Local Government

The "Bradford Revolution" of 1988 (see Blog 18 Feb 22) heralded the nation-wide imposition of financial control over local government. All manner of local provision of health, welfare, education, infrastructure and community support for urban dwellers and their families were taken under the financial control of national government, and then denied funding. The history of the evolution local government provisions may prove helpful in understanding what is happening today. And the best way to start would seem to be to consider the origins of those provisions that were to be the subject of swinging cuts in the Bradford Revolution of 1988. (which in turn followed from the Local Government Acts of 1974).

Finance and urbanisation have gone hand in hand since the onset of the industrial revolution in the 18th century. And that is because the move to the towns from traditional farming communities necessitates a host of communal provisions to fill the gaps that were filled by traditional communities.

Municipal, 'gas-and-water' socialism was the term given in the late 19th century to the provision of local government services in the inner cities. Poverty and disease were rife. The quest was to provide piped water, sewage disposal, fuel, transport, health care, education and the entire infrastructure necessary to produce healthy living and working conditions in urban areas. The services were administered through democratically elected local government structures evolved by and for the local citizens of the urban district across the political spectrum. The Bradford Revolution led to the nationwide dismantling of a host of this type of provision considered necessary for sustainable urban living since the late 19th century.

In 1988 the official story line was that municipal provision of of services could not be sustained for lack of finance. The task ahead is to review the local history of the area in which we currently live, with a view to re-creating democratically sound, sane and sustainable provisions of municipal services, health, education, welfare, libraries, parks, leisure centres, allotments, advice centres, and above all council housing and Care Homes. The entire pack of lies that has been sold to a gullible electorate over recent decades is designed to bring in a totalitarian regime of global finance. Tat danger is to be avoided at all costs.

In 1944, Orwell wrote: "The really frightening thing about totalitarianism is not that it commits 'atrocities' but that it attacks the concept of objective truth; it claims to control the past as well as the future," a framework that would morph into Big Brother's "Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past." The attack on truth and language makes the atrocities possible. If you can erase what has happened, silence the witnesses, convince people of the merit of supporting a lie, if you can terrorize people into silence, obedience, lies, if you can make the task of determining what is true so impossible or dangerous they stop trying, you can perpetuate your crimes. The first victim of war is truth, goes the old saying, and a perpetual war against truth undergirds all authoritarianisms from the domestic to the global. After all, authoritarianism is itself, like eugenics, a kind of elitism premised on the idea that power should be distributed unequally." (Quoted in Orwell's Roses by Rebecca Solnit (2019, p145)

Presently, we find ourselves living under a state of medical martial law, maintained by the police and backed by the military. In the absence of democratic debate based upon clearly presented factual information, we find ourselves subjected to 'Lockdown' measures that seem quite inappropriate outside a police state. And all in the name of health and safety!

So, what can be done? We must face the fact that too many are complying, in the hopes that it will all blow over. We must, on the contrary, move in the opposite direction, seeking to decentralise power and control to local level. The way to a sustainable future is to re-create municipal consensus politics at local level. We must support local farms, suppliers and businesses, becoming increasingly self-sufficient, doing more for ourselves outside the money economy. Local banking must become more widespread defence against Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs). All such measures require local people's research, informal 'round table discussions' and practical action. So much is already happening.

Non-compliance is not an easy option. That way the Covid measures will last for ever. We may tell ourselves that this will be just until the crisis ends. But if history tells us anything, it teaches us that nobody ever 'complied their way out of totalitarianism'.