Wandsworth council chamber, Mayor's chair and crestLabour did not cover themselves in glory at last night’s meeting.

You would expect me to say that, wouldn’t you?  But actually I’m rather disappointed in them.  I expected a coherent set of arguments and reasoned alternative budget from them.  Instead, it seemed every time one of them stood up to speak we got a slightly different line, and that is slightly worrying – for one because it’s always good to have a strong opposition.

“Raise tax, no, lower it, no, raise it.”
The council presented a strong budget.  We are keeping the council tax at the same level as last year, because of savings we have made we are still able to increase spending and put some money into contingency.  Perfectly sensible given that a lot of people are expecting a prolonged recession and worse times to come.  But, of course, you can argue if that’s the right thing.  If you think the recession is going to be short and shallow you might think extra spending or a cut in tax preferable.

It was clear the Labour party hadn’t decided what they thought was best.  Their formal amendment suggested putting nothing into contingency, creating about 50 jobs for a year (by my count, Tony Belton, their leader, put it at 30) and reviewing charging levels for various services.  But during the course of the evening some of the members suggested the contingency could be used to cut council tax, some suggested that taxes should be higher so spending could increase, one – during the course of his contribution – suggested we should both lower and raise council tax.  They may have put a formal amendment to council, but it seemed they’d not agreed it amongst themselves.

Big state to the rescue?
But it was also clear they were convinced that a big state could solve all problems.  One of their Tooting councillors complained bitterly that the council were, only now, cleaning up Tooting’s alleyways and attempted to give credit for this to Sadiq Khan.  Yes, we are cleaning up the alleyways as part of Tooting Together, but these are private alleyways, owned by the businesses that are frequently dumping the rubbish on them.  We are stepping in and cleaning up because the owners have not taken responsibility – but somehow the council is the bad guy on this one.

And dog fouling raised its ugly head.  It seems Labour believe the council doesn’t have the country’s largest dog control unit in the country, but actually have the country’s biggest state-owned pack of hounds, specially trained to go and foul our pavements.  Again, a fundamental belief that problems are not shared by the community but there to be solved by the state.  The idea that somehow a dog fouling the pavement is the council’s fault rather than the owner’s or even the dog’s is risible, but somehow this was trotted out as an argument against the council’s budget.

To be honest, the most coherent solution put forward was by Tony Belton: it’s like the 1930s, he reasoned, and that wasn’t solved by Keynes, but by 10 years of depression and a world war. So this is Brown’s plan B! I haven’t been able to divine any other plan from Labour either locally or nationally, and I might rest easier if I knew they had some ideas rather than the current floundering.

It’s up to all of us
Implicit in the council’s budget, and in the council’s recession response, is that we help people to help themselves.  Perhaps we do not push that enough, and Malcolm Grimston made a thoughtful contribution to evening (probably the most thoughtful speech of the night) highlighting that, actually, many the solution to many problems lies not with the council or government, but very simple actions by ordinary people.  Of course it’s right for the council to help, and it was shameful for the Labour party to vote against our recession support, but we need to be aware that we all can play a part.

It might yet prove that one of the benefits of recession and environmental crisis is that we all come out of it a bit more thoughtful of our impact on our communities.

‘Great service. Excellent value. Would use again. A+++++++++++’

Perhaps a bit flippant, especially as I think the latest initiative from our heavily listing ship of state is, actually, quite a good one.

The simple fact is that these ratings take place informally in all sorts of places.  Across the counter of the local shop, between neighbours or online in various guises: people are not afraid to say what they think is wrong (or right) with local services.

What has never happened is for that conversation to take place on an ‘authorised’ forum – public services have never encouraged people to tell them what’s wrong.  Of course, I can immediately see the criticism; this will just be legitimising those with an axe to grind or agenda to push.  And you can see how it would be fairly easy for people with minor gripes, if I were in opposition I’d be combing the feedback for ammunition.

I think Wandsworth provide excellent services, but I also know that nothing is perfect and however much we strive we won’t get it right 100% of the time. But given that these conversations are taking place, and people do have complaints, shouldn’t we be encouraging them to air them in an arena where we can do something about them?

I’d be interested in hearing your thoughts.

I’m working out of London for a couple of days, and although I’d posted I wouldn’t be blogging, I couldn’t resist a rant about hotels.

I’m not sure what it is, but it has always seemed that hotels make judgements about me.

The first is that I want a single bed to sleep in, and one spare. In a way it’s been helpful. I could spend the time before meeting colleagues for dinner last night carefully mulling over my choice of bed. And tonight I might sleep in a different bed, just to mix things up.

