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My Kafkaesque town hall battle
Whoever suggested that we'd be wise to devolve more
powers to local government must be crackers
Magnus Linklater
Editor: Scottish Edition, The Times
Filed 02 Feb 08
©Magnus Linklater
This article was originally published in The Times on 30th January, 2008.
It is reproduced here with the kind permission of is author and of the newspaper
There is a line in that grim but absorbing movie The Lives of Others, about the East German police state, which reminds me about the altercation I have just had over my council tax. In the film, the Stasi interrogator, instructing a class of students, explains how to tell the difference between a guilty and an innocent suspect: “An innocent prisoner will become more angry by the hour due to the injustice suffered,” he says. “He will shout and rage. A guilty prisoner becomes more calm and quiet. Or he cries.”
I am not quite sure what this says about me, because, at the hands of my anonymous town hall interrogators, I shouted and I raged, but I also came close to weeping, so perhaps they succeeded, finally, in convincing me that I was not as innocent as I pretended. The Stasi, after all, suspected that every citizen of the GDR was more or less guilty of subversive behaviour. Maybe, like Josef K in Kafka's The Trial, simply knowing that you have done nothing wrong is no defence.
The letter that arrived last Friday morning, was as harsh as it was unheralded. Headed “Sheriff Officers & Messenger-at-Arms,” it told me that a summary warrant had been granted against me by the courts for the non-payment of £170.58, being unpaid council tax on my daughter's flat. Unless I handed over the money within seven days, a warrant would be “enforced without further notice”. Glancing at the date, I saw that four of my days had already gone. The notice expired on Monday. I had no time to waste.
Then I spotted something odd. The unpaid amount referred back to the year 2003-04 and an address that my daughter had left four years ago; truly, the mills of local authority justice grind small, but they also grind exceeding slow. I needed to know what I was paying for. The sheriff officer, or rather the girl at the call centre, informed me that they were merely agents of the council, with no remit to explain, vary or defend the demand. I said I had received no previous notification, and wondered whether a court warrant wasn't a little heavy-handed. “What would you think if you were threatened with enforcement?” I asked. She said it wasn't her job to think.
The next two hours were spent on the telephone, listening to various soothing messages telling me that my request was held in a queue. I reached one office that checked on my details and told me that the bill should be paid forthwith. “But what is it for?” I protested. “Why has it taken this long, and why was I not sent a reminder?” I noticed that my voice was becoming, not only louder, but curiously strangulated, a bit like Kenneth Williams in a Carry On film. The crosser I became, the calmer were my anonymous officials. They asked for details of my background, they checked on their computers, they seemed neither surprised nor sympathetic at an unpaid bill that was five years out of date. Attempts to establish human contact, such as “Just how ridiculous is this?”, met with passive disinterest.
But in the course of interrogation, the victim too may develop some cunning. “Why wasn't I served a warrant five years ago?” I asked. “But you were,” said the voice. “So why am I not in prison?” I demanded triumphantly. “You'll have to ask the sheriff office that,” said the voice.
So, back to the call centre, where a voice as rasping as a chainsaw told me that they had no knowledge of any previous demands. “So the council is lying?” I cried. “You will have to ask the council that,” said the chainsaw. This is the bit where I nearly wept.
There is a passage in The Castle, his other novel about impenetrable bureaucracy, where Kafka describes the mind of officialdom: “It's a working principle of the Head Bureau that the very possibility of error must be ruled out of account. The ground principle is justified by the consummate organisation of the whole authority.”
But of course the organisation is anything but consummate. It is riddled with incompetence. And it is on the double rock of obduracy and inefficiency that the whole principle of localism so often founders. Those who argue that power should be devolved downwards so that the citizens can be brought into closer contact with decision-makers, and can thus make their voice heard, ignore the fact that it is at town hall level that communication is often hardest. Anyone who has ever attempted to sort out matters such as housing benefit, disability allowances or planning permission, let alone challenged the might and right of a council decision, knows that finding someone who is prepared to listen or to understand is well-nigh impossible. Councillors or local MPs may do all they can to help, but when it comes to negotiating the system, even they may find themselves lost.
Yet no party now argues against the principle of ceding power to local authorities. Labour advocates it, the Liberal Democrats embrace it, and David Cameron, for the Tories, has become one of its greatest champions. “Local councils should be the collective instrument of local people rather than the local outposts of central government,” he said recently. At the same time, he added: “I have always believed that power needs to be accountable - and that means visible.”
There is, however, nothing less accountable or more invisible than a hidebound bureaucracy, exercising its right to omniscience and an implacable resistance to reason. If, at any time in my fruitless attempt to extract an explanation, one human being had said to me: “You're right, pal, this is an almighty cock-up, but you still owe us the money,” I'd have paid up gladly and immediately. As it is, I feel like emulating that great champion of citizen's rights, the late A.P.Herbert, writing my cheque on the side of a rhinoceros, and releasing it into the corridors of power. They might just recognise that there is one animal at least with a hide that is even thicker than theirs.
©Magnus Linklater |
