Assembly Project

In an earlier post, I reviewed a book about Independents for Frome (IfF), who in 2011 took control of the Somerset town’s parish council and showed that a lot more can be done at this often neglected level of government. I’ve rather liked the story, because it challenges people’s assumptions about how politics should work.

The original book, Flatpack Democracy by Peter Macfadyen, dates from 2014, during their first term. It discusses how the grassroots movement took control of the council and governed. IfF rejected traditional party politics and agreed to work together despite not agreeing on everything. At the time, the experiment in governing looked promising but, after losing a by-election the previous December, its future looked uncertain.

By the time Macfadyen wrote the sequel, Flatpack Democracy 2.0 (2019), things looked quite different. In 2015, they won all 17 of the seats with 54% of the vote, kicking off the traditional parties and getting a long, positive report in The Guardian. In 2019, they again swept the council, this time with over 79% of the vote. The Liberal Democrats, their main opponents, hadn’t bothered to stand against them. Since the book was released, IfF have swept the council a third time, when only a single independent stood against them. Incredibly, IfF managed to do this despite having made some courageous decisions like raising taxes and supporting house-building.

Unless you actually do take control of a council, the sequel is not as essential as the first, but if you’re interested in the Frome experiment, it’s still worth a read.

The book is organised by theme rather than time, with chapters devoted to topics such as their campaigns, governing record, relations with upper councils and the question on whether the Frome experiment can be exported. Since the story is less important than in the original, the thematic order makes sense, though it’s not always kept to. Discussion on Denmark’s Alternativet party is split between two chapters.

There is much useful advice on matters such as how to run a parish council and discussions on IfF’s wins and occasional setbacks in office. He talks about some impressive achievements such as starting Fair Frome, a charity to address local poverty, and a role in a pioneering experiment to reduce loneliness. More relevant to this blog, a few points stuck out to me about their approach to democracy and the dabbling in assembly-based approaches.

Do councils need an opposition?

To many democrats, particularly those used to the Westminster system, the disappearance of opposition parties in Frome could look disturbing. Even Macfadyen calls their 2019 victory “Putinesque”. There is also the question on how a council can govern well without an opposition to scrutinise its moves.

But it’s not as bad as it looks. For one thing, the Westminster system has never really worked at a local level. People nearly always vote in local elections based on national politics. If a party loses control of a council, it’s usually nothing to do with their governing record. Some councils like Manchester and Barking & Dagenham have at times had every seat occupied by one party, as has the parliament of New Brunswick in Canada.

Moreover, IfF ran the local council like how almost any democratic organisation works outside of the State. You don’t see a “Club Feepayers Party” fighting for control of a local tennis club with the “Tennis Social Democrats”. Even some local councils are nonpartisan like a tennis club, including the smaller parish councils in the UK and local councils in Canada and California. The real thing that’s unusual about Frome is that a partisan council was turned into a nonpartisan one.

I would argue that five factors have made IfF’s dominance both acceptable and possible:

• IfF chose candidates that brought a variety of views to the table, thanks to using an independent selection committee to pick them. Instead of crushing opposing views, IfF brought opposing views into the fold. The real loser was old-style party politics.
• IfF did not use whipping or make its councillors pretend to agree with each decision, as traditional parties do. Its councillors agreed to disagree on the issues. Whereas open disagreement about policy is a weakness for a traditional party, IfF turned it into a strength.
• IfF did not agree a manifesto, offering priorities instead of promises, as the latter would have also put their councillors in a bind.
• IfF listened more to the views of the public they served. Macfadyen argues with some justification that the parish council is actually better scrutinised than ever.
• Should they falter in the future, there is a route for IfF to be replaced by an alternative movement with the same premise.

A street in Frome town centre.

EDD not DAD

Having no manifesto or promises may also sound undemocratic. In Westminster systems, the idea is that voters have a say because they choose the parties whose promises match what they want. But this not essential for a democracy. In countries where proportional voting systems produce fragmented parliaments, the party you vote for will have to horse-trade with others to get things done. And again, the assumptions of the Westminster model never really work in practice. Voters rarely read manifestos or trust politicians to act on their promises. Politicians often fail to deliver on their promises, sometimes for good as well as bad. And their promises cannot address how they would deal with unexpected events and problems.

Instead, IfF offered the public a say in other, better ways. What was essential was that they made more decisions by consulting with the public. Macfadyen stresses the need to have power “with” the people rather than “over” them. And these were not the lip service consultations by a council using the DAD approach (“Decide, Announce, Defend”) but more like EDD (“Engage, Deliberate, Decide”). How did they do it?

