Norway’s undying
gratitude
to Shetland
With one final
shove, the bin
clicked shut
Damnably difficult questions about modern art
Douglas Hall, first keeper of the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, replies to criticism of his custodianship
Get SR free in
your inbox three
times a week
Click here
The Cafe
The Cafe is our readers’ forum. Send your contribution to islay@scottishreview.net
Today’s banner
Sunset over Glasgow taken from Kelvinside
Photograph by
Ann Donaldson
The system is broken.
Real local government
is long overdue
Michael Pugh
Kenneth Roy’s piece (3 May) urging abstention from the recent council elections given Scotland’s well-documented local democratic deficit certainly gives one pause for thought.
I’m not so sure that if the present Scottish Government tries its hand at reforming local government it ‘couldn’t do any worse’ than the Conservative architects of the 1994-6 shake-up. But it’s clear each of Scotland’s four ‘major’ political parties, or in some cases, their ideological antecedents, have had their opportunities to re-shape Scottish municipal structures over the past two centuries, with at best mixed results.
The introduction of the single transferable vote in council elections under the Labour-Lib Dem coalition reduced the chances of any single party dominating Scotland’s council chambers, although this does not necessarily imply an end to machine politics and backroom deals; coalitions can play those games too. The present SNP government at Holyrood has had almost five years to make its impact on municipal life.This has so far amounted to rather procrustean spending ‘concordats’, and the introduction of a single National Police Force. These are not promising straws in the wind for a revival of local democracy, but perhaps, just perhaps, the prospect of independence or ‘devolution max’ in coming years will somehow lead to a meaningful embrace of localism at Holyrood. This is certainly the hope expressed in the Reid Foundation’s timely ‘Silent Crisis’ report, which has understandably little to say about Scottish municipal arrangements before 1889. Yet earlier precedents can illuminate the present predicament.
In 1833, the Lib Dems’ Whig ancestors devised a distinctively Scottish legislative framework whereby local ratepayers could petition for their locality to be recognised as a ‘police burgh’. Significantly, the ‘police’ part of this equation derived from classical notions of a locally accountable city-state, going well beyond its modern connotation. 1830s-onwards ‘police’ powers encompassed matters such as crime and punishment (the modern police bit), sewage, waste disposal, water and utility provision, paving, lighting, and maintaining streets, nuisance control and general public health: in short the arrival of recognisably modern local government on the Scottish scene. Incidentally (or maybe this is the point), if you need reminding just why the local state matters, just try imagining modern urban life without such basic services, even before health and education came into the mix. This permissive, relatively grass-roots approach to the creation and empowerment of local authorities survived several acts of parliament substantively unchanged until 1889, and many of the local authorities created under it survived in one form or another until 1975. The resilience of this Victorian ‘General Police’ framework and the burghs formed beneath it testified at least in part to the Westminster state’s recognition of the Scottish bourgeoisie’s desire for and ability to exercise ‘local self-government’, as Graeme Morton argued in his influential 1999 book ‘Unionist Nationalism’.
No less a liberal luminary than John Stuart Mill spoke up for Glasgow’s surrounding police burghs during his brief tenure as MP for Westminster. Evidently the Thatcher and Major governments were not informed of these precedents for respecting local sentiment.
Michael Pugh is a lecturer in political history at the University of the West of Scotland. He is working on a book about the experience of ‘local self-government’ in the former burghs of Govan and Partick, which were absorbed into Glasgow in 1912