EXCLUSIVE: The Annemarie Ward Column
From the Ground Up: Reclaiming Power in the Age of Managed Decline
EXCLUSIVE by Annemarie Ward, CEO Faces & Voices of Recovery UK (FAVOR-UK)
A new pope has been elected, and for a brief, flickering moment, the world paused, some in reverence, some in curiosity, and many of us wondering if this time, Rome might rediscover its spine.
As the white smoke curled into the sky above St. Peter’s, it carried with it all the age-old hopes of the faithful: for truth spoken plainly, for justice pursued fearlessly, and for a shepherd who sees through both the wolves and the consultants.
Meanwhile, back here in Glasgow, we're still stuck choosing between technocrats in rainbow lanyards and bureaucrats in better suits.
But maybe, just maybe, this turning of the papal page can stir in us a deeper yearning, for subsidiarity over statism, for solidarity over showmanship, and for the courage to build from the ground up, not wait for salvation from the top down.
The Catholic social tradition teaches that human dignity is the foundation of a just society.
That principle has never felt more at odds with the way our cities, our services, and our people are treated by the bureaucratic leviathan we call the modern state. Glasgow, once a city of invention, hard graft, and roaring laughter, now finds itself managed, not governed.
Declined, not developed. Consulted, but never truly heard. And the latest insult? We’re being asked to cheer for a “Metro Mayor.”
Yes, apparently what we need to fix generational poverty, hollowed-out communities, and drug deaths that shame a nation is...a regional PR manager in a nicer suit.
One more link in the golden chain of managed decline.
But what if the answer isn’t another mayoral office, but a movement rooted in the dignity of the local person?
What if subsidiarity, the idea that problems are best solved at the most local level possible, wasn’t just a footnote in a Papal Encyclical, but a revolutionary organising principle for our time?
A Gospel of Control
David Thunder, in his radical critique of the monocentric state, lays bare what many of us in community work already know: the system isn’t broken, it was built this way.
Like a parent who insists on choosing your career, your friends, and even your bedtime, the modern state operates on the belief that it knows best.
But it doesn’t. And like any overbearing parent, its control stifles the very flourishing it claims to protect.
We saw the worst of this during COVID.
Suddenly, walking your dog was an act of civic virtue, but walking your child was criminal. Shops could sell booze but not Bibles. And any dissent was dismissed as dangerous. This wasn’t a glitch in the system, it was the system in high definition.
As Thunder puts it, the problem is epistemic: the state simply doesn’t know what’s best for every community, because it can’t.
It sees the world through spreadsheets, not soul. It governs from afar, with data, not wisdom. And that gap, the one between lived experience and imposed policy,is where suffering festers.
Davos Doesn’t Know Govan
Let’s be clear.
The proposed Metro Mayor model, lifted wholesale from Andy Burnham’s Manchester experiment, is not devolution.
It’s rebranding. It’s not subsidiarity. It's a substitution. One big regional body swallowing up local councils, community organisations, and whatever scraps of autonomy remain.
And who writes the script for these metro mayors? It’s not the butcher in Possilpark or the single mum in Easterhouse.
It’s the World Economic Forum, the climate bureaucrats, and the investor-class consultants who think “15-minute cities” are the answer to everything.
For them, life should be confined to zones, like a theme park. Everything is trackable, taxable, and tightly controlled.
But subsidiarity laughs in the face of such grand designs.
It says: no thank you, Geneva. We’ll sort our own potholes. We’ll feed our own kids. We’ll mourn our own dead. And we’ll do it with compassion, community, and the kind of kitchen-table wisdom that outclasses any equality impact assessment.
Politics with a Pulse
Catholic social teaching reminds us that politics should be about communion, not control. The economy must serve people, not the other way round.
And power, when hoarded, becomes tyranny. But when shared, when it’s rooted in the real lives of real people, it becomes grace.
Yanis Varoufakis, in conversation with Wolfgang Münchau, made a biting point: we live in a world where the so-called rules-based order is designed to be broken by those who wrote the rules.
The EU lectures nations on fiscal discipline while ignoring its own democratic deficits.
The UK talks of sovereignty while outsourcing moral authority to unelected panels.
Meanwhile, in Glasgow, people just want a safe home, a job with dignity, and a say in how they live. That’s not populism. That’s participation. And it’s time we reclaimed it.
The Redemption of the Local
Here’s the good news. We don’t need to wait for permission from Holyrood or Westminster. The Polycentric Republic, as Thunder imagines it, begins not with grand constitutional shifts but with prototypes.
Parishes that run their own recovery services.
Councils that hand budget control to citizens. Streets where neighbours are seen not as statistics, but as stewards.
It starts with courage. And maybe a little mischief.
Let’s be the city that politely declines the next quango consultation and throws a community ceilidh instead. Let’s be the neighbourhood that fixes the park swing before the council even notices it’s broken. Let’s be the town that remembers subsidiarity isn’t about shrinking responsibility it’s about raising up responsibility to where it belongs: with us.
In the End, A Choice
So, Glasgow, here’s our fork in the road.
We can choose another tier of government that speaks global and acts managerial.
Or we can build, block by block, a republic of the local, a commonwealth of care, of kinship, of kitchen-table politics.
That choice won’t come with a campaign jingle or a TikTok strategy. It’ll come in our daily decisions to act, to connect, to lead.
To love our city enough to fight for its soul.
Because the opposite of managed decline isn’t top-down regeneration. It's a bottom-up resurrection.
Amen to that.