Sphinx

I suspect that for a lot of people the joy of the Handforth Parish Council Planning & Environment Committee Zoom meeting (video here, if somehow you haven’t already seen it), besides the entertaining spectacle of chaos and surrealism, is the discovery of a bizarre, alien world where the question of whether someone is a Proper Officer or who actually has The Authority In This Meeting is a matter of high political drama. For me, it was a nostalgia trip. I should stress that Castle Cary Town Council was never anything like this bad, even at its worst moments, but it’s easy to see the potential that existed for such a breakdown, and there are other councils in this area whose Zoom meetings would probably be equally comedy gold. And, given that the video leaves out a significant amount of context, it was great fun to revive my once intensive knowledge of local government procedures and standing orders, to work out what must be going on and who actually did have the Authority, if not Jackie Weaver…

The answer? Sue Moore, by virtue of being Vice-Chair of the Committee, once the Chair of the Committee, Brian Tolver, had declined to take on the role on the grounds that the meeting was illegal. It is the one major flaw in the otherwise excellent discussion of this case on David Allen Green’s Law & Policy blog that he suggests Tolver was offered the role of chair for the meeting by virtue of being the Chair of the Parish Council, whereas it’s clear from the agenda and other papers that he was the Chair of the committee – whether or not ex officio as Chair of the Council isn’t clear, and wouldn’t make a difference to this being a distinct role – and so would normally chair meetings. It’s clear that Tolver had not called a meeting for many months (which would have left him in the position of making many decisions by chair’s action; one might speculate that this could be significant…); two councillors had written to ask him to call a meeting, which is usually a procedure for an emergency meeting in addition to scheduled meetings, but works equally well when scheduled meetings have not been scheduled; after his refusal or failure to do this (not clear which; doesn’t matter), it was then not only perfectly legal but a statutory requirement for a meeting to be called anyway. Absent the regular Chair, the Vice-Chair takes over (and the Vice-Chair of the committee, not the Vice-Chair of the Council, whatever he might claim). Absent the Vice-Chair (or if they decline), the committee can vote to appoint another of its members to take on the role for that meeting.

One of the fun things about local government is that there is always an answer to this sort of question. It is not the case that every councillor should always know the answer (I’m slightly weird, both in being a natural bureaucrat and in having been for a while Chair of the HR committee, hence responsible for inducting new councillors into the basics of council workings). Rather, every council has a professional, qualified Clerk, whose role includes knowing the rules and advising the council on proper procedure, the legality of its actions and so forth. And if there are issues with this, or a problem seems especially knotty, then it’s possible to solicit advice from the county Local Government Association (which is where Jackie Weaver comes in, serving as clerk to this particular meeting – not to the whole council, and certainly not taking on the role of Proper Officer).

But the Handforth kerfuffle illustrates perfectly a couple of reasons why this doesn’t necessarily work. Firstly, the complexity of the rules and standing orders creates enormous opportunity for the barrack-room lawyer type, able to cite terminology and paragraph numbers in his (of course it’s almost always ‘his’) own interests with an air of confidence and authority. The fact Tolver didn’t want a meeting to take place doesn’t make it illegal, nor was he entitled to declare himself Clerk (putting it as his Zoom identity doesn’t make it so), nor was the fact Jackie Weaver was not the council’s Proper Officer make the slightest difference, and in the face of actual authoritative knowledge (i.e. Jackie Weaver’s) this all falls apart – but it is easy to see how ordinary councillors with a fuzzier sense of the detail might be brow-beaten into submission, let alone members of the public.

Secondly, the rules are insufficient to ensure effective operations; what this episode shows, at least as well if not better than the ongoing problems in the government of the United States, is the role of unwritten norms, and the consequences once they start being flouted. This layer of local government works on the assumption that everyone involved is basically public-spirited, volunteering their time and energy (the demands on which can be considerable) for the good of the community. Of course there will be different views on what would be best for the community – just as there will always be grey areas where a councillor might seem to have personal interests even if they do not clearly fall into the category of the sort of interests that must be declared and which rule you out of relevant discussions and decisions. And the way these are dealt with is that everyone goes out of their way to acknowledge that other opinions are valid, and to assume good faith, and to raise their own possible conflicts of interest even if manifestly over-cautious, and to be civil to one another.

Some – the council on which I once served – go further, with an unwritten rule that no one has a party affiliation and that overt party politics are kept out of everything. This can work in a small community where people know each other rather than relying on party affiliation to decide whom to vote for – and still more when most if not all councillors have to be co-opted because there are never enough candidates for an election. It can indeed be helpful in smoothing relations with representatives of higher levels of local government – county councillors, and in our area also district councillors – who are normally elected on a party platform, that may be quite different from the dominant local tendency. Of course we all know that most of us have Views, but those are for the pub afterwards (yes, this is a very blokey world, still), not for council meetings.

One thing to be said in favour of allowing party affiliations is that, at least in theory, individuals are then subject to some sort of external discipline; independents, notional or actual, are a law unto themselves. Which is fine, so long as they play by the unwritten rules. Once someone starts insisting loudly on the letter of the law, or openly questioning the good faith of others, or overtly abandoning any attempt at finding compromise positions, or even just ignoring the basics of courtesy, you have a problem. Of course there are disciplinary measures that can be invoked, but that’s a sign that things have already failed, and generally just make things worse. Either the whole council (or at least its dominant figures) abandon the behavioural norms and start quoting statute and trying to manipulate the rules or just yelling at one another, or the majority carry on trying to manage business as normal but are constantly derailed. There is tremendous power, at least for disruption, in being someone who ignores expectations when everyone else is sticking to them.

At this point, some academic readers may be reminded of department meetings, where a similar dynamic can sometimes play out if one colleague is happy to push the boundaries of collegial discourse – worse, arguably, in the absence of any sort of rulebook for the conduct of meetings or of an equivalent of the professional Clerk, so the only option is the invocation of higher layers of management and disciplinary proceedings which no one wants to do (members of a local council calling in the Monitoring Officer may be embarrassing, but since everyone is an unpaid volunteer the range of actual consequences is very limited).

Of course there’s a flip side to all this stuff about unwritten norms, deliberate politeness and collegiality: the way in which they can be used to silence or marginalise minority voices, and ignore inconvenient arguments on the grounds that they haven’t been expressed appropriately, ignoring their merits. Local councils can be stultifyingly conformist and sexist, and their dependence on unpaid volunteers means they are often thoroughly unrepresentative of their whole communities, but convinced that they speak for the (right sort of) people. And they can be extremely resentful of anyone questioning their self-image – because after all they are giving up their spare time for this.

But there are three obvious advantages over similar situations in the academic department. Firstly, it is only a part of anyone’s existence, rather than their whole professional life, and you can always walk away. Secondly, there are rules about the conduct of business, with the Clerk obliged to enforce these even if, hypothetically, he might sympathise with the small-c-conservative wing – and these rules can be used to stymie any tendency to agree things down the pub outside of regular meetings. Thirdly, this is politics: if your position is genuinely marginal and unpopular, then you shouldn’t get to impose it on the community anyway – but if it isn’t, then you just need to recruit allies, build a platform and work to change the composition of the council, which is not something you get to do with your department…

Tl;dr: maybe I need to jack in this academic malarkey and train as a town clerk…