Nae King I was my response to the penultimate devolution/re-structuring consultation in Hastings. You can read about that here…
I went to HBC’s final one yesterday, and there were more people and more ideas than at the last but Nae King II is not a report on that meeting so much as a development of what’s buzzing around in my head thanks to all the people I found myself listening to at Hastings Assembles meetings over the last 12 months.
Nae King II
Glittering in the immense nebula of our folk memory, you occasionally come across strange tales of a young adventurer, a swine herd or a goose-girl perhaps, who sets out on an epic journey to tell the king, or the queen, or whoever’s enthroned at the top of the unimaginably remote tower of command, about some injustice that the earnest youngster wants sorting out.
For some reason, some of the stranger chapters of my life were precipitated by my getting bored of complaining with colleagues, and astonishing everyone by taking myself ‘upstairs’ to tell the boss a thing or two.
These things came back to me when I was halfway to sleep the night after the last of the ‘consultation’ events about our council ‘restructuring’ and ‘devolution’. Am I going to find myself, a couple of years on from here, getting on a train to go tell the Mayor of Sussex a thing or two? I don’t think so. In the folk tales, the little shepherd boy or milkmaid or whoever it was turned out to be (or to marry) the next king or queen after they’d sorted everything out. By contrast, my own sorties to talk to real world bosses didn’t result in everyone living happily ever after.
Something’s been bugging me all through this consultation period. It’s all about options 1, 2 and 3, and there’s considerable annoyance from everyone that we don’t get a vote, but it seems we’re not even being consulted about the nature of this Mayor of Sussex job.
Towards the end of the last consultation event, a Green Party councillor described this non-negotiable Mayor thusly: his job will be to negotiate with big businesses, to bring employment into the area. Well, that’s a neat little sales-pitch he’s fallen for. We all know by now, don’t we, that in the 21st century, ‘big businesses’ are neither good nor big employers and anyway, isn’t Hastings by its very nature the place for small businesses and independents?
[Noises off: What the Hell are the Green Party anyway? Shouldn’t their very central idea be to challenge and dismantle ‘big business’, that supreme destroyer of community and environment? Don’t they know that when big business comes to negotiate with pesky politicians, what it seeks is tax breaks and a licence to pollute and degrade everything it touches?]
Things I learned on the last day of real-world consultations
This central, expensively-elected, top-down Mayor will be answerable to ‘a committee’. Who sits on this committee, and what jurisdiction they have, we have not been told.
The consultation process is there to keep us occupied because we were a bit noisy about imposed change, but it doesn’t have any force with the government (you know, that rabble currently falling apart over their determination to spend our money on warfare, not welfare).
However, some of our councillors and council officers have the bit between their teeth and, now Hastings is beginning to wake up to what’s going on, they have extended the online consultation to the 7th July.
The opinions and preferences we are generating now will go into reports that the council will submit to the government in September, which should get a response from the government in January or February next year.
Other councils in the county are only consulting on option 1, which is a big of a bugger as Hastings’ options 2 and 3 could only work with the consent of the other areas in the county. What chance is there then, for option 3, the ‘federal model’, which appears to be attracting a lot of interest now Hastings has realized it’s there. It is, for one thing, the preferred option of the most experienced former councillor in town…
Things I learned in the last ten years
I was in the Green Party for a while once, years ago. I thought they were the only party not bent beyond repair by corporate funding. I didn’t realize back then that our entire political system is designed to turn any organization that gets anywhere near Westminster into a servant of big business. I now think that the only way we as a species can save ourselves is to patiently work on the idea of bottom-up decision making. If all government policies come up the line from random individuals’ wishes, wants and ideas, the ones that make sense and so get taken up by others, if that was how we did it, unless those corporations offered a £200k bung to everyone in the country, policy could not fall into their hands.
Railroading democracy
Hastings is nearly ready to start the consultation on how the council should be restructured now just as the actual consultation period is ending. Most people seem to think it’s a good idea to scrap the two-tier system, particularly if it rids us of ESCC, which has never favoured Hastings — but most people also feel Hastings – or at any rate, the current Hastings-and-District area – needs its own council, one that knows what’s special about Hastings – both in terms of unique potentials and in terms of urgent needs.
The third thing most people seem to be agreeing on is that this has been sprung on us and rushed past us, with no concrete way for our ideas to affect what the government (you know, that falling apart thing that isn’t working) is going to do.
Therefore we, the people, need to ignore imposed rules and timetables and just keep talking and keep learning until the whole town knows what it wants and is together enough to stand up and take it. Apparently, across the whole of this country, there was just one council where someone stood up and said ‘no, we’re not doing this to our people. If you want to restructure, you give us a referendum.’
As it happens, Hastings’ ‘New Left Party’ group have an event coming up with a session to learn about ‘Outreach’ – that is, how you go about getting everyone involved and finding out what we as a town think/want/need; and a session about economics – I’m definitely up for that one because in all these conversations, I’ve heard so many people repeat the received idea that there’s no money for this or that. Where did this idea come from that there’s just no money for anything anyone wants to do in local government, when there’s clearly plenty of money for national governments to take part in astonishingly expensive wars all over the world?
Here’s a link to register for the workshop day…
Or just come along – this is the start of a whole-of-Hastings conversation.
Meanwhile, we’re under imminent threat of both climate catastrophe and world war three. A big-business Mayor plonked on top of us making decisions for Sussex is the very last thing we need, so our councillors need to be talking to the councillors in other parts of the county, to see if any of them can get the hang of the word ‘no’.
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Kay Green 