Mood music<\/strong><\/p>\nFor those listening out for how politicians across the piece talked about local communities, all the conferences had something in common.<\/p>\n
Devolution is exciting for many \u2013 delegates flocked to hear from the new metro mayors \u2013 but so too are fears that another layer of bureaucracy is the last thing local communities need.<\/p>\n
Touring party fringes across the conferences, Lib Dems heard widespread annoyance that local people had been frozen out of decisions about their community for so long. A shadow minister at Labour argued that Labour would lose the next General Election if they didn\u2019t engage people in the decisions which affected them. Tories were told that big international initiatives were unpopular because voters wanted to focus on what they could do to improve the things they cared about on their doorstep.<\/p>\n
The mood music is for change. Politicians get the benefits of a system where communities have real power, and where funders and local government are mainly relevant in helping local people get on with it. That is what we will be fighting to help create, because we believe that a refreshed localism agenda needs to start from the bottom up.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Party conference season is a good time to take the temperature of what different parties are thinking<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":17,"featured_media":4613,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","inline_featured_image":false,"wds_primary_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[340],"tags":[],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.powertochange.org.uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4611"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.powertochange.org.uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.powertochange.org.uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.powertochange.org.uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/17"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.powertochange.org.uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4611"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.powertochange.org.uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4611\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.powertochange.org.uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4613"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.powertochange.org.uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4611"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.powertochange.org.uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4611"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.powertochange.org.uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4611"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}