken, we have a system of governance which is broken.

Can you run a country like that? If you can, what would it look like? We may be about to find out...

Attempting not to yield to despair...

There is a bargain to be had in public service. In return for my loyalty and faith that what I do has value, the Government runs things with a degree of competence. I may not agree with what they choose to do, or to prioritise, but they are the elected ones, and what they get through Parliament goes, at least until someone else comes along and changes it.

This is not complex, although I accept that, for those of you who haven’t given more than three decades to professional public service, it might smack of “following orders” - and we know where that can lead.

But, assuming that the Government adheres to a set of democratic rules, and obeys the law, the Civil Service, and thus individual civil servants, carry out the tasks assigned by Ministers without obstruction or dispute. And, if you can’t do that, you quit.

Ministers need to be able to presume upon that compact, for they rely on civil servants for accurate, dispassionate information, for their best judgement on how any particular aspect of public policy might be delivered, and for honest appraisal of the available options given the resources available. And, despite whatever personal doubts they may have, our public servants deliver that.

But I sense that, as events and, increasingly, social media, expose lack of knowledge, false assumptions and, occasionally, outright untruths, the question of competence becomes more challenging to presume. The ability to fact check politicians means that, if what they say is demonstrably contrary to the facts, you wonder if they are lying or ignorant of the truth. Either brings questions of competence and good faith into stark relief.

And, regardless of which side of any debate you find yourself, for decision making to be optimal, you need either to understand the consequences of particular decisions, or be willing to accept the risks incurred by a lack of that understanding. More important, for an informed democracy, the wider polis requires access to accurate facts and data.

Now, as a public servant, you cannot fall into the trap of thinking that your political lords and masters are malicious liars, for such an acceptance makes it difficult for you to serve with a clear conscience. But is it worse to believe that they actually don’t know enough to make good decisions and, when confronted with facts, deny them credence?

I admit, I worry about such things. Professionally, I crave competence over flair, understanding over ideology, empathy over bombast. I like to think that, where difficult decisions are to be taken, the impacts of each option are carefully assessed.

But Brexit seems to be immune to that sort of quiet reason, and increasingly the debate within our body politic is fractious, angry, unthinking. The space for people to have honest doubts about the issues we face as a nation appears to be shrinking by the day, and there are good grounds for doubt or, at the very least, some serious philosophical musing on the direction our country should take.

Parliament must accept some responsibility here. The debate has been tactical, rather than strategic, designed to get the players to the end of the week still part of the game. Opposing things, rather than actually calling for a specific, detailed course of action, unpopular though that might be.

Meanwhile, I’ll be at my desk, possibly under it, but doing my job with a slightly unsettling sense of dread. But it will be alright, won’t it?...