Democracy as we know it

Jim Weston produced a splendid letter (April 14) castigating the reality of central government riding roughshod over the needs/ views of local people.

An alternative conclusion is that there is no longer any rational form of local democracy.

I have known Jim since we started school at the Kingsham Road Primary School in Chichester; 75 years ago! We both worked for the county council throughout most of our working lives. For a chunk of that time we were both committee clerks.

What follows are my views; Jim might or might not agree with them.

As a committee clerk

I was privileged to work closely with a number of the senior members including Sir Peter Mursell (county council chairman): Brigadier Thwaytes (county council vice-chairman); the Duke of Norfolk; and Lt Col Sir Walter Burrell (chairman of both of ‘my’ committees).

Landed gentry all they treated each of their committee staff as though we were their equals. These were the days when local democracy operated. Yet already – over 50 years ago – an independent report on the relationships between local and central government concluded that all departments except the Home Office were advisory; the Home Office was regulatory.

So what about democracy? The wonderful Betty Boothroyd: “Today, when people talk of democracy in the UK, they mean the House of Commons which, for many years, has been controlled by the main political parties. For some years increasing numbers of observers have been concerned that the authority of the Prime Minister has increased to absurd levels while our latest players – including our central media, spin doctors, special advisers, pollsters, think-tanks, regulatory bodies and others – could well have greater influence / authority than the entire House of Commons”.

Dr Stuart Wilks-heeg, executive director of Democratic Audit, was commissioned by the Joseph Rowntree Reform Trust to undertake a study of ‘The Purity of Elections in the UK’ (2008).

In 2010, he was lead author of the Electoral Commission’s report on electoral registration. His conclusions were that: “We are highly likely to be facing the death of democracy as we once knew it. This should not surprise us.

“In some ways, it should not particularly concern us. History is littered with defunct forms of democracy, from Ancient Greek city-states to assemblies of Viking ‘free men’, and we may not be able to salvage a model of representative democracy in terminal decline.

Instead, the issue for policymakers is to understand how the era of representative democracy has embedded universal democratic values in ways which earlier forms of democracy did not, and which offer scope for future variants of it to emerge.”

If any of your readers can recognise any emerging variants I would be very grateful to know of them! FRANK HARLEY The Midway

Felpham