'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.

Is there such a thing as the Big Society?

Nearly a quarter of a century ago, the then Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher gave an interview which for many summed up the 'greed is good,' every-man-for-himself culture of the era over which she presided.

"There is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women, and there are families," she said in an interview with Woman's Own magazine in October 1987.

Although she had merely been talking about the need for people to stand on their own two feet rather than relying on the state for handouts, the comment swiftly gained a life of its own.

And while it initially captured the late-80s zeitgeist, in time it came to be seen as part and parcel of the "nasty party" image that the Tories fought to shake off during their wilderness years.

At one level, the 'Big Society' was to David Cameron what 'New Labour' was to Tony Blair – a marketing slogan whose main purpose was to detoxify a brand that had become tarnished.

Its aim was to demonstrate that not only did the Tories now believe in society after all, they actually had a vision for the kind of society they wanted to create.

But whereas New Labour had a genuine philosophical basis - the embracing of the Thatcherite economic consensus and the abandonment of 'tax-and-spend' - the Big Society has always been much harder to pin down.

Tory candidates reported it had caused bemusement on the doorsteps during last year's election campaign, a state of affairs not helped by the fact that many of the candidates were similarly bemused themselves.

In government, the more urgent question has become less about what the Big Society is, and more about whether it is compatible with the kind of policies the Coalition is pursuing.

Liverpool City Council thinks not. It pulled out of a Big Society pilot project this week on the grounds that it is not deliverable in the context of £91m budget cuts and 1,500 job losses.

Although the Labour-run authority was swiftly accused of gesture politics, it is self-evident that it is hard to sustain local community activities and initiatives if the funding that underpins them disappears.

The closure of large numbers of Citizens' Advice Bureaux as a result of town hall cutbacks is surely a case in point here.

The wider problem with the 'Big Society, though, is not so much whether it is compatible with reductions in public expenditure as to whether it is compatible with free market economics at all.

Will our forests, for instance, end up in the hands of cuddly 'Big Society-ish' institutions like the Woodland Trust or other local community groups, or will they all simply be sold to the highest bidder?

Will local people really be able to club together to buy and run their failing village pub when the brewery is being offered ten times as much by a developer who wants to knock it down and build ten flats on the site?

It is for these sorts of reasons why people would not necessarily regard the Big Society and the Tory Party as the most natural of bedfellows.

Mr Cameron may be a skilled PR man, but to regard the Big Society as no more than a piece of spin is probably to do him a disservice.

He passionately believes in it, even if he sometimes struggles to articulate it in a way that the voters can relate to, and would probably like his government to be remembered for it above all else.

The great historical irony about the Big Society is that at the time Margaret Thatcher came out with her infamous quote, there was actually much more of one than exists today.

It will take much more than words if Mr Cameron is somehow to recreate it.

Wrong kind of snow - or wrong kind of government?

IN last week's column, I wrote that the coalition government's key political success since taking office was to have pinned the blame for the savage spending cuts it is implementing on Labour.

It is no small matter. On the question of who takes the rap for the country's current economic plight will hang much of the politics of the next five years.

If the government can hold the line all the way to the next election, it is inconceivable that the electorate would let Labour back in after just one term in opposition to atone for its economic sins.

But this, in turn, depends utterly on how the economy actually performs – and whether Chancellor George Osborne is proved right in his strategy of putting deficit reduction before economic growth.

Up until now, the country has by and large been prepared to give Mr Osborne the benefit of the doubt on this point.

Whenever Labour politicians – notably Ed Balls –have tried to argue the opposing point of view, they have been swiftly condemned as "deficit deniers."

But this week came the first sign of a chink in the Coalition's economic armour – a 0.5pc fall in GDP during the final quarter of 2010, following two preceding quarters in which the economy grew.

Could it be that Mr Balls was right after all, and that far from providing a springboard for recovery, the Coalition's deficit reduction strategy is actually strangling it?

Timing is everything in politics and in one respect, the GDP figures could not have come at a better time for Mr Balls, newly-installed as Shadow Chancellor following Alan Johnson's surprise resignation last week.

He certainly made the most of the opportunity, tearing into Mr Osborne with a self-assuredness that made the Chancellor look like the new kid on the block.

"My message to George Osborne is – get a Plan B, get a policy for jobs and growth and do it quick," he said, winning the war of the soundbites with some ease.

Mr Osborne's cause was not helped by the fact that he tried to blame the fall in output on the weather, which, as one union leader put it, sounded "a bit like a rail boss blaming delays on leaves on the line."

Whether this week's exchanges will turn out to be of lasting significance will of course depend on where the economy goes from here.

The risk factors for the government are obvious. This month’s VAT rise seems hardly likely to encourage a resumption in the growth trend, while there remains the risk of another cold snap.

Some observers have argued that having clamped down on spending in last year’s comprehensive spending review, Mr Osborne would use his March Budget to shift to a more pro-growth strategy.

Had this week's figures turned out positive, he could have done that from a position of strength - but to do so now would look more like a panic-induced U-turn.

Either way, if the next set of figures in April show the growth trend resuming, Mr Osborne will be off the hook and Mr Balls and Labour will be back at square one.

But if on the other hand they show another fall, then the UK will officially be back in recession and the dreaded "double-dip" will have become a reality.

Not only would that give Mr Balls the whip-hand in the economic debate, it would start to shatter the current consensus that the cuts are (a) necessary, and (b) Labour’s fault.

And the voters might then start to conclude that not only did we have the wrong kind of snow last month, but that we also have the wrong kind of government.