CoSERG (Cornwall): In January a CoSERG member was approached by a television company making a programme for ITV on the change to unitary local government in Cornwall. The programme researcher explained that the programme would be about the costs of the transition; was it costing more than the County Council had predicted, as forecast by the opponents of unitary local government? A fair question; but we asked whether they also intended to include the issues of the loss of democratic accountability, devolution to Cornwall or local community empowerment. They weren't - these issues had "already been covered." Moreover, it became clear that our TV person had not even heard of the soon to be unlamented South West Regional Assembly.
Apparently, the issue of democracy had "already been covered" in the "debate" over the unitary authority. We must have blinked and missed it. In fact there was pathetically sparse coverage of the changes in local government in Cornwall, and now it seems the media are merely interested in the costs of the truncated and over-centralised authority we will be saddled with. Democracy? Forget that. It's all about money. Not surprisingly, CoSERG was not invited to take any further part in the programme.
The local media are unable or unwilling to provide space for embarrassing and tedious issues such as democracy and devolution. Yet at the same time they eagerly act as willing and uncritical sounding boards for the various undemocratic and unaccountable quangos that run Cornwall. This contrast reflects a deeper malaise.
In the broadsheet press these days one, two or even three pages are routinely given over to the American presidential primaries - and the real election campaign hasn't even begun yet. Compare this with the reporting of the last elections in our European neighbours - in Ireland, France or Germany for example - which was negligible in comparison. Or with discussion of governance at the regional level in the UK which remains hidden, not defined as a topic of public interest.
Political journalists' over-fixation with American presidential elections is only partly due to the Americanisation of British culture and politics. US primary elections have all the elements that journalists love. They are about contests between individuals rather than policies. Their principal output is the vacuous and meaningless media sound-bite. They involve a vast amount of money, some of which is raised from media friendly celebrities. They are accompanied by a massive amount of polling, reported in the media. They occur in a simple-minded context of first past the post electioneering familiar to even the dimmest of British journalists, who find it far too much effort to understand and explain to their audience proportional electoral systems.
American politics is bankrolled by large corporations - and every successful American politician is in hock to his or her business supporters. But the tawdry and corrupt reality that props up American politics is rarely mentioned, for the most part left decently covered up in the press. In a similar way, the centralism and bureaucratic regionalism that lies behind 'local' politics in the UK is also shrouded from the public gaze by a press prepared only to discuss the banal issue of the cost of local government. Wittingly or unwittingly, they are busy digging democracy's grave both in the UK and beyond.
