Take That Lady to Bingo!
A Glasgow woman just wanting to go to bingo sparks a whole debate about local and national politics!
I had travelled with a group of friends to the small town of Falkland in Fife, Scotland for a green festival called ‘The Big Tent’. A few of us had been involved with trying to establish a Transition Town group in Dundee, and we were keen to attend a talk about the Transition Movement, scheduled for the afternoon.
There are hundreds of people at the festival, but when we reach the venue for the Transition talk, there’s only a few of us. The host looks a bit deflated. Even so, she gets going with her presentation. After a few minutes, she mentions a project in Glasgow that had intended to set up a community garden scheme. This is not a Transition project as such, but one of the audience suggests it might be worth discussing.
So we chat about this. The land in question lies to the rear of houses. It is frequented by drug addicts. The project leaders, we are told, did their best to spark enthusiasm in the locals to establish vegetable gardens and orchards. Apart from the general lack of interest in food growing, the main concern is that increased access to the land may, in turn, increase the incidence of drug use, and may also encourage vandalism.
In desperation, our host had asked one resident what she really wanted. What would make life better for her? The elderly resident said she was frightened to go out alone. She really wanted to go to play bingo, if she could find someone willing to go with her.
There is silence in the venue at this point. The statement hung in the air. I don’t remember if anyone actually said it, but we were all thinking – why not ditch the community garden and take that lady to bingo!
So there’s the problem right there, for people who might wish to make the world a better place! What do you do if people just don’t want the changes you’re proposing? What do you do if people actually want something that’s harmful for them or for their neighbours or for nature or the planet? (Not that bingo is in this category of course! But what if the lady had wanted to go big-game hunting!)
Real politics is about what happens in your street and in your neighbourhood. And I’m very much a fan of this style of politics – it’s come to be known as deliberative democracy. Everyone has a voice in deliberative democracy and your street could be getting together to talk about stuff that could be done right now to make life a bit better. So it might be gardens, fences, litter collection, traffic calming measures, street lighting. At a slightly bigger scale, it might be the local park, play areas, shops and small businesses.
You may like the sound of that. Or you might prefer it if all this were left to big government to organise for us. The ‘bottom-up’ method (that is, the deliberative democracy I’ve been describing) is possibly going to deliver the goods more effectively. But then, it takes participation by at least some of the neighbourhood to actually make it happen. And participation might not be your thing. Or it might not be something that anyone in the neighbourhood wants.
But if it did happen, this deliberative thing, then we are back to that problem with which we started. What about that person who just doesn’t agree? Or a group of people who disagree? Or several groups just wanting different things? It’s not going to be a fun way of spending an evening!
That’s why most of us, if we think about such matters at all, would prefer to leave it to those who are paid to take care of this stuff. The top-down method of organising things might be a blunt instrument – no matter how much money is thrown at it – but at least some of the time it gets the job done. And if people don’t like what’s done for them they can always complain to the government. It doesn’t have to end up with a fight between neighbours.
But big government has it’s own problems. And the bigger it gets – that is, the closer we get to the top – then the worse the problems seem to be. Governments are complex beasts of course, but we could summarise it’s problems with just one word – equity. Or we might simply say, fairness. Because whatever the issue, someone, somewhere will say that they have been treated unfairly. So to solve things is to try to work out what is fair for everyone involved (and we might include other nations, nature and the planet into that fairness equation as well).
But we could dig a bit deeper and say that the real underlying fairness is that (more than likely, depending on what country you’re in) we never get to choose what type of government we have in the first place. Sure, we can vote, support one party or another, and maybe get our voices heard a little via a representative democracy. But we never got to choose whether to have a representative democracy in the first place and we’re very unlikely ever to get a say in having a different system. Constitutional change is just not on the agenda. Maybe that doesn’t bother you. Maybe you don’t think that’s unfair. Or maybe you’ll tell me to go live somewhere else! But where else?
So if we compare those two systems, deliberative democracy and representative democracy, then you’ll see that the issue with deliberative democracy is sorting out the small unfairnesses and the issue with representative democracy is that we get stuck with some very big unfairnesses and can’t do much about them. In fact the two systems – although they are at opposite poles in terms of bottom-up versus top-down – nonetheless both have kind of a hierarchy arrangement. There has to be representation from the street level in deliberative democracy out to the wider circles of government. And as we work our way out from neighbourhood to town to county, the two systems become more similar. The key thing though is participation – that’s what deliberative democracy offers that is mostly lacking in representative democracy.
To change between the two systems does not require a revolution. It could be a gradual shift – that’s if we were ever to want the change. Because, whilst we might grumble about unfairnesses, both small and large, we’re often not willing to participate in order to set them right. Perhaps (apart from disagreeing with neighbours) the problem is that we don’t really believe that our voice could be heard, because we’ve grown so used to big government ignoring us? Perhaps we think that if we were to raise some substantial issue – let’s say a national issue – at a neighbourhood meeting, it just could not work its way up the hierarchy from neighbourhood to town to county to region to nation – finally reaching the level where it could be addressed. The one thing worse than people not having a voice at all is to offer us a voice and then fail to hear. So the system needs to be very very good to fulfil its promise and perhaps that just seems too big an ask – it’s participatory utopia.
Well, trouble is it’s likely most of us have grown up never discussing issues with neighbours. Unless we happen to live in a co-housing or an eco-village project, we have zero skills in the art of community. There’s one key ingredient that’s needed – trust. And that takes us right back to the woman and her bingo. Because if we look at it again we might see that it’s not an all or nothing thing. There never needs to be a ‘crunch’ decision, a unanimous agreement, or total success versus total failure. Street politics is a conversation, and it’s always changing and evolving. So I think we should take the political problems on the chin and get involved where we can, plus push for the kind of local networks and decision-making processes that could be the basis for a full-scale deliberative democracy. Participation, fairness, trust. They’re all important, but maybe it begins with trust.
