The leaflet was branded Hackney News with a red masthead, masquerading as a Labour newsletter. Which is interesting because the last Lib Dem News I saw was in Birkdale where they are fighting the Tories. That leaflet was made to look like a Tory leaflet. Why are they embarrassed about being Liberal Democrats?

The Lib Dem leaflet didn’t make any reference to any of their accomplishments on Hackney council. As the third largest party on the council, that’s surprising. Why don’t they want to be open about that? But perhaps it’s a leaflet focussed on the parliamentary election. So why no reference to Nick Clegg? That’s a shame because I’ve always wondered what he looks like.

The newsletter was informative: it said that the Liberal Democrats have made “four top commitments in their manifesto”. Leaving aside the absurdity of anyone having four top priorities, one of them was “clean, open politics”.

I read the leaflet in detail to discover what they meant by “clean, open politics”. Given that the Lib Dems might hold the balance of power in the next parliament, it’s a critical issue. Will they reveal who they would form a coalition government with? No, not that open.

There’s an article on the second page attacking the bus fare rises in London, quite rightly. The text clearly says “The Mayor of London (Blond Bombshell Boris they call him – ingenious) is responsible for these fare increases.” Odd then, that the accompanying photo sees the  Lib Dem candidates posing with a banner reading “Labour and Tory bus fare increases”. “Honesty and integrity should be a given” writes candidate Keith Angus. Presumably not when there’s an election to be won.

The backpage (alas, there are only four pages) declares that the Liberal Democrats have been campaigning for action on regeneration in Woodberry Down “but so far with little success”. That doesn’t inspire me with much confidence in their effectiveness. Apparently the campaign involved writing an EDM for Diane Abbott MP to table in parliament. “Unfortunately the MP didn’t raise it in parliament, as I’d hoped” says Mr Angus, who clearly does not understand the pointlessness of EDMs nor that they don’t really involve raising an issue in parliament. Because, of course, if he did know that, he wasn’t being open and clean with us.

Finally, there’s a cut out and reply slip at the end of the leaflet inviting you to support the Lib Dems, display a poster (which presumably isn’t red) and join the party by accident if you donate more than £9 (yes, seriously). Only unfortunately the leaflet provides no indication of what they will do with your personal data. Neither clean (it’s against the Data Protection Act) nor honest.

Unfortunately, Mr Angus was  honest on one point: “One of my guilty pleasures is to watch Come Dine With Me on TV while eating chocolate spread, straight from the jar”. That may be honest, but it isn’t clean.

So again, I ask: what do the Liberal Democrats have to hide?

I do believe that the Lib Dems have a useful and important role to play in British politics. But when they behave like this, with low calibre people, it’s a difficult position to defend.

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B (politician’s partner): Did you have a good day at work, darling?

P (politician): I think that’s a very important question which is why I’ve been talking to people up and down the country, listening to their views and taking the action I’m announcing today.

B: The kids had a good day today at school, but I’m worried about little P who’s struggling a bit with his maths homework.

P: Thanks to our unprecedented focus on numeracy, every child is getting the focus on core skills that he or she needs to compete in the global economy. The record investment in schools, opposed by the opposition, is delivering raised standards across the country.

B: But I’m worried that his teachers aren’t giving them the support he needs.

P: Thanks to the ‘every child matters’ agenda, there are over 20,000 children getting additional support in our extended schools and city academies.

Incidentally, darling, I noticed that the brake-light on the car needs a step-change. Could you action that to ensure that we are seen to be delivering?

B: Yes, darling. And would you like me to ensure that we take an holistic view to fixing the car?

P: Well, y’know, it’s important that we remain focussed on the things that are really important to people. Like jobs, the economy, ensuring inflation is low.

B: Yes, dear. Because the threat of rampant inflation was the talk of the nursery gate today.

R: Really? Do they not understand the regime of responsible, independent economic stewardship that we’ve created?

B: No, dear. I’m off to bed.

P: I really can’t be seen to be sleeping, darling. Not so soon after recess.

No – of course politicians don’t talk like that. You only have to look on Twitter or Facebook to see MPs as diverse as Nadine Dorries, Lynne Featherstone and Tom Watson engaging properly with people who want to listen to them – and talk to them. And MPs are not all the same, even if it’s hard to distinguish visually between a Cameron, a Clegg or a Miliband.

So why is it that the language of political debate has been reduced to the sort of corporate-speak which any sensible corporation abandoned 10 years ago?

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But anyone who has been involved in local politics will be familiar with this debate. When I worked for Alan Whitehead MP, he would knock on the doors of residents of Southampton who would remember him not for his stunning election victory in 1997, or even his consecutive defeats of 1979, 1983, 1987 and 1992 in the same onstituency. He was remembered as the “man who closed the aviary”. The aviary was of course, much loved and its passing has never been forgotten by some Southampton citizens. But when it was open, it was not sufficiently well loved for enough people to have visited it. The debate about local newspapers has the same ring of an ‘expectation gap’ between how life is and how we would like it to be.