But that’s probably just one step shy of a rock and roll style room trashing though, so I might reconsider.

The second is that I obviously want to pay well over the odds for communication with the outside world. At the moment I can pay 55p a minute to make a local call, 75p a minute to call home and £17 a day for internet access.

£17 a day?! That’s more than most people pay in a month, if they don’t get free broadband. But I’m wise to their games, so I’m just using my phone to tap out a long rant.

The third and final annoyance is their total and utter conviction that I’m determined to bankrupt them through my compulsive theft of hangers.

I have never stolen anything, let alone a hanger, in my life – the worst I have ever done was, aged 7, receiving some Dennis the Menace stickers that I think may have been stolen. They adorned my lunch-box and gave me daily bouts of guilt that forced me to give up packed lunches at school.

But somehow hoteliers have me down as some sort of clothes storage kleptomaniac, as if I’d steal the wardrobe if it weren’t fitted, and console myself with petty hanger theft. You can get 3 for a £1 on St John’s Road so why would I pay £70 a night to steal £2.67 worth of hangers?

I know I’m not alone in this. I Tweeted last night and received a fabulous response from @agentoffortune expressing his relief that he was not the only one seen by hotels as “a bourgeois yet gullible net freak with a penchant for celibacy and hanger theft”.

But I’m determined to be positive, so I shall finish by mentioning somewhere that I think got it right.

Towards the end of 2006 I stayed in a fabulous hotel in Folkestone when there for a friend’s wedding. It was set-up by a couple of guys who simply felt they could do better. And they did. Internet was free, you just connected to their wifi network (they’d lend you a cable if you needed). They didn’t have mini-bars, but there was beer and wine in the lounge, as well as home-made cake and you were invited to help yourself. And every wardrobe had proper hangers.

And bizarrely, I didn’t steal a single hanger, and didn’t abuse the free booze although I probably did have too much cake. Basically, their guests were treated as responsible adults and, unsurprisingly, behaved as responsible adults. It was a fantastic hotel, and if you ever need to stay in Folkestone (or want to see how a hotel can be well run) I would recommend the Hotel Relish.

I wish I could disclose I’d been paid for that, but sadly I feel compelled to praise them, two years later, simply because it was the last place that didn’t assume I was a petty thief.

And this is going to prolong my rant because it fits in with something I’ve been increasingly thinking recently; that we are all human. Nothing very profound in that, you might say, but it seems that a lot of problems in this world are caused by people who either expect something different of others, or try and portray a different image of themselves.

I’m frustrated because a hotel chain’s assumption I’m a potential hanger thief has left me having to deal with fiddly hangers.

Is Sir Fred Goodwin a greedy banker because of his personality, or because we’ve created a society in which bankers are expected to be like that?

And is Gordon Brown floundering because he’s useless, or because we have created a system where politicians have to appear all-knowing and infalliable and he can’t keep that appearance up?

It seems the public expect politicians to be muppets, and politicians portray themselves as super-human – when it would be much better and healthier for everyone if we recognised that (Kermit and Clark Kent aside) that we are human beings and sit somewhere in the middle of that spectrum.

Posted via email from jamescousins’s posterous. Want to know what this is? Then click here.

I’ve been mulling over whether I should post something on this for a few days.  I mean, who would speak out in support of Sir Fred Goodwin?  He’s a national enemy.

But I’m have become increasingly concerned about the way this whole issue is being handled by the Government.  This isn’t really an issue about Sir Fred.  It probably isn’t possible to defend that size of pension for failure, but there is no question it is entirely legal.  Harriet Harman herself made the comment that:

It might be enforceable in a court of law this contract but it’s not enforceable in the court of public opinion and that’s where the Government steps in

This is not only bizarre.  It’s worrying.

For a start it was the Government who approved the pension.  Lord Myners approved the deal, either knowing how big the pension was or not even bothering to ask.  It’s also not as if Goodwin’s huge pension was secret until recently; the Dizzy Thinks blog links to a number of media articles dating back to last October on the subject.  And let’s be honest, it’s a drop in the ocean compared to the billions the Government are splashing over the public sector.  I’m prepared to bet the recession won’t end a single second earlier if the pension is surrendered.

However indefensible the pension is, it is a diversion.  The government are using it to divert attention from their own failings, and doing it in a particularly unpleasant way.

Sir Fred got his pension legally and with the Government’s consent, and it’s a matter for his conscience how he deals with it.  But the government, from Brown down, seems to be enjoying stirring the mob – suddenly deciding that the court of public opinion is all important.

