Civic Gospels

This evening I went to a talk at the Council Chamber. This is the room where the city council meets to do business. It looks like this. The talk was titled "A Civic Gospel For The 21st Century" and was given by the historian and broadcaster Tristram Hunt, author of the book Building Jerusalem. He was introduced by the leader of the council, Mike Whitby, with follow on comments from Jerry Blackett of the Chamber of Commerce (who had a very nice tie) and Chris Game of Birmingham University (who has a very impressive beard).

Here's the summary of what the talk was about, taken from this press release:

His lecture will ask whether we can we recreate the civic gospel of Chamberlain's Birmingham, when it was known as the best governed city in the world. How can the business community once again play a strong role in civic affairs? What impact does the city's diversity and changing social make-up have on how it is governed? What new freedoms and powers does local government need to take the city forward?

While the talk was very interesting and raised some important questions about the relevance of Birmingham's Victorian-era regeneration to its current period of major change, that's not what I'm going to write about. What interests me is the talk itself.

I attended as a guest of a friend who works in the local history department of the Library. He gave the impression he could "slip me in", the subtext being I perhaps shouldn't be there. Of course there was no problem with my attending - anyone could have phoned the council and booked a place. They just needed to know it was happening.

The event wasn't very well attended considering the subject matter and the stature of the speaker (he's been on telly!) and I understand it hadn't been publicized very well, if at all. Just a few circular emails to the usual people in the usual departments. The press release from the council appears to have been issued on the 26th, two days ago.

The talk was, like I said, introduced by the leader of the City Council. I'm sure Mike Whitby is a good man. I'm sure he does what he does for sound and moral reasons. But I can't understand him. Sure, I recognise he's speaking a form of English but when I process the words that come out of his mouth I can't deduce any real meaning. Maybe if I spoke politics I'd get it, but I don't. Not many people do. From what little I did comprehend he appeared to be bemoaning the bad reputation councillors have and the negative reporting they get in the press. He alluded repeatedly to a battle that had occurred in the Chamber yesterday as if the audience would immediately know what it was. I had no idea, though I believe it was to do with setting the Council Tax. This is not a personal attack but from my perspective he was representing Local Government and I came away thinking I want nothing to do with Local Government.

Tristram Hunt's talk was, as you'd expect from a young media-savvy academic, very well presented. I wondered if him doing these sorts of events was similar to an up and coming band touring the country before making it big and expect to see more of him, if not in broadcasting then perhaps in politics. He struck me as very Cameron-esque, combining that belief in the virtues of free enterprise and business with an appreciation of the importance of what you could roundly call Society. I didn't necessarily agree with everything he said but I understood it and it made me think.

The follow-on speeches, reacting to Tristram's themes, were also interesting if short. Jerry Blackett came across as quite progressive making the point that local businesses realise that they need more from a city than low business rates - they need a city their workers, particularly their skilled workers, enjoy living in and are starting to realise they need to pay for this. Chris Game, using the position of academic with no vested interests, was very entertaining and I'd like to see him talk again.

The Q&A afterwards was a bit of a farce. A couple of relevant points were made but there was also a lot of single-issue grandstanding which kinda pissed me off. I wonder if this was due to the environment and the presence of Mike Whitby on stage where people felt able to rant about their specialist subject no matter how off-topic it was in the knowledge that Whitby couldn't stop them for fear of being accused of censorship. So there wasn't much of a debate about the issues under discussion, which was a shame as they were interesting issues.

Afterwards we moved to the Round Room of the Art Gallery for refreshments. There were multiple plates of sandwiches and canapes and plenty of wine. We stayed pretty much to the end and barely a dent had been made in the food (despite my best efforts).

So, conclusions then.

Over the last few months as I've been blogging about Birmingham I've become very aware that this sort of thing goes on a lot. There are many talks, conferences and the like which are open to the public and many of them are debating issues which are of crucial importance to the development of the city. I only know about them because I've either been looking or, more often, because I know people who have found themselves in positions where they come across them, usually within "the establishment". Often (though not always) these events constitute the "consultation" part of a project enabling the department or agency involved to tick the consultation box and get their funding. But no-one outside the usual suspects attends so no views or opinions outside of the establishment are heard.

Now, on the flip side to this, the danger of opening yourself up to the views of the masses is that the masses will give their views and once they give their views they expect something to be done about them. You can see this happening with the No. 10 Petition site where people are, rightly or wrongly, expecting their petitions to have some effect. Further to this is the cruel truth that there are a lot of idiots out there and giving them a voice is not always the most productive of actions. For further illustration of this see The Internet, department: Blogging, subsection: Comments. And this is something government at all levels is going to have to deal with. Currently, by accident or design, they're not.

But even if these talks continue to take place behind de-facto closed doors (which isn't such a bad idea if you want them to be controlled and useful) there's no reason why the results of them should stay hidden. To my knowledge this event was not recorded and there was no transcript. If it was there is no facility for that information to be made available to the wider population. Information, let's not forget, that the citizens have paid for. We paid for Tristram to travel here. We paid for the buffet afterwards and the overtime for the staff. And while the minds of those who attended may have been stimulated those who didn't see no direct benefit. I'm not suggesting they should be involved with the debate as it stood, but they should have access to the results of that debate, be it a video or audio recording or a document. Then they can take this and start their own debate elsewhere. This, to me, is the genesis of e-democracy or whatever you want to call it. Not so much having access to the current structures of power (which are not built to deal with it) but having access to the tools to build your own structures which can then react to the establishment from an informed perspective. Give us the information.

This view of mine comes into sharp focus when you consider our elected leader Mike Whitby and his alien ways. I don't necessarily want him to change but I also I have no desire whatsoever to engage with him on his level. It's occurred to me that if I want to continue writing about the City then at some point I'm going to get dragged into these institutions and negotiate the waves of politics and double-speak and, frankly, bullshit, finding myself eventually drowning in a sea of nonsense wondering what exactly my point was in the first place. I don't want to do that. I appreciate that managing a city is a very complicated thing and requires a specialist language and attitude. I understand that idealism will only take you so far in this arena if you want to get anything done. But I know in my heart of hearts that I'm never going down that road.

But I also have a passion for this city and a desire to understand it, not from a political point of view nor an academic one, but as someone who lives here. In order to do that I need information and I need the powers-that-be to realise that giving me and everyone else that information in a structured but undiluted form is not a bad thing but a very good thing indeed. That way we can have a proper debate, distributed across the city, involving everyone. We don't need to be given a voice - we already have a voice. We just need the knowledge, the information, to give our voices some substance.

To find out about future talks run by the council I'm guessing keeping tabs on this page of press releases might do the job.