If the events of the last few years tell us anything, it’s that our democratic structures need protecting and enhancing and the gap between the governed and those who govern is often too wide.
That’s why I’m a proud localist, I believe that more decisions should be taken at a neighbourhood level by people in communities who know and understand their cities, towns and villages. If we are to bridge the gaps we need the right powers in the right places.
It’s an argument that Dr Fiona Hill made the other week at Durham Book Festival via a live link from a Bavarian hotel room where she was isolating with Covid. For someone who has spent her career at the dizzying heights of national state dominated world affairs – she once sat next to Vladimir Putin at dinner, chosen she thinks because she is anonymous – you might think she is an unlikely localist.
But Dr Hill recognises it was the actions of a local state and a community that enabled her remarkable life journey. It was subscriptions from the Durham Miners’ Association that paid for her to take courses in Russian and helped fund her to go on an exchange to the then Soviet Union in the 1980s It was Durham County Council, her local authority, that gave her a full grant to go to St Andrew’s University to study.
And she also stressed that localism doesn’t necessary have to be parochial. Those Durham coalfields were outward looking and internationalist in nature. The Miners’ Association has historic ties with miners in the Donbass region of Ukraine and Ukrainian miners sent money and donations to their Durham brethren during the 1984 strike. Her stellar career in international affairs might have seemed like a distant dream, but it was encouraged and supported at a local level.
And that localism, that sense of rules, joint enterprise and collective good stands as a real contrast to some of the rogue state actors that Dr Hill spends her days studying, writing and talking about 40 years after she left Bishop Auckland.
A number of times she referred to Vladimir Putin’s ‘play book’, a well-worn list of tactics he uses to cause chaos and get his own way. For example, claiming Russia’s spurious historic right to Ukraine, threatening nuclear armageddon and supressing internal dissent. He uses each of these methods periodically and cleverly. The nuclear threat should not be under-estimated, but as Dr Hill says ‘Putin wants us to freak out’ – it’s part of his modus operandi for dominance.
Trump uses similar tactics, but without the malignant knowledge of state craft that Putin enjoys. Dr Hill recalls sitting in on a call with then President Trump and Putin at the White House when Trump summoned his daughter and son in law to listen in – not for advice but for the novelty. For Trump the substance of the call was unimportant, it was the fact that he and his family had been on it that mattered.
What enables Trump and Putin to flourish is that they regularly stamp over all democratic norms, exploiting division and sowing confusion. The only way to beat them is to repair the cracks and make sure people feel involved and fully participate in the decisions that affect their lives. Populism and tyranny cannot flourish when people feel in control. Increased power to place and local decision making has to be part of the answer.
'At Least We Get The Burglar Vote' 