One way was through people’s assemblies and panels. If I’m reading this right, the council would typically start with the former, and invite a large number of people to a well-structured discussion on a particular issue. Even the council’s meetings could sometimes serve this purpose. These would often spawn a smaller panel who would listen to expert advice, study the issue in more detail and make the final recommendation to the council. Panels dealt with issues such as “Wellbeing” and “the Town Centre”. While panels were small and temporary, they sometimes spawned larger and longer-lasting groups called forums.

The consultation process could at times be ad hoc, but this wasn’t a problem. The ultimate decisions were made by the council, and it was their job to consider how much weight to give to the recommendations of each process.

Also interesting is their use of participatory budgeting (PBing). It’s an awkward phrase, so they instead called it a “people’s budget”. This concept, which I intend to do a post on in the future, is to use direct democracy to decide how to spend money at a local level. The exact process varies, but typically it starts with local people’s assemblies to discuss ideas. It usually ends with some sort of public vote on the final outcome, though often a more informal online vote rather than opening the polling stations. At the time, PBing was spending £25,000 a year (close to £1 per resident) on projects such as new park toilets and a community orchard.

Over 1,000 people participated in one such scheme, in a town with a population of just under 30,000. That may not sound like much but for a British local government to get that kind of engagement is astonishing.

That IfF governed with far more public participation may explain why they were able to raise taxes with little resistance, admittedly from a low base. Macfadyen notes that “There was incredibly little protest at any point”. This fits with my hunch that voters are willing to spend more money if it goes to a good cause, but they are reluctant to trust politicians with their money. Just as universal suffrage made the welfare state possible, further democratisation could likewise persuade people to accept higher taxes.

Where next?

All this raises the question: could the flatpack approach be spread more widely? Some parish councils have been taken over by independents inspired by IfF, especially in the West Country. But it’s hasn’t even spread to nearby towns like Warminster and Trowbridge. Frome remains more of an interesting case study than a trailblazer.

There may be several reasons why. Britons rarely care much for local government, with good reason, given its pitiful lack of power. In addition, the towns that are most conductive to flatpack movements also tend to be the most conductive to alternative left-wing parties like the Liberal Democrats and Greens; in 2019, an attempt to try the flatpack model in Bath was outgunned by the former.

One valuable contribution of the book is some examples of how councils have found alternative ways to improve local government, such as how the London Borough of Newham started the first permanent citizens’ assembly. My own experiences with the Salisbury people’s assemblies have so far suggested that another route is possible, by persuading existing councillors and their support staff on the value of assembly-based consultation. We shall see where this goes.

Like me, Macfadyen believes that revitalising democracy should start at a local level, and there are hints of inspiration from Murray Bookchin and the social ecology movement. He quotes Debbie Bookchin in explaining what is meant by municipalism:

It returns politics to its original definition, as a moral calling based on rationality, community, creativity, free association and freedom. It is a richly articulated vision of a decentralized, assembly-based democracy in which people act together to chart a national future. At a time when human rights, democracy and the public good are under attack by increasingly nationalistic, authoritarian centralized state governments, municipalism allows us to reclaim the public sphere for the exercise of authentic citizenship and freedom.

He shares his own views on whether the approach could be spread to a national level, and his tone is cautious. He notes how the Alternativet party in Denmark initially appeared to herald postpartisan politics, and they won 5% of the vote and seats in the national parliament in 2015. But they soon turned into something more like existing green parties. They lost some seats in 2019 and had a leadership crisis afterwards. Though they didn’t revolutionise Danish politics, they have remained in parliament and prodded other parties into being greener.

There are a few other examples, such as the teal independents in Australia and the five independents elected in the UK last year. More recently the Serbian protests and their assemblies have inspired slates of independents to stand in local elections. Green shoots of something bigger? Who knows.

Perhaps political parties will remain inevitable or even desirable at higher levels of government, where it is impossible to create an authentic grassroots movement like IfF. But the system cannot go on the way it is. As Vincent noted in If We Burn:

In recent years, it has been trivially easy to find people saying that “all politicians are the same,” and then quickly follow up with the contradictory statement that “they need to stop fighting and get things done.”

He was talking about Britain and Brazil but could have meant almost any other democracy. Voters increasingly dislike the culture of bickering parties, as it looks neither honest nor effective. My view is that if parties are to stay, they should phase out the whip system and be more like loose banners of independent candidates. One to way to encourage that would be to try the flatpack approach in more places.