The Tories say they are devolving power to local authorities but real democracy doesn't lie in treating citizens as consumers
Eric Pickles, the communities secretary, urges local councils to "man up" and accept the "quiet revolution" the government is implementing. In this process, austerity is bound up with a set of policies ostensibly devolving power to local authorities. Councils can increase taxes if they must – but any rise above 2% must be ratified by a local referendum.
This sly proviso is intended to provide a pseudo-populist basis for austerity in perpetuity. Just as the government is using a thin facade of democratisation, with the election of a single police commissioner, to boost rightwing law-and-order politics, so it is using the language of devolution to further neuter local authorities.
To see how this works, it is necessary to understand the context of Cameronite "localism". Its premises are rooted in what might be called a neoliberal governmentality – the idea that through the correct application of market-based incentives, people can be gradually moulded into neoliberal subjects. People's behaviour, driven by such incentives, would determine how they thought and felt about the world. As the French philosopher Louis Althusser once put it, "Kneel down, move your lips in prayer, and you shall believe."
While the Tories were known for their belligerent combat with local authorities in the 1980s, more low-key, molecular changes arguably had just as much lasting effect as the defeat of "municipal socialism" and the GLC. Take, for example, the introduction of compulsory competitive tendering. Public authorities were compelled to introduce competition between public sector service providers and private sector contractors. This was supposed to streamline costs, but it was also intended to weaken public sector unions and strip away their insulation from market forces. Wages were cut and jobs shed. Tory minister Nicholas Ridley argued at the time that poor quality services was the result of a grip exerted by trade unions, driving up costs and delivering less for "the consumer".
The downsizing of the state was advanced in a new populist idiom, wherein public service users were treated as demanding consumers, always wanting to pay less if they could get away with it. This reduced the quality of services. It also harmed local democracy. The Thatcherites didn't object to local government as such, but they didn't like democratically empowered local government. Therefore, they imposed a network of single-function or area-specific bodies to administer local services. Undemocratic quangos assumed control of a vast budget and a great deal of public life in the UK. This opened up new avenues for capital accumulation, and rent-seeking – consider Serco's vastly profitable empire of public sector contracts, from schools to nuclear sites. The same firm now bids to run free schools, another localist reform in the neoliberal tradition.
In recent years, the commodification of further areas of life has become a norm. Services that were once free now have to be paid for; services that were provided cheaply and publicly have been contracted out or privatised; other services that were subsidised have been placed on a competitive setting – they must cut costs, or die. Taken together with the transformation of the private sector, the destruction of unionised sectors, and the spread of precarity in work, this has dramatically changed the fabric of everyday experience. Decades of ideological groundwork have gone into naturalising the market, treating its action as something akin to weather. But the way in which social relations have been restructured along market lines has arguably been just as important – for most people, the market is natural in a sense, as it forms the bedrock of their daily experience.
The shakeup of local government being rolled out by the government is part of the same process. One has only to ask: why does the consultation stop with council taxes? Why are we not permitted a referendum on the whole austerity platform, including the deep cuts to local authority funding? Why is it not possible to vote for a policy of raising taxes on top incomes, inheritance, profits, and other forms of wealth, in order to pay for public services? Because those decisions have already been made for us. Because that would involve treating the allocation of resources by the state as a matter of democracy.
When the government approaches you as a consumer rather than a citizen, it is not a democratic transaction. A consumer can decide how much to spend on this or that service, but have no say in how the shop is run. But citizens, scandalously, demand more. They demand the right to rule.