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Imagination and debate are key to beating political apathy
THIS newspaper has often been critical of policies and decisions taken by both the current administration at the Town Hall and its predecessors.
Neither elected members, nor politically thinking members of the public, nor our readers in general, would expect anything else.
This is the bread and meat of a local newspaper.
Far too often, however, the fault may be found to lie not with the political machine at the Town Hall but with Whitehall, whose civil servants and politicians daily make decisions that govern the very system of municipal authorities.
Historically, certainly since the 1950s, this has been the case; but in the past 20 years the situation has deteriorated to the point at which the micro-management of practically every process of major decision-making lies in the hands of the Whitehall machine.
This could not be better illustrated than in planning .
From the Thatcher years to Blair, and now to Gordon Brown, it has become more and more obvious, not only to the relatively few social activists in the borough but to large swathes of the general public, that planning committees may as well not exist, considering how final decisions will be taken either by planning inspectors following the tight rules laid down by legislation or by the relevant secretary of state who almost invariably will overrule the inspector.
Even the tendrils of arguments over the sales of council properties to pay for the modernisation of estates can be partly traced back to powers – legislative or otherwise – exerted by Whitehall.
This has led to the slow death of local democracy and inevitably to political apathy and low polling in elections that make a mockery of the electoral process.
The wrecking ball has been swinging violently for years.
More than ever apathy must be confronted.
History often judges direct action or passive disobedience to be the spur of change.
Those who are opposed to the enslavement of local democracy, who see dispirited politicians driven to act within the prescribed wheels of so-called due political and bureaucratic process, perhaps for those, it is time to conceive a different line of action.
Mass discontent led to the abandonment of the discredited poll tax.
An alliance of all reforming and free-thinking political groupings and individuals in the borough, if formed, could be the trigger of real change.
What is required is political imagination and unharnessed debate.
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