Town & Country Planning, January 2014
The political thinker Benjamin Barber hit the headlines a decade or so ago with his book Jihad versus McWorld.
It was a clever idea, which of course was highly controversial at the time. Whatever you might say about global corporate power, they rarely chop people’s heads off. But it was an interesting juxtaposition which encouraged the search for some more tolerant diverse solution on a better dimension, more supportive of democracy.
Since then, Barber has been wrestling with the problem of why things don’t work, with a series of the kind of thinks that think-tankers do these days – have a TED talk, do an interview with Prospect magazine over here, and write a book of course.
He represents the New York think-tank Demos (pronounced differently from our think tank of the same name), which has a excellent track record in bottom up solutions, notably a recent report on banks run by state governments in the US, like the now famous Bank of North Dakota.
So I am in some sympathy with his position. Having worked in government for most of 2012, and rather unexpectedly found my own political party in government, when I had been involved in developing policy for it, I have been wrestling with the same problem myself.
Why is it that government finds itself so powerless in the face of forces which they might, in previous generations, have tackled without a backward glance?
The answer, I believe, lies partly in the sheer complexity of modern government at a nation state level. Any change tends to involve a whole series of unexpected side-effects which seem completely unpredictable, even by insiders.
It is usually easier to do nothing,. Certainly if action means unravelling a central compromises which greater objectives depend on (the energy market springs to mind).
Then there is the frustration of ministers, who come to suspect that their own civil servants are undermining them, because of the staggeringly slow progress towards any kind of policy shift, and keep back their best ideas until too late in the programme to be able to evaluate them properly.
And so it goes on. So when I heard Benjamin Barber’s TED talk, with the same title of his book, If Mayors Ruled the World, I thought he had hit on a potential way out of the impasse.
Because national governments are so remote from the real policy levers that they fiddle with them hopelessly, unaware – as Sir Keith Joseph said so famously – that they are not connected to anything. But mayors don’t have to: they have the levers right before them, at least for local action.
As he said in his lecture, Barber only had to articulate this question to himself to realise that, in some ways, mayors already do rule the world. Or they do if they realise they can.
This is particularly true of the high profile, entrepreneurial, plenipotentiary American mayors, but it seems also to be true increasingly of our own – or, in the absence of mayors, the leaders of our industrial cities.
The UK has its own typically compromised and yet enlightened approach to this. The government’s City Deals allow councils to draw down the powers to make things happen, once they have put forward innovative plans to central government for approval.
It is being extended to other cities, and quite rightly, though it is generally acknowledged that the City Deals have worked – where they have worked – despite, not because, of the system. The old bureaucracy at the centre clings jealously to its old privileges.
These are important issues for us i the UK, because we remain uniquely hidebound by centralised sclerosis. Barber’s book is attracting attention in the USA because they have a federal political sclerosis of a different kind. The idea that mayors may already be making things happen despite it is a huge relief.
And they are doing so because of the sheer pragmatism of mayors. They have to make things work. They use the same roads as the people they administer, use the same transport and service systems. They can’t hide behind ideology or national policy, unless it actually helps them solve problems.
But Barber goes further. He imagines a future where the mayors club together and bypass national governments, and do so internationally as well.
And once again, he has only to say it, and you realise it is happening already.