The New Deal Labour consultancy in the early 2000’s instead of furthering participatory democracy failed because it gave the money of the New Deal, the opportunities, to the professional middle class and did nothing to change gig and gang labour and agency work for working class communities.
During the New Deal it wouldn’t have been difficult to regenerate all of the neighbourhoods of Nottingham if the New Deal gave unemployed and underemployed people direct access to employers, training and skills but we all realise how it wasn’t going to be like that it was going to be the medicalisation of work via the DWP and consultancy companies mainly run by individuals, groups and groups of broker companies in whose interests it was to keep the individual as far away from stable work as possible.
Without democratic accountability this form of mediated, brokered employment is a form of employment control that keeps the working class as far away from stable work….as possible.
In the 1990’s as local authorities contracted out and outsourced their democratic responsibilities, middle senior and middle managers in local authorities took redundancy only to become consultants on projects they knew were doomed to fail because in this new culture there was little understanding of the history or capacity need to transform employment and housing.
Consultants were paid handsomely thrice over as Local authority authorities lost authority no-one was there to connect people, organisations, businesses, history, lives, culture in a way that encouraged a to and fro of people, culture, ideas, events, opportunities in the local, regional, national and international.
Consultants were in the local area even the good ones were ineffective because they were working in micro size on a fragment: talking to the neighbourhood, finding out what it was like to live there understanding the quality of life as if it could be addressed was off the agenda in the 1990’s and 2000’s.
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