The European Charter on Local Self-Government, which Malta is a signatory of, says that “local authorities are one of the main foundations of a democratic regime”. There’s a number of reasons for that assertion. They’re summed up in the principle of ‘subsidiarity’, a term which has over time faded out of the memory of Malta’s political discourse.

Subsidiarity is the principle that a central authority (the government in Castille) should have a subsidiary function performing only those administrative tasks which cannot be performed at local level in the town and village halls from Għasri to Birżebbuġa.

Now, to be fair, our political culture and tradition has, in modern times, been unitary and centrally controlled. Our independent government inherited a colonial administration that was scarcely concerned with the particular needs of people in towns and villages. The colonial government’s near exclusive concern was with the needs of the colonial government.

In the early 1990s, the Nationalist administration said it was time for “the change (to our democratic structures) to continue” and introduced local councils, starting a process of devolving powers from the centre to local politicians and administrators working all across the islands.

Strictly speaking, that’s not subsidiarity. Subsidiarity requires powers to stay with local authorities unless it is necessary to concentrate it. Devolution presumes power is in the capital until some of it is handed down.

It must be recognised, however, that it was unprecedented for anyone running Malta from its capital city to give up even a small portion of their competences and hand them down to someone else. I suspect people forget how radical the notion was.

And yet, perhaps, local councils have been stripped so utterly of even the small powers they held a decade ago, that the innovation of the 1990s may again shock us. Before 1987 and since 2013, we have accepted as a nation that basic every day needs require the blessing of the local MP who made it to cabinet. Local councils were set up to free us from the infantile trap.

You might think that in the great scheme of the nation’s governing, replacing a broken street lamp or installing a new one is not the most important thing. But in the scheme of the persons affected by it, the people who live in that dark street or whose children might have to walk through it, fixing the light bulb is all the government they want to think about.

Before 1987, you waited in line at the local minister’s constituency clinic to make the case for the light bulb. The minister would intervene, like a saint for a sinner, and ‘arrange’ for the voter’s request to be met by the department responsible. The right to safe and well-lit streets is thereby transformed into a transaction. It becomes a debt which the voter is morally expected to repay in loyalty and votes.

Local councils were given the power to manage street lights. Firstly, because there’s no reason why the minister for foreign affairs or the minister for agriculture should spend their time arranging for street lights in their constituency. They should have more important things to do. Secondly, because the streets and squares of people’s neighbourhoods should be managed without the need of transacting voter support in national elections.

Local councils have been stripped so utterly of even the small powers they held a decade ago- Manuel Delia

I mention street lighting as an example. Most competencies that were devolved from central to local government between 1993 and 2013 have, for some excuse or other, been concentrated back to the control of central government. And a recent, so-called, ‘strategic vision’ for local councils published by the government does not include any plans to divest any power from the centre to them. Devolution is frozen except where it is being reversed.

Mayors are turning away the complaints and requests of their neighbours about matters that used to be in mayors’ competence. And those turned-away citizens are having to resort to beg for their rights in ministers’ constituency clinics.

Why should it matter who does what? Isn’t Malta small enough to remove the need of local councils and have ministers handle it all? After all, we lived without local councils until 1993.

Many people never cared for local councils. They dismissed them as petty and parochial and beneath their daily concerns. It is in the shadow of that indifference that Joseph Muscat and Robert Abela hollowed them out, leaving little more than flags and glorified local clerks working as branches of central government offices.

Meanwhile, town and village centres that enjoyed a short-lived renaissance for the first three decades of local government are now neglected, maintenance and upkeep below par. We’re back to ministers diverting their national budget towards their constituencies. Indeed, we’re back to the industrial-scale clientelism of 1987.

This is why local authorities are a foundation of a democratic regime. Because when neighbours run the neighbourhood, they can react more quickly to changing local needs. Their decisions will be sensitive to local expectations and customs.

Civic pride fuels civic participation and fosters community spirit. And accountability to voters is direct and immediate. And the grace and favour of a central government minister is not relevant to your right to enjoy living in a well-kept, self-aware, community with its own autonomous educational, health, policing, and support structures and services.

For any of this to be meaningful, local councils should be able to raise local taxes to pay and provide local services without begging for the mercy of the central government. This might sound shocking for us but we’re the only signatory of the European Charter on Local Self-Government that deny local authorities even a small measure of fiscal autonomy. Representation without taxation is as pointless as taxation without representation.

Visit Repubblika’s website to read our reaction to the government’s aimless ‘strategic vision’.