Taking control

Getting elected is no mystery. Experience shows just how many leaflets, letters, doors knocked upon, pounds and years spent it takes to win a council seat. With a creditable manifesto and enough time and money, winning a city council majority is and has been done by parties other than the current duopoly—in several countries too.

Things could be so much better, though. It makes sense not to spook the electorate when you are few and have limited access to the media, but fighting for control of a council presents the opportunity to reveal the long-term goals, the real differences between yourselves and the orthodoxy—your ideology.

Having an ideology is a revolutionary thing in itself in this allegedly post-modern world. What’s more, lofty global ambitions linked to personal goals that do not extend beyond the local community are an apparent contradiction that you can turn into a winning combination.

An ambitious mainstream politician in local politics will see it as a step towards the national level. His (or her) personal ambitions can be justified by linking them to his ambitions for his own political views, his local community and his country. But in reality, greater ambition coupled with greater ability will see the best and most driven politicians abandoning their roots. National-level governments do what they perceive is best for the nation and have little incentive to empower local communities, as Nixon astutely observed.

So, the average local politician is second rate because there is little worth bothering with at local level.

Turn that around. If we assume that we will most effectively change nation and globe by our example rather than domination, the ultimate ambition is to make your own community the epitome of fairness and ecological balance.

When communities start to turn against the dictatorship of central government, the best politicians will want to play a part in the re-invigorated local. And with a growing number of communities taking control of their own affairs, the pool of (genuine) best practice and experience will grow, making the localisation programme ever easier.