I’ve seen the future of democracy in a Dad’s Army hall
Ladies and gentlemen, I think I may have reached peak countryside. I have just attended my very first parish council meeting. Or, at least, the first hour and 20 minutes of it. When the Zoom call scheduled by our chairman timed out for the second time (the free online meeting service being available only in 40-minute segments), I took it as a sign from the god of local government and moved on to a meeting with my drinks cabinet instead.
Coronavirus, however, made for an odd introduction to the inner sanctum of rural politics. Conventionally, I would have taken a pew alongside my neighbours in our village hall – a glorious 100-year-old construction, clad in moss green wood and lifted straight out of Dad’s Army.
Instead, I slumped in my sitting room, and saw theirs arrayed in small squares on my computer screen. I’m not sure this set-up did a lot for our collective gravitas, making us (OK, mostly me) look rather more like exhibits in a village zoo than sagacious statesmen.
Should you be unfamiliar with the concept, parish councils are the heroic first-responders in our system of governance. A port of call for residents in a stew about community issues, they deal with complaints and suggestions on subjects ranging from planning applications to unruly allotments (the old me would have finished this sentence with the words “so you don’t have to”. But that was before my Damascene conversion).
In our case: the weighty matter of investing in a village defibrillator. OK, I can hear your guffaws from here (especially when I tell you that, as only elected members are really supposed to talk at meetings, I was relegated to the role of mute spectator). But bear with.
For I would now genuinely class parish council meetings as essential viewing (and not only for those who binged on every available Netflix box-set in the first two lockdowns).
Can there be a better time than a month in which a Leader of the Free World incited riots, to make the case for grassroots politics and its potential to work positive changes from the bottom up? Apparently not, as a think tank called Onward has just released a report calling for more parish councils with greater powers.
The pandemic hasn’t only devastated our economy. It has taken a sledgehammer to our already ailing sense of community. Last September, Onward warned there had been a steady fall over the past decade in levels of volunteering, local group membership, community activities and “social trust”. So as we crawl shakily out of the Covidwreaked
ruins, “we need to take steps to empower and recapitalise communities”, said its director, Will Tanner. “To give people back a sense of belonging and rekindle the social networks and institutions upon which we all rely.”
The answer? Not protests or rallies (admittedly a far sexier, social-mediasuited form of community action), but the parish council. Only a quarter of England possesses one of these rare yet modest prizes, quietly lending a democratic voice and a structure for action to the tiniest of communities (including ours – so minuscule that we share a council with the neighbouring village).
In the end, it’s not just about the defibrillator, or which end of the village has proved itself most deserving of the honour to host a new sign. It’s about pausing from your daily doom-scroll through updates on a global situation that’s largely out of your hands, to invest an evening in your neighbours and the half-mile radius on your doorstep that’s within your control. It’s about knitting the social fabric of a community back together.
I’ll be back every month, and not just because it is the only imaginable forum in which someone could ever feasibly refer to me as “that young girl”. This month, a new village sign. Next month, a new world order. I wonder how many Zoom calls that will take…