Why Scotland needs a grassroots revolution in its towns and villages to defend democracy

The fine municipal buildings in Scotland’s towns are mostly still standing, of course. They are arts centres and wedding venues, council offices or local “service delivery” hubs.

What they are not, though, is thriving centres of local democracy. In Scotland, as across the UK, repeated local government reorganisations since the 1960s have left most towns and communities lacking that immediate local level of representation; and the buildings now stand as a melancholy reminder of a time when all the towns listed above – and dozens more across Scotland – would have had a burgh council of its own, raising its own revenues, and able to exert a major influence on the life and future of their community.

Directly elected mayors

To judge by much of the current debate about local government reform across the UK, though, the main impulse of those tasked with improving our local democracy, in the 21st century, is if anything to remove basic local government units even further from the people they serve. That our increasingly cash-strapped and powerless local government needs reform is widely acknowledged; and this week, the Labour government in London announced its plan for local government in England, which involves merging district and county authorities into single unitary authorities, and “allowing” local areas to make this change, and “giving” them more powers, on condition that they agree to introduce directly elected mayors.

If the content of these proposals is worth debating, though, the top-down language in which they are framed speaks volumes about the extent to which the UK has almost forgotten what real local government might look like; and this approach is echoed in much of the public debate about local government in Scotland.

Repeated rounds of reorganisation have left Scotland with an awkward unitary structure of 32 local authorities, which typically raise only 20 per cent of their own revenue, and are widely acknowledged to be in most cases too small to function as effective strategic authorities, yet too large to be truly local.

In terms of international comparisons, this leaves Scotland with by far the biggest local democratic deficit in western Europe, with only 1,400 elected councillors across the whole country, compared with around ten times that number, on average, for similar populations in the European Union.

Disagreements about independence

The large average size of our base unit of local government – around 170,000 people – increases the workload of local councillors, and transforms the role from something local citizens can fulfil in their spare time to a full-time job for party politicians. Hence the current unseemly events at Edinburgh City Council, where the good governance of Scotland’s capital is routinely sacrificed to a disagreement among the three key parties on a matter – Scottish independence – which is rarely of any direct relevance to the issues facing the city.

Yet still, the standard response to these problems is often to make local government even more distant from voters. One recent proposal, designed by an algorithm, suggested that Scotland should have only 17 councils, effectively removing “local” government altogether, and replacing it with what in any other European country would be recognised as a regional tier of government.

All of which suggests that instead of rushing towards “reforms” which further weaken the real grassroots of local democracy, Scotland should be taking a much more radical and deliberative view of what is needed, to maintain a thriving democracy under 21st-century conditions. Back in 1999, Scottish voters were promised that devolution would also bring a new age of reform and re-empowerment for Scotland’s local authorities; yet over 25 years, successive Scottish Governments have completely failed to deliver on that promise, instead centralising power even further.

Scotland once had 430 local authorities

So what we now need is to revisit the debate about democracy in Scotland as it applies to our fundamental layers of local government, which in turn tend to shape our whole democratic culture, in terms of whether citizens feel respected, heard, and able to play a role in shaping their own futures.

We need initiatives – like the Building A Local Scotland campaign, of which I am a member – that come not top-down from government, but from citizens who can see where our democracy is currently not working well; we need to remember the 430 local authorities we had in Scotland until the 1970s, and to ask whether the move away from that intensely local structure has been for the better, or whether we now need to restore a 21st-century version of it.

We are fond, in Scotland, of saying that sovereignty here finally rests with the people. If we mean it, though, then we have to recognise – in these times above all – that if people feel disempowered in their own communities, and have no hands-on sense of how democracy can work to improve lives, then their attachment to any kind of politics at national level is likely to become increasingly shallow.

And that, in turn, leaves our politics ever more vulnerable to manipulation by those who now often explicitly threaten our democratic institutions, whose interests are not those of ordinary citizens, and whose power can only be countered by strong layers of representation at every level, starting from the town or village hall, and flowing upwards to national governments who understand that the more they hoard power, in these times, the less real power and resilience they will finally have, in facing up to the challenges of an increasingly troubled century.