community consultation document

Such as it is: This is my contribution to the Liberal Conspiracy response to Chapter 8 of Hazel Blears' communities in control document: Ownership and control. 

Chapter 8 looks at how citizens can move beyond being consulted or holding officials to account, to how people can own and run services for themselves, either by serving on local boards and committees, or through social enterprises and cooperatives.

Well.

Don't want to start on an arsey note, of course, but -

The first question I want to ask Hazel Blears when Hazel blathers on about the joys of handing community assets to the community to operate is 'you mean the few assets that New Labour hasn't allowed to be sold yet, Haze?'

I mean really, people - this has not been the golden age of community, or community assets, exactly: swathes of housing stock moved to arms' length management organisations, schools closed and ownership of new city academies handed to private sponsors, lidos closed, nursery schools shut and nursery places cut, etc, with Labour, Lib Dem and Conservative councils all cheerful offenders.

Various Olympic programmes, meanwhile, slash and burn community projects like the Manor Gardens allotments, and look set to scrag Greenwich Park monumentally, etc. Hazel, somehow, sees a world where happy communities club together to profitably run 'community centres, street markets, swimming pools, playgrounds and tracts of land, as well as derelict facilities such as a disused school, shop or pub.' I, unfortunately, see a world where local and national's government greatest - if inadvertent - contribution to community unity in recent times has been the relentless promotion of deeply unpopular anti-community initiatives that inspire communities to unite against them.

Posted at LiberalConspiracy as well.