Showing posts with label Local governnment. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Local governnment. Show all posts

Saturday, January 19, 2013

Council leaders should pay heed to Kinnock's warning

 Earlier this week I tuned in to an interesting radio discussion about whether, in the era of instant communication via text messaging, email and Twitter, set-piece political speeches still retained any relevance.

The discussion had been precipitated by perhaps the most long-awaited and over-hyped set-piece political speech of recent times – Prime Minister David Cameron’s planned address on Britain’s relationship with Europe.

The consensus was that, while such speeches still had their place, it helped if the politician concerned had something new and original to say – as for instance Margaret Thatcher did in her famous Bruges speech of 1988 when she set her face against a federal Europe.

In that respect, perhaps it was a good thing that Mr Cameron’s proposed speech ended up being postponed, given the expectation among commentators that it would say little to appease his increasingly Eurosceptic backbenchers.

But if Bruges was, for those on the right of politics, the setting for the seminal political speech of modern times, those of a Labour disposition tend to look to another town beginning with B – namely Bournemouth.

For that was where, in 1985, Neil Kinnock delivered the Labour conference address subsequently credited with launching the party on the long road to recovery after the wilderness years of the early 1980s.

The historical significance of the speech was that it marked the start of a fightback by Labour modernisers against a hard left faction which had rendered the party unelectable.

This process of internal renewal would eventually lead to the creation of New Labour and, electorally speaking at any rate, the most successful period in the party’s history.

But in an era in which a Conservative-led government is once again imposing spending cutbacks on Labour-run councils, could Mr Kinnock’s great speech have a new relevance for today?

What he was railing against in Bournemouth was the kind of gesture politics typified, not just by Militant-controlled Liverpool City Council, but by a host of other Labour authorities of the era who used budget cuts as a means of ratcheting up political pressure on the government.

The key sentence in the speech was Mr Kinnock’s warning – delivered in the face of a heckling Derek Hatton – that “you can’t play politics with people’s jobs, or with people’s homes, or with people’s services.”

And more than a quarter of a century on, it’s people’s services that are once again at stake in Newcastle, as the city council decides how to implement what it claims are the £90m worth of savings demanded by the Con-Lib coalition at Westminster.

Council leader Nick Forbes’ decision to target some of the cutbacks at libraries and the arts has caused deep and bitter controversy in the region, but is actually nothing new in the annals of Labour local authorities.

Whether consciously or otherwise, he has taken a leaf out of the book of David Bookbinder, the left-wing firebrand who led Derbyshire County Council at the same time as Mr Hatton was running Liverpool.

Faced with a similar set of cutbacks in the 1980s, Mr Bookbinder decided to take the axe to a series of libraries in Tory-voting middle-class areas as well as scrapping school music tuition.

But just as Derbyshire’s voters saw through his attempts to blame the government for the sorry situation, so Newcastle’s are increasingly beginning to question who is really to blame for the present-day cutbacks.

Save Newcastle Libraries campaigner Lee Hall has made clear his own view on the matter, accusing Councillor Forbes in a speech last week of wanting to “make a name for himself” and wanting “a platform to rail at the Coalition.”

“Instead of trying to protect our libraries, our enormously successful arts organisations, Forbes, for his own political aggrandisement, is trying to cut as much as possible,” he said.

David Bookbinder’s unique brand of showmanship made Derbyshire a great place to be a local government reporter in the 1980s, but ultimately his attempts to play politics with people’s services did Labour no favours in the county.

Perhaps Councillor Forbes, too, should now take heed of Mr Kinnock’s wise words of warning.

Saturday, February 12, 2011

'Gunboat diplomat' leaves Coalition in a pickle

More than 20 years ago, a young , Conservative council leader gained a measure of notoriety after unexpectedly seizing control of the hitherto safe Labour authority of Bradford.

Storming into office at the May 1988 local elections, he announced a five-year plan to cut the council's budget by £50m, slash the workforce by a third, and outsource most council-run services to private operators.