But oddly, we have representative government when it comes to other issues, the court of public opinion has been ignored over issues like:

  • The war in Iraq
  • The abolition of the 10p tax rate
  • Jacqui Smith’s £100,000 second ‘home’, which is a room at her sister’s house

We might all feel uncomfortable about Sir Fred’s pension, but I feel even more uncomfortable about a government that devotes so much energy to convenient scape-goating one man to distract attention from its own failings.

This rabble-rousing is not driven by principle, if it were then the pension would not have been approved in October, it is driven simply because the court of public opinion puts Labour miles behind in the polls.

COMMENTS I rather expected to be criticised for this post, but it was not to be. However, something in it has attracted spammers like crazy. Rather than delete 40-50 spam comments from this post every day I’ve closed the comments about half-way through the current 60 day commenting period.

We all make mistakes. It is human nature. But I cannot help but wonder what Battersea’s MP is up to when he posts his explanation for his Heathrow vote on his website.*

Apparently he voted FOR the third runway because he was trying to vote AGAINST it.  Got that?  The reason he made that mistake?  Well, it was all the Tories fault.  In his own words:

 I was expecting two votes and instead of voting for an Opposition motion on the first vote I was going to vote against a Government motion for a third runway on the second vote. But the Opposition decided not to call the second vote.

So that’s all right then.  He’s only been in Parliament since 1997, and it’s not as if the issue was getting major news coverage or anything – so it’s all perfectly understandable.

Yes, we all make mistakes, and, to be honest, I am sure that plenty of votes in the Commons are cast the wrong way. But when it’s on one of the biggest issues facing his constituency (and he doesn’t live too far from me, so  know he suffers from Heathrow noise too) you would rather hope your representative in Parliament would do his job and take the time to check especially when he’s defending a wafer thin majority.

Either way you look at it, he’s either not representing his constituents, or he’s not up to his job.  He needs to go.

 

* UPDATE Martin Linton’s website seems to have lost the page explaining his vote.  Fortunately ConservativeHome had a copy which I’ve pasted below.  It is an interesting read, but I just cannot understand how someone with over 10 years experience of Parliament, and who has worked so hard to fight the 3rd runway which (after the recession, surely the biggest issue facing his constituents) can get this utterly wrong.

This is a mix-up for which I am entirely responsible. I was expecting two votes and instead of voting for an Opposition motion on the first vote I was going to vote against a Government motion for a third runway on the second vote. But the Opposition decided not to call the second vote.

I now wish I had taken my opportunity of voting against the runway on the first vote and I feel not a little embarrassed at the confusion this has caused, but I can only say that I remain against a third runway and I shall not miss an opportunity to vote against if one comes up.

I lobbied the Aviation Minister and the Transport Minister and went with a group of London MPs to see the Prime Minister twice to try to persuade them against any increase in flights into Heathrow and we were successful in persuading them to drop the idea of all-day flights. This would have meant an increase in flights over Battersea and an end to the system of runway alternation, which gives people under each flightpath a break of eight hours each day without aircraft landing overhead.

I think there is still a chance of persuading the Government to drop the third runway and I shall certainly keep trying. It is not due to be started until 2015 and it has to go through a long planning inquiry first, and then it has to meet noise and pollution targets that are so high that some people think they may never be met.

The first vote was on a Conservative motion to ask the Government to ‘think again’ and the second vote would have been on a Government amendment supporting the third runway, which I would have opposed.  Only the first was put to the vote and was defeated by 19 votes.

brown-i-didnt-see-crisis-comingWe’re officially in recession, with a second quarter of ‘negative growth’, although we’ve gone three quarters without any growth.  Unemployment is rising, so is crime, and house values are falling almost as quickly as high street names.  So why is it, as a Conservative, I sorry for Gordon Brown?

It is an odd feeling.  But I’ve had it for a long time.  I think it’s because he’s actually not very good at his job, I’m sure he’s well-meaning and has the best intentions, but sadly he’s just not up to delivering on them.

I was first aware of it shortly after he became Prime Minister.  He’d desperately wanted the job for so long, and when he finally got it, it turns out he’s not very good at it.  It’s like being a child at Christmas, desperately wanting some toy, then, finally getting it and discovering that it isn’t actually anything like you imagined it.

