Working it out together

Tighten your belt, so more heavy stuff with another of my central themes coming up.

Looking back, the expectations when my mother was born was that she would grow up, work, marry, have children and die in the same village. In the immediate surrounds of that village there would be some half dozen families she was related to and there would be several more families that had direct connections to her own family. Then came two WW's.

Contrast that with a child born today in a city. The expectation now is that the child would have serial parents and half siblings, would move locations, if not cities, several times before leaving schooling, would live on their own at a distant university and then moving on to take up a series of careers based any where around the world, Hong Kong, Melbourne, Buenes Aires or Montreal. In their home city it is unlikely they would have any direct kin, would have only fleeting visit with blood relatives and only have connections within their own network of contacts.

This is the difference a hundred years makes. Social structure has changed dramatically but the way we relate to it has not kept pace. An urgent review of how we interact and relate to each other is long over due.

Contrary to all the hype and talking up, what keeps us on the straight and narrow is not ever more government surveillance, checks and controls. No, what keeps us, the vast majority, on the straight and narrow is the fear of being caught and found out about by our peers and the social ostracisation that would surely follow.

In these amorphous cities we now live in there is no need to exercise self-restraint, we move anonymous amongst crowds of strangers that have scarce connection to the city or even the country and certainly not to us, so anything can go, and does.

This is coupled with the absence of any revere for authority. Once, your life's fortunes or opportunities and that equally of your families were strongly influenced by those having authority over you, whether bosses, clergy, local bigwig, the local policeman or councillors. Get into their bad books and your path would be made hard if not blocked. That has all been swept away, we are free agents, beholdened to no-one and free to choose as we please without consequence, or so it would seem.

Can't put back the clock, and who would want to, but we do have to make re-adjustments if we are to avoid that totalitarian state.

It is a large leap, but strangely enough, we need to replace centralised government and national authorities with local governance. Not the parody of local government we have now, where the locals talk but the financial, legal and delivery framework is all dictated and controlled by central government. It matters little what 'local politics' may decide, central government have all the reins to ensure their chosen way will prevail. Not conducive to meaningful local politics able to make a difference and to be accountable to those that put them there.

We have to get to a position where local people make local decisions and have budgetary and deliverance responsibility on how services are to be provided to their fellows. To make meaningful decisions as to whether services are centrally supplied or locally sourced. Such a system, to be a real system, has to contemplate failure, local decisions get it wrong, finances spiral out of control or services provided fall below acceptable minimum standards. Some central direction is still essential, to interpret the minimum compliant application of an EU directive, to promulgate 'best practice' or to establish norms of costs or acceptable standards. The expectation is that the provision of community services from say Norfolk, Midlands, South West or London would be noticeably different and would actually reflect the different local character and locations. No longer would cosmopolitan London civil servants apply their middle-class values uniformly across the country. Rural would be a different life-style to city, manufacturing areas different in feel to start-up office parks.

To re-awaken our people, they have to know that decisions that will impact on their life-style expectations are made locally and they have to get involved if they want the 'right' decisions for them made for the future comfort of their family. That people in re-locating encounter different levels of service and support expectations is inescapable and may well be desirable.