Rupert Murdoch’s gift to democracy

The downfall of Rupert Murdoch, even if it’s only temporary, has been painted as a triumph of Parliament against a corrupt media machine. And so, to some extent, it is.

But it also exposes the shortcomings of institutions across the board: the succession of governments who preferred to keep the press onside and were more or less happy to work through cosy relationships and well-placed leaks and briefings; the journalists and reporters who, with some honourable exceptions, followed the pack rather than their vocation; the police who worked through similarly cosy (if not corrupt) connections.

And let’s not forget that it’s only just over a year since the Telegraph exposed the scandal of MPs’ expenses, attracting attention more for the vices they revealed than for those they employed in their investigation. If we’re looking for heroes and villains, we may need to rethink our assumptions. It was fascinating to watch how quickly Parliament’s united front against evil got bogged down in party political mire in Wednesday’s Commons debate.

Away from the Great Wen, it’s just as difficult to draw clear lines between the heroes and villains. And so it should be.

On Tuesday I was at the annual conference of the Centre for Local Economic Strategies, listening to debates about how we could make places better. Neil McInroy, the CLES chief executive, issued a rallying cry for a ‘just localism’ – one that combined local power with equality and strong leadership from local government.

Maurice Glasman, Labour’s guru of the moment, brought to bear a Saul Alinsky-style analysis of power, attacking the failures of (among others) trade unions who lack a vision beyond their members’ interests and local government officials whom he described as ‘very well paid people with degrees in social sciences who don’t see or care about the workers around them’.

The role of local government came up, too, in a workshop I was helping to lead on the ‘big society’. The debate was around representative versus participative democracy – a false distinction, I think, but one that tends to arouse strong differences between passionate defenders of a representative system that struggles to attract interest from more than a third of voters once a year at local level, and a participatory approach that deeply involves the interested and active but not the majority.

In all of these debates there’s a tendency to look for someone to blame. We all want to blame Murdoch, and we probably should. Many of us like to blame politicians. National government and some community organisations like to blame local government. But when we’ve finished hounding out everyone who’s flawed or who’s failed, there will be very few of us left.

The point of accountability is that it works in the round. If the inquiries announced last week are only about holding the press to account, their value will be limited. If local politics is only about holding politicians or officers to account, it will also fail. A working democracy is one where nobody can hide – business, press, politician or administrator – but where we all know we’re accountable to each other. The News International hacking scandal may just be the crisis we need to help us start to reinvent democracy as well as journalism.