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early 170 years ago, more than a quarter of a million people marched to Kersal Moor, in Salford, demanding democracy. One of the biggest of the many demonstrations organised by the Chartist movement in the mid-19th century, this huge rally was the Live Aid of its day, with more than 30 bands playing. But instead of Bob Geldof demanding ‘Give us yer fuckin’ money’, there was Feargus O’Connor demanding ‘Give us the fuckin’ vote’. After much campaigning and demonstrating, five of the six points of the People’s Charter, adopted on Kersal Moor that day, were eventually won. As well as the right to vote itself, these were: secret ballots, equal electoral districts, no property qualification to stand as an MP and payment for MPs. The exception to this successful record was the demand for annual parliaments, which was seen by the Chartists as crucial to stop the corruption of MPs. Fast forward to 2007 and the eyes of the democracy movement are on Salford again – in the person of Salford MP Hazel Blears, secretary of state for communities and local government. Blears – backed by Prime Minister Gordon Brown’s new-found emphasis on devolving ‘power to the people’ – isn’t offering annual parliaments, but she is using a radical democratic rhetoric. ‘Democracy should be about more than casting a vote every few years,’ she has said. ‘It should be a daily activity, not an abstract theory.’

Hazelocracy Blears’ comments were, in part a reaction to the Joseph Rowntree Trust’s independent Power Inquiry in 2006, which basically said that local representative democracy was knackered – that fewer people are voting and thus elected councillors have lost credibility and legitimacy. The new ‘Hazelocracy’ promises ‘devolution right to the doorstep’, where ‘people come together, set priorities and vote on what is going to happen’ and ‘have a direct say’ in how their

taxes are spent. The idea, taken from the practice of popular budget making in Latin America, was adapted in 2002 by Church Action on Poverty and Community Pride working with the council to make Salford a pilot project. So is it time for the modern heirs of Chartism to bathe in the warm glow of democracy and declare ‘battle won’? The answer, of course, is no. For a start, there’s a major difference between the UK and Latin America, where they know a thing or two about dictatorship, death squads, absolute poverty and the imposition of western ‘democracy’. In the Brazilian town of Porto Alegre, inspiration for the original Salford experiment, the right to decide how local public money is spent was demanded by the people and the popular Workers’ Party, which swept to power shortly after the junta was sacked in 1985. The popular budget making there was radical, political and community led. At its height, around 20,000 people participated in deciding where 18 per cent of planned municipal investment was to be spent. And it has had real results in alleviating poverty. (For a fuller description see ‘Going Local’, page 17.) Contrast this with the UK, where the ‘participant friendly’ budgets are puny, and the numbers of people involved are tiny. In Salford, 47 people got involved in the Claremont and Weaste sample project – and that was seen as a major breakthrough. Although popular budget making (PB for short) is being greeted with cautious optimism by community organisations, noone I spoke to in Blears’ Salford constituency was under any illusions that real power was arriving on their ‘doorstep’. ‘I’d like to see it in practice,’ says Graham Cooper, who’s just been elected chair of the East Salford Community Committee. ‘But I think it’s a token gesture – like feeding a dog and patting it on the head just to keep it right.’ His thoughts are echoed by Beryl Patten of the Claremont Community Association, who welcomes the potential of PB but greets it with a massive dose of Salfordian

cynicism. ‘One always comes away from the meetings questioning the real importance of our decisions,’ she says. ‘Major issues in the neighbourhood, like Media City [a 200acre dockland development at Salford Quays], have never been aired in any significant way. We are scratching at the surface. It’s not real empowerment and sooner or later the community will become disaffected.’ Both Patten and Cooper point to the relatively tiny budget that the community actually controls. Salford leads the country in putting money from the mainstream council budget into a PB process but it’s still only around £100,000 per area from the highways kitty and £100,000 to support community and voluntary groups. Each area covers around 30,000 households, so that’s the equivalent of less than £7 apiece. ‘A hundred thousand pounds might seem a lot of money but when you realise it might just resurface a short road or put in a couple of pedestrian crossings it brings it home how minor your involvement and impact can be,’ Beryl Patten argues, ‘Cynics would say it’s a way of getting communities to slug it out between themselves and take the heat off the planners.’ ‘It’s a very limited amount of money, a drop in the ocean,’ says Graham Cooper. ‘To put it into some sort of perspective, the council agreed to spend £500,000 on a jolly at Salford Quays for the Manchester International Festival, which is five times as much as we get in devolved budget for every voluntary and community group in this area. And I’ve seen public sector departments, like schools, leisure and the police, apply for money from both these pots for activities that, to me, are mainstream services. At the end of the day the council makes the big decisions.’

The governmentis promising ‘devolution rightto the doorstep’as a means of reinvigorating local democracy. Apilotparticipatorybudgetmaking project, wherebypeople can ‘have a directsay’in howtheirtaxes are spent, has been running in Salford. STEPHEN KINGSTONquestions its democratic credentials oct/nov2007 red pepper

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Council control And that’s the big problem with PB – that the council, rather than the community, is controlling the whole process locally, while government targets and policies are controlling the council on a national level. The government calls it ‘double devolution’, where, in theory, the

power bounces down to the council and then bounces off the council to the community. The trouble in Salford is that the community can only make decisions while caged in complicated structures and tamed by procedures. Before Hazel Blears announced her ‘devolution to the doorstep’, Salford Council was busily reorganising its community committee structure based on a consultation that gave prominence to developers like Countryside Properties and involved more unelected officers and organisations than actual community groups. The resulting new constitution sets out rules whereby the community can decide on the use of delegated budgets only ‘within criteria set by the council, other funders and the Community Action Plan’. And only councillors and one representative from each ‘properly constituted’ ‘recognised community group’ can vote at meetings. Meanwhile, the terms of the constitution are all about ‘conduct’ and ‘behaviour’. Anything that

is ‘inconsistent with council policy’ will be refused. Spending decisions on devolved budgets will also only be valid if ‘supported by the majority of councillors present at the meeting’ because ‘expenditure of public money requires the endorsement of democratically elected members’. These will be the same councillors, however, who are at the centre of the Power Inquiry’s ‘crisis of democracy’, who have little credibility or legitimacy within the community. Wasn’t that supposed to be why PB was set up in the first place?

Star rating At the Salford Star, a community-centred magazine that has been not just criticising the council but slating it over affordable housing, demolitions and dodgy dealings, we thought we’d put ‘people power’ to the test. We applied to all of the city’s eight community committees for devolved budget funding. Would the council allow the community to fund a community magazine, run by a local community group, that’s critical of the council? Our application never got anywhere near a community committee. The council pulled the application without explanation two days before it was due to be looked at by the first community budget panel. Six weeks later we got a letter outlining the council’s agreed new criteria ‘in relation to the spending of devolved budgets on publications’, and informing us that the ‘council directorate’ now decided whether an application ‘complies’. The Salford Stardidn’t. A letter later arrived from the council explaining that the magazine contained language ‘which could be considered to be offensive’ (we had called the council ‘dickheads’ – in context, of course) but the main reason for the rejection of its funding application was that ‘we have not found the Salford Starto meet the criteria of taking a balanced approach’. As such, the letter continued, ‘the council is not able to offer