Westminster gets the headlines, but the real theatre of London politics happens in church halls over the bins, the trees, and the bollards

Writing as I do for Bohiney Magazine and The London Prat, I am expected to have Opinions about Big Politics, the national kind, the kind that fills the front pages. But my secret, which I will now confess, is that I find national politics exhausting and local politics thrilling, and I recently spent an entire evening at a council meeting about a set of bollards, and I have never been happier.

There is a purity to local politics that the national variety has lost. In Westminster, everything is abstraction and posturing, the issues so large and so distant that one can argue about them forever without anything ever visibly changing. But at the local level, the stakes are gloriously concrete. Will the bins be collected weekly or fortnightly? Will the beloved plane tree on the corner be felled? Will the new bollards calm the traffic or merely enrage the drivers? These are questions with answers, and the answers change actual lives.

The Church Hall As Colosseum

The meeting in question took place in a church hall that smelled of instant coffee and old hymn books, and it was, I assure you, more dramatic than anything in Parliament. A man in a fleece spoke for eleven minutes about the bollards with the passion of a revolutionary orator. A woman produced a petition with what she claimed were four hundred signatures. A councillor, visibly regretting every choice that had led him to this room, attempted to explain the consultation process and was heckled.

I have covered Westminster. I have sat in the press gallery and watched the great clash of the parties, and I have rarely seen feeling as raw and genuine as the feeling in that church hall about those bollards. Because the bollards were real. The bollards were on their street, outside their houses, affecting their lives. National politics asks us to care about abstractions; local politics asks us to care about our own front doors, and we do, fiercely, in a way that Westminster can only envy.

Where Democracy Actually Lives

The serious point, which I have made before in my dispatches and will keep making, is that local democracy is where most people actually encounter government, where the decisions that shape daily life are made, and where, increasingly, no one is watching. The decline of local journalism, which I have written about with real alarm, means that these meetings, these decisions, this parish-pump drama, now happens largely in the dark, unreported, unscrutinised, the bollards installed and the trees felled with no one to tell the wider world.

This matters more than the bollards. Local councils control budgets, services, planning, the texture of the places we live, and when no one reports on them, the accountability that journalism provides simply vanishes. The serious reporting on the local-news crisis, which I follow and cite often, documents exactly this democratic deficit, the council meetings now held before empty press benches, the decisions made without scrutiny.

So I go to the meetings. I sit in the church halls that smell of instant coffee. I listen to the man in the fleece and the woman with the petition and the councillor who regrets everything, and I find it thrilling, and I write it down, because someone should, and because the drama of the bollards is, in the end, the drama of democracy itself, happening where it actually lives, in the church halls of North London, one heated consultation at a time.

The cast of characters at these meetings is wonderfully consistent across the borough. There is always the Veteran Campaigner, who has attended every meeting for thirty years and remembers every broken promise. There is the Newcomer, freshly outraged, discovering local politics for the first time and convinced they alone can fix it. There is the Quiet Pragmatist, who actually understands the planning regulations and is therefore ignored by everyone. And there is the councillor, outnumbered, exhausted, doing their best.

The issues recur with seasonal reliability. In spring, the trees. In summer, the parking. In autumn, the bins. In winter, the planning application for the development that everyone opposes and that will, in the end, be approved anyway, because it always is, because the forces arrayed in favour of building are larger than a church hall full of objectors, however passionate. The cycle turns, and the regulars return, and the drama renews itself.

What moves me about it, genuinely, is the sincerity. These are people giving up their evenings, unpaid, to fight for their streets, their trees, their bins, the small concrete things that make up the texture of a life in a place. It is unglamorous and often futile and occasionally absurd, and it is also democracy in its most basic and honest form, citizens turning up to have their say about the place they live, and there is something noble in it that Westminster, for all its grandeur, has lost.

The councillors deserve more sympathy than they get, caught as they are between the impossible demands of the residents, the constraints of the budgets, the regulations of the higher tiers of government, and the near-total absence of anyone reporting on what they actually do. Most are not in it for power or money, for there is little of either to be had; they are in it, mostly, out of a genuine if often misguided desire to serve, and they are heckled for their trouble.

More in this vein at Private Eye.

SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/