For a while, 'Bradford-style Toryism' became something of a by-word in local government circles, with some like-minded authorities modelling themselves on it, while others cited it as a warning of what happened when Tories took control.

After its brief flirtation with uber-Thatcherism, Bradford soon returned to the Labour fold - but that Tory council leader went on to become probably the most influential politician to emerge from local government since Labour's David Blunkett.

His name was of course Eric Pickles and, as Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government in the coalition administration, he is now in ultimate charge not just of Bradford but of every town and city hall in the country.

Among grassroots Tories, Mr Pickles is a hugely popular figure – but it is fair to say those feelings are not always shared by his Liberal Democrat Cabinet colleagues – or by political leaders in the North-East region.

During the early months of the Coalition, he fought a running battle with Business Secretary Vince Cable over whether the North-East should retain a distinctive regional voice – a battle characterised by briefing and counter-briefing on both sides.

It did not help that Prime Minister David Cameron was bored by the stalemate and told the protagonists to sort it out between themselves rather than taking sides.

What sort of regional political institutions will emerge from that process is still unclear. Many hope the proposed local economic partnership covering Durham, Northumberland and Tyne and Wear will be able to take on at least some of the role of axed regional development agency One NorthEast.

But the limitations of the scorched earth approach to all things regional employed by Mr Pickles and others in the Coalition's early days are already becoming clear.

As was revealed in a parliamentary answer this week, Dr Cable's department for Business, Innovation and Skills is having to create new local offices to carry out work previously carried out by the regional government offices.

This provides further proof of what some of us were saying all along: that if the regional tier of governance did not exist, it would be necessary to invent it.

But if Mr Pickles' pathological hatred of regionalism has caused controversy in the North-East, his attitude to local government spending has caused ripples on a far wider scale.

Newcastle council leader David Faulkner was only one of more than 90 Liberal Democrat councillors who signed a letter to The Times this week protesting at the scale and pace of cuts to their authorities.

Part of their anger stems from Mr Pickles' uncompromising political style, which they described as 'gunboat diplomacy.'

"The secretary of state's role should be to facilitate necessary savings while promoting the advance of localism and the Big Society. Unfortunately, Eric Pickles has felt it better to shake a stick at councillors than work with us," said the letter.

The reference to the Big Society was illuminating, in the context of Labour-run Liverpool's recent refusal to co-operate with Mr Cameron's flagship initiative.

But the wider political significance of the row over local government spending is that it plays into the area of relations between the two governing parties.

Lib Dem leader Nick Clegg needs to be able to take his party with him if the Coalition is to survive long-term, and on this issue he is clearly some way from succeeding.

And there is only one place that will ultimately leave the government: in a pickle.

free web site hit counter

Thursday, July 26, 2007

So much for the new localism

Local government reform is a notoriously difficult area and one in which you are inevitably going to end up upsetting one group or another. But I for one am surprised by the thrust of the latest proposals for unitary councils announced this week.

This government - both before and after the Blair-Brown handover - has made great play of its commitment to "new localism," and to devolving decision-making down to the lowest possible level. So it is disappointing that the big losers in this week's plans seem to be the district councils rather than the counties.

Cornwall, Durham, Northumberland, Shropshire and Wiltshire county councils will all become giant all-purpose authorities, with the districts in those areas disappearing. Two other county councils - Cheshire and Bedfordshire - will cease to exist in their current form, but other large single-purpose authorities will be created in those areas.

Why is the government doing this? Well, larger authorities tend to cost the taxpayer less, both in terms of administrative overheads and through economies of scale. I think what this goes to show is that when push comes to shove, governments will always put saving money before the importance of local democracy.

There may be another, less obvious explanation, and that is that the government is seeking to compensate for the loss of the regional assemblies whose abolition was announced the week before last. This will require the creation of "joint boards" of local authorities to oversee region-wide functions such as transport planning, and this will be far simpler with two or three counties than with 15-20 districts.

If I am right about this, it is surely another example of the operation of the law of unintended consequences - how abolishing an admittedly unpopular regional tier of governance actually ends up not bringing decision-making closer to the people, but taking it further away.

free web site hit counter