This concern for local newspapers well-founded. They fulfil an important role in society. With so many public spending bodies operating in a community, scrutinising the local area fora, the PCT, police, safer neighbourhoods schemes, childrens’ centres, schools, local businesses and so on is an important and time-consuming activity. A local newspaper should also reflect the richness of a local community – those public interest stories ‘the oldest person to . . . the youngest person to . . . the biggest float at the school fete’. Without these functions life goes on but we are all a little poorer for it. Moreover, local newspapers are often read by people who are more marginalised in the local community than national newspapers, other forms of news or the internet (possibly not unrelated to the job ads) helping involve them in society that little bit more.

But it’s worth remembering why we are where we are. Local newspapers were failing adequately to report public bodies long before they started closing. It was the struggle of trying to get a local reporters to a council meeting, a cabinet committee or a committee inquiry that led local authorities to create their own newspapers. And where local newspapers did cover local politics, the newspaper rarely had the circulation across diverse communities to justify a local authority advertising in that newspaper alone. How many people who are concerned about local newspapers buy theirs every week? Anecdotally it’s not quite the complete commitment you might desire of a protest movement.

The situation at the moment – where local newspapers are being crowded out by expensive council-run freesheets – is anti-competitive and probably unsustainable. But to suggest that if councils only stopped producing their own newspapers there would be a flood back to the traditional paper is misleading. And there’s little evidence that people were better informed of their local politicians ten years ago, before councils tried to do more to make themselves accountable.

The health of local newspapers is also bound up in the health of local democracy. Whilst there are undoubtedly lots and lots of meetings – and many of these take place outside the town hall (making them more resource-intensive to cover) – local public bodies have less control over the cash they spend than ever before. Is it any wonder people don’t buy local newspapers to discover the effectiveness of public services at doing what they’re told by central government?

So if we don’t want local newspapers to become the new aviaries, what are the options?

First, we need to lead by example by buying the newspaper. We could also contribute every now and then by submitting an article, an op-ed, an idea for a story or a picture from our street. We could even attend a local meeting and write it up. Will Perrin and Talk About Local can show the way. Failing to recycle our local council-run freesheet would be irresponsible – though the threat of local authorities missing their landfill targets would introduce a new incentive. But in the absence of local public bodies with genuine power – the need for accountability will not feel so important.

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He sets out 3 paradoxes:

1. Direct democacy and communist dictatorship
2. The simultaneous triumph and crisis of liberal democracy
3. The democratic deficit of the EU

There was an interesting analysis of:

• The absence of any real discussion about families in Marxism
• The lack of civil society connections as a means of bringing about communism
• The flaws of a participative democracy which requires too active a citizen

There’s the most useful overview of the participative democracy in Porto Alegre. One of the key features is that its really an annual process which goes through a series of filters, examination etc.

There’s also a really nice quote from Marx which matches some of Godin’s points about sheepwalking:

“When alienated labour tears from man the object of his production it also tears from him his species-life . . . and turns the advantage he has over animals into a disadvantage in that his inorganic body, nature, is torn from him.”

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This is a problem because although they may not be formal state institutions, governments can’t be formed without them. If the situation gets worse, democracy will be weakened or major constitutional reform will need to take place.

I’ve been thinking about this for a couple of weeks now and want to find out what you think it amounts to. Is this just really obvious, not as complicated as I’ve suggested or just vacuous?

Why did political parties work?
These parties served an important practical and philosophical role. Political parties:
•    synthesised a number of competing interests and beliefs,
•    organised people into two or three groupings and
•    provided a clear choice at election times

You had the Labour party for the labourers – the industrial working classes and the Conservative party for those who wanted to maintain the status quo – largely made up of aristocrats, the wealthy, landowners etc. Most people were one or the other and a swap represented a significant change of personal fortune. They were formed in these structures because it was also the best way to ‘game’ the electoral system.

Why political parties no longer make sense
British political parties don’t make sense to a middle class population with Sky+ and the freedom to go to a different supermarket if they have a customer complaint.

British political parties depend on a broad identification with a small number of social groupings. But we don’t identify ourselves with that. Most of us think we’re middle class.

We’re not prepared to accept the compromises and synthesis necessary to create a programme for government. In a world where you can download the track you want rather than buy the album, watch the TV programme when you want, rather than when the TV company wants, it makes no sense to accept one policy (say, cut in carbon emissions) just because you accepted another (higher energy costs). And where would you go to be challenged on this contradiction: The local butcher or a Facebook Group?

Personal freedom and personal responsibility now matters more than collective organisation. On a FiveLive phone-in yesterday, callers debating the merits of the military in society challenged young officers. A frequent point was that if you know a particular order to be immoral, you shouldn’t go along with it. That, of course, is no basis to run an army, but many couldn’t comprehend those who chose to sacrifice personal freedom to a collective chain of command. On a different scale, my recent post about George Monbiot’s criticism of Hazel Blears attracted a number of comments from people who couldn’t understand why a minister would vote in favour of the government so frequently without resigning or speaking out.

Personal identity matters more than collective identity. The authenticity provided by the personal blog can’t be delivered by politicians repeating ‘the line’.

Political parties are going to become less relevant

1.    The pick and mix of options for activism provided by single issue groups and social networking websites further undermine the collective action required by parties
2.    The instant feedback loop provided by the internet can’t be delivered by political parties
3.    The limitations of collective responsibility are absurd in an online world where everyone has a view, the freedom to express it and is immediately accountable for it.

This might just be one elaborate argument for a change in the electoral system. But I think it goes much deeper than that.

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