What has really compounded my pity is the discovery that he wasn’t any good at his last job either.  He’s basically spent the past 12 years turning up for work and hoping no-one spots that he’s bluffing, promising “an end to boom and bust” and sustained growth.  Of course, now he blames the international banking system, as if it’s something new rather than something he failed to regulate or monitor properly.  Or maybe he managed 10 years as Chancellor ignorant of the fact there was a banking system.

And bizarrely, all of us have known for a long time it was coming.  I remember having conversations in pubs at least 3 or 4 years ago, speculating on whether it was worth selling the house and banking the equity for when the crash came, and most people I know can recall similar thoughts or conversations from before the recession.

The benefit of hindsight is a wonderful thing, but when the man in the pub can feel it coming, it really speaks to the incompetence of a man not spotting it despite having an entire Treasury of civil servants and economists.

But although I feel sorry for the guy, I feel sorrier for the ordinary people who are losing their jobs and homes on his watch and it’s time for me to move past my sentimentality.  We all love the plucky amateur who refuses to recognise his lack of talent – shows like The X Factor and Britain’s Got Talent trade on it – but when he’s managed to rise so far above his level of competence that he’s running the country, and running it into the ground, he doesn’t deserve pity – he deserves the boot.

The whole episode of MPs’ expenses has been an interesting one, many will concentrate on the government’s reaction, which has been a typical Brownite dither, bottle it, try and blame the Tories.  What I think is more interesting, though, was the initial attitude.  Having passed the Freedom of Information Act, the government then decided it shouldn’t apply to MPs.

Initially I wasn’t a great fan of the Freedom of Information Act.  The great majority of applications that come through the council fall into five categories:

  1. Someone appealing against a parking ticket, asking for all the information they can get in the hope of supporting their appeal.
  2. Headhunters and recruitment consultants, looking for organisation charts, names and contact details to help them find and place candidates for jobs.
  3. Political researchers of all parties, who are compiling information for a current campaign or cause (and probably making the same request to every council)
  4. Journalists, hoping to find something embarrassing for a headline (again, probably making the same request to many councils)
  5. People genuinely seeking information, but not realising that looking around the council’s website or using Google would have found the information already published.

There are very few requests from members of the public for information they couldn’t get any other way.  This is because Wandsworth has always operated as openly as possibly, with the principle always being that unless there is a compelling reason information should be placed straight into the public domain.  The number of confidential papers seen by councillors is very small, and limited to those containing sensitive commercial or personal information.

On that basis we could probably have a great case for saying that Freedom of Information legislation should be changed, after all, why should the council tax payer be helping recruitment consultants who are already being paid by their clients.  Maybe we should be able to decide what is a ‘legitimate’ request, or decide the format in which we will provide the information so we can cut down on these requests.

But that would go totally against the the spirit of freedom of information.  Given that power, what would there be to stop us, or any public authority, picking and choosing the requests we answer, or the information we release.  It is a very very dangerous path when, as happened here, the government decides it doesn’t like the rules and that the best course of action isn’t compliance, but using Parliament to change the law.

The simple fact is that while the Freedom of Information Act is a pain a lot of the time, it does change behaviour.  Public bodies are more open to begin with knowing that private individuals have the power to see information even if they try and hide it.  It makes for an empowered public and better government; we let the state remove that right at our peril.

Everyone who joined the campaign, and especially MySociety who organised it, deserve congratulations in standing up against the government and Harriet Harman’s ridiculous proposals.

My expenses
It is only fair I reveal my expenses.  It’s fairly simple.  I haven’t claimed any – my total for the year is £0.00.

A councillor doesn’t get an allowance for a second home, nor does it buy any furniture, clean my windows or do my gardening and I’m expected to fund my own travel around the borough.

The nearest I get to expenses is being part of the council’s ‘Computers for Members’ scheme which provides IT related equipment to councillors to help them do their job.  I have a printer (I bought my own computer) and broadband access under the scheme and pay the council £12.35 a month for it.  Given that you can get broadband for free from a lot of places, and how cheap printers are, it’s probably not a great deal.

It is not a terribly fashionable thing for anyone who is British to admit, but I am, and always have been, a great fan of America. And today, I believe, shows all that is great about the country.

The United States Capitol, Washington DC

I’m not particularly speaking about Barack Obama, but instead about the inaugural process.

That is not to say I am not a fan of the British political system, which has a lot to commend it. But when it comes to the transition of one government to another we have always been fairly ruthless. A party loses an election, and within hours its leader will be at the palace handing in their resignation. Meanwhile all his (we’ve never had a female Prime Minister defeated at an election) belongings will be packed up and moved out the back door while the incoming Prime Minister comes in the front. It is unceremonious.

And