return to top page Bringing Up The Local Issues John Papworth The Ecologist. Vol 31 No 5, June 2001 John Papworth believes all of us are capable of running our own lives - we don't need others to run them for us. I was reared in the 20s and 30s in an orphanage. It was built in the 1880s by 'The Board of Guardians' of the 'Parish of St Leonard's' in Shoreditch. The parish was in one of the poorest parts of London and it had a problem of hundreds of homeless children.
The members of the emphatically working-class 'Board of Guardians' proceeded to purchase several hundred acres of open farmland in Essex. They commissioned an architect to build 'cottage homes', each of the dozen or more cottages housed 30 boys in the care of a married couple and 30 girls in the care of a single woman.
The cottages were set in lawns and flowerbeds either side of a broad winding gravel drive and at a central point there was, on one side, a school, a gymnasium, and a chapel, whilst on the other side was a yard surrounded by offices and workshops. Each cottage had a large playground surrounded by garden plots in which the children, if they wished, could grow whatever flowers or vegetables they could get hold of.
What rivets my memory today is that all this was accomplished by a group of ordinary people in a poor London parish. They had a problem and they solved it in a quite exemplary and commendable fashion with no suggestion of any interference by an almighty ministry of this or that and, like hundreds of children who passed through it, I have always been profoundly grateful that I was so well cared for.
By modern standards the place might be regarded as seriously deficient. There was no central heating and in winter a grate piled high with mostly coal dust might yield little warmth. If we were judged to have stepped out of line the superintendent had a cane which was seldom far from some bare backside, and I was about six before somebody thought to inform me that there was a girl who had the same name and who might be, as she was, my sister.
No doubt the finer points of childcare might be little regarded as seen through modern eyes, but no doubt too, had the place not been shut down in the 60s, those responsible would have kept pace with the times and made changes accordingly. But 'those responsible' are no longer there. 'The Board of Guardians' has vanished, as has the 'Parish of St Leonard's' as a local government unit. Why?
What has been achieved by this satanic abolition and the creation of units of 'local' government, which are about as local as a moon rocket and as responsive to citizen needs as a dead dinosaur? This is not just a matter of 'politics' or efficient administration, but a matter of whether the quality of life is being enhanced or degraded.
Each of us possesses a need to create as a basic element in our endless quest for fulfilment, a need expressed not simply in great art, in poetry, literature, painting, sculpture, music or architecture, but in a multitude of mundane forms once known by every tradesman who once served our daily needs. It was the democracy of creativity throughout society which was the seedbed of all the cultural achievements of the past; in our day, now that vital seedbed has been virtually abolished by boardroom get-rich-quickery, Is it any wonder that high art forms have become increasingly sterile, discordant and uninspiring?
And the damage the boardroom brigands have done to work is reflected in what the politicians have done to our social structures.
Local government once involved the energies, dedication, commitment and genuinely altruistic spirit of service to the community of a high proportion of local people. Today a kind of Fabian fascism has brushed all this aside as being of no account.
Instead of members of a local community hospital or welfare committee being involved in the day-to-day running of local institutions, organising fetes and celebrations to raise funds and keeping the show on the road; doing it in ways which gave their lives meaning, status and, again that word, fulfilment, they are now relegated to the role of voting fodder in the mass political charade.
We now have 'national' schemes and ministries for health, education, welfare and other essentially local matters. The evidence abounds and grows that these bodies are increasingly wasteful and inefficient, where they are not indeed riddled with the maggot of corruption, and not least of course they operate on organisational parameters which make a mockery of democratic principle.
Somehow the illusion has been fostered, for example, that people who have devoted their lives to clambering to the top of the greasy pole are better qualified to ordain how children should be educated than are the parents and their local committees. So our public prints are loaded with otiose speculation about 'national' examination standards and results, and about the content of 'national' educational curricula; meanwhile, in rural areas, large numbers of children are bussed to giant 'comprehensive' schools where they learn about computers and nothing about how to grow food.
Local government, instead of being a power in its own right but working in tandem, where necessary, with national government, is now the pawn of the latter, which is making a mess of the whole works.
It is time to cry halt to the assault on freedom involved in all this centralisation; time to restore the power and the spirit of local power, responsibility and commitment of genuine local government as a precondition of a healthy democratic way of life.
John Papworth is editor of Fourth World Review, the only magazine for which the readers decide what they pay.copies of this document may be obtained from 26 The High Street, Purton, Wiltshire SN5 4AE, UK
Tel: 01793 77 22 14 Fax: 01793 77 25 21
e-mail: john.papworth@btinternet.com
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