Muhammad Haque says the London Times is wrong to perpetuate the spin for unaccountable local councils

I must say that your otherwise important contribution to the overdue debate about the role of local councils in the UK is marred by your contradictory arguments. The most important flaw in your argument is the assumption that election promises must always or necessarily be about or be followed by council expenditure. What about accountability? How long must it be before it is acknowledged in fact that it is as important to have accountability as it is to have the money, to serve the local communities? Without true accountability, NO council, no matter where they are or what class or section or type of constituency they are elected by, can even begin to represent the people in terms of material services needed locally if there is no true accountability by the elected councillors and by their bureaucracies. Can we start having this understood and appreciated by all concerned? It is a given that money is needed. But what happens when the decision makers are allowed to decide on what happens to the money in eternal secretary that is not being broken even by the increasingly undermined [and very limited] Freedom of Information legislation? Before councillors were allowed to pay themselves salaries, it was argued that with reasonable income being allowed, we would see the dawn of an era of high quality representatives on our local councils! What a costly and damaging and anti-democratic spin that was. With the tangible prospect of awarding themselves ever increasing salaries [de facto], councillors on most councils that I have observed, are prone to behave just as irresponsibly as they would have been before. And the scramble for a post as councillor is even uglier now in most inner city areas in the UK than it ever was.

The more income-seeking individuals are encouraged to seek to become councillors, the less likely it is that councils for the peoples’ representation will be revived. They cannot be revived. They can only be discredited and thereby made in effect redundant… The political parties are not constituted in ways that even recognise the need for accountability by holders of elected office locally or regionally or at the UK central level.. This is a fundamental crisis of the very fact or nature of democracy in Britain and it is one that has not been given the serious and the sustained attention it deserves