Politics is no Party

Yesterday I went to my first public meeting.  I confess, this was not because I felt strongly about the issue but because my daughter has a piece to write for her course on a public affairs issue and thought this subject would be interesting, although she wasn't able to attend herself; so I went and took notes.  I tried to write everything down as accurately as I could without bias (and I can tell you that is hard).

The meeting was about the proposed development of 1300 homes to the north of the village and had been organised by local residents who did not want this development to go ahead.  They had asked two members of the parish council to speak and there were also members of the district council present.  The parish council, it appears, are against the proposal and the district council are for it.

I don't enjoy meetings.  I find them overly long, boring and too ego fuelled for my liking and this one was no exception.  If I had any desire to get into politics then I would have been completely put off.  The meeting was a sea of grey hair and body odour (I will never understand what men over 50 have against washing their armpits and using deodorant) and there were only one or two young voices. I found this to be really sad.  If young people are happy to have 1300 new homes in their village then they should have been at the meeting to say so, after all, being able to buy a house near their parents may be something that is important to them.

A public meeting should leave the people attending, feeling confident that their questions had been answered and that they know what to do next.  I believe this meeting left people feeling angry and confused.  The political agendas stopped people agreeing to work together.  It had to be constantly adversarial.  The man from the parish council spent a long time talking about how much work they were being made to do to object to this development.  He said that they had to complete 3 pages for every little point of objection. He said that would be 50 pages of paperwork (all I could think was welcome to the paperless world). When a lone young voice asked if it was possible to make a website with the points and suggested answers on them, so that people could copy and paste and/or edit to make replying easier he was told, "No.  We're not allowed to tell people what to write, if the district council gets responses that are the same they will disregard them."  The young voice said he thought that was undemocratic and the district councillor shouted, "It's not true, shame on you, shame on you!"  I have a feeling that the young voice was told that it wasn't possible was because the parish councillor doesn't understand computers.

The second speaker from the parish council stood up and thanked the residents association for giving him the opportunity to speak. He said he wanted to convince everyone to stand against the current district councillors, "the conservative councillors are being elected because they're uncontested..."  He was interrupted by the the district councillor, who shouted, "You stood against me, you plank!" People started to get up and walk out.  They stopped listening because they couldn't bear the fighting and the second speaker was made to stand down.

This is the reality of politics.  PMQs are in the news for being too adversarial and it's the reason people don't get involved in issues that affect them and their public lives.  I thought the district council and parish council were concerned about the same issues: flooding, roads, schools, medical facilities etc. but they were unable to agree about anything because they had decided that they were on opposite sides.  The district council seemed to be more resigned to a development happening.  They said," what I can say is that unless we can demonstrate a 5 year plan the Governments will force things on us.  The reason there is an increase in the number of houses is because without that number we can't enforce flood defences.  We have in excess of 3500 homes by developers in this village alone.  If we do nothing Government will approve these." I also thought that they wanted people to fill in these 3 page documents because these were the only way they would get funding (from the developers - there is no money in the government budget) to make the improvements to the infrastructure that is so desperately needed.

My favourite quote of the meeting was the person who said, "It's been flooding down there since Noah was a boy." and I can't help thinking that politicians have been shouting at each other for just as long.