The following article will appear in the next edition of the UK's C'llr Magazine


IN MY DAY

BRYAN GOULD


Not a day goes by without more whispers about who might stand, should stand or will stand for leadership of the Labour Party when Tony Blair leaves No 10. So we thought it would be a good moment to talk to someone who has been down that road before.

It was 1992. Labour had just lost the general election. Within days, Neil Kinnock announced he was stepping down. There was just a week for nominations and the media was already crowning John Smith as the new leader of the opposition. Bryan Gould thought things were moving too quickly.

"If no-one had challenged John we would have had a new leader within a week, with no debate and no real inquest into why we lost the election. I thought it was important for the party to have that debate. Although I lost - not as badly as it may seem due to the distortion of the electoral college system at the time - the resulting discussions showed the value of having an election."

Bryan Gould left politics soon after and headed back to his native New Zealand. "It's true that I had very particular political views that were not shared by many colleagues, but I never felt that I lost the argument. Rather, I was out manoeuvred politically".

He was shadow environment secretary at a time when local government was firmly in the sights of Margaret Thatcher's government. "I felt that Margaret Thatcher had targeted local government because it was the last bastion of opposition to what she was trying to do. She set out to deny local government a role and resources.

"As a constituency MP it was clear that the average voter didn't distinguish between local government and central government. If central government deprived local government of resources, it was the council and the MP who bore the brunt and it was no good turning round to people and saying it was all Margaret Thatcher's fault."

It hurt Bryan Gould then, and still does, to see local government being undermined or marginalised. "My vision at the time - and in some ways what I felt then I feel even more strongly today - is that politics have to be close to people. The more we can get political power closer to the grass roots, the better chance we have.

"The big problem we face today is the global economy. The development of the global economy means that the democracy we think we enjoy is being circumvented by global business.

It's only if you restore political power to local communities that they will have a chance of overcoming the power of international capital. I'd like to see more power being handed down. The government has used the rhetoric of grass roots democracy, but the trend has been in the opposite direction. In some ways, what Margaret Thatcher set out to do has been carried out. The government apparently distrusts the idea of community and collective organisation, and prefers to entrust the functioning of society to the unchallenged market place.

"Local government's ability to raise revenue and its general discretion has been restricted over the last ten to twelve years. At the same time, the government has failed to support the idea of public service. I'd like to see a restatement of the great value of public service.

"But public service needs to recognise that the public now knows what it is to make choices. We are moving away from producer-orientated public services to consumer-orientated public services. This does require a change of culture and new mechanisms and processes to make sure that the idea of public choice is maintained."