Friends and Cronyism

A group from Friends of Blacka Moor went along to the Lord Mayor’s Reception for Friends Groups at Sheffield Town Hall on Saturday. We decided it could be a good opportunity to meet and talk to Council officers who were involved in one way or another in meetings with Sheffield Moors Partnership. Friends Groups are mainly engaged with urban parks and have been set up in a semi-official way, typically groups of local people pretty fed up with run down facilities and poor standards of maintenance in what should be at the heart of their neighbourhood. The council in the way that councils do has in many cases absorbed them into their institution and embedded them into a strategy which makes hands on work contracted out to volunteers while their own employees are largely deskbound.
FoBM was never one of these groups. Yes we pick up litter as and when we see it but our main activity relates to trying to get the management vandals to see sense and stop ruining an area that had become an exceptional natural site. If we go along with SWT’s volunteer programme they would have us helping them cut down birch trees, and patrol around counting cattle and doubtless polishing their barbed wire and sending in emergency messages to their HQ when one of their several thousand notices loses a staple in the top left corner.

At the meeting there was a certain amount of predictable cheerleader stuff. What a grand job you volunteers are all doing. What a lot of money you have saved and brought in for the council. Let’s hear it for the hard working inadequately resourced parks staff, rangers Parks department officers etc. (cue applause).

It was helpful to have the chance to tell Paul Billington the new Director of Culture and Environment that the decision to hive off Burbage is too important to be left to a Cabinet who know very little about the issues advised by dodgy reports from officers who have no scepticism gene. And that consultations should happen before any such decision is considered and that they should start with a blank sheet – definitely not run by Sheffield Moors Partnership after they’ve already been promised the land.

I also talked with SCC officers who were at the SMP Action Planning junket. This gave some idea of the mindset among the local officers. Most if not all their information must come from other like organisations and their personnel. Gathering together in such matey situations creates a tendency to cronyism and no alternative views are heard never mind anything radical. So things get taken as read. There is a tremendous pressure towards inertia, group conformity and stagnation. One person says something and the others go along with it qualified only by the odd currently fashionable gesture towards community input. At some point a scrap of meaningless superficial nonsense surfaces to general approval and gets elevated to a new jargon helping to builds walls of obscurity around the emerging 'vision' – it has to be a 'vision'. And the more obscure the more it's decared to be transparent.
It’s also noticeable when you get close to these people in the same industry that they have been conditioned to stick together and tell the same story. You wonder what has happened to those who think and speak differently.