Radical Consultation

The Charter of Neighbourhood Communities
Conference Draft approved by Radcon III Planning Group on 5th August 2006

The small, localised community dates back to the stone-age and is the oldest social unit in the human record. It has been the seedbed of all human progress in culture and civilisation for many centuries.

Within the past 100 years the powers and prerogatives of these communities have been abolished, swept aside, constrained or undermined by the ever increasing powers of central governments.

We declare that this development has resulted in the most destructive, demeaning, degraded and dangerous form of social organisation in all history, the mass society and must be reversed. The evidence of modern experience is overwhelming that the mass society does not deliver because it cannot.

People want peace and they get more and bigger wars;

They want justice and they get unending abuse of their rights;

They want stable jobs and incomes and they get a constant eruption of giant economic upheavals involving loss of jobs and the means of subsistence;

They want a secure social order and they get a constant increase of criminality, drug trafficking, violence, fraud, intimidation and other forms of lawlessness which the police show themselves increasingly incapable of controlling;

They want decent health services and they get a nationally organised one that is ill-managed and constantly skirting bankruptcy as it continues to shrink, whilst demand for it increases;

They want a decent education for their children and they get giant overlarge schools which teach nothing about health, decent food or civic responsibility and produce a giant sub-class of semi-literate, ferally disposed morons who are making urban centres unsafe and no-go areas for the police;

They want honest, democratic government in their local communities and they get an elected local council shorn of any power or responsibility for their governance which are prisoners of centralised national schemes they are powerless effectively to challenge, even in such essentially local matters as education, health and planning.

We need to face up to the truth embedded in Leopold Kohr’s observation ‘If anything is wrong it is because it is too big’.

Today the dangers which have developed from the increasing degree of centralised power and the virtual emasculation of even such local powers as once prevailed (all in the name of democracy), are so imposing that a drastic restructuring of the entire governmental process is now the only realistic prospect of resolving them.

We therefore hereby resolve at the meeting of THE THIRD RADICAL CONSULTATION in September 2006 in Swindon that every community has the right to democratically elect its own governing council with full powers:

1. To assume decision-making power sufficient to ensure that local governance be properly responsive to democratic control.
2. To elect its own representatives to bodies providing household services such as utilities, post, transport and broadcasting.
3. To maintain its own law and order and elect persons to represent it on bodies responsible for law maintenance over wider areas.
4. To maintain and oversee public educational services to ensure adequate provision and prevent outside interference.
5. To maintain and oversee trading of goods and services and, subject to due process, prevent public trading without permission.
6. To establish its own currency and local mints, manage its own banking and credit arrangements and regulate local exchange.
7. To establish its own broadcasting stations and prevent intrusion by outside interests into its private households and public places.
8. To strive to end the abuses inflicted on the environment, on the social process and structure, and on countless individual lives.
9. To strive to enable technology to be used to elevate and ennoble the human spirit compatible with human dignity and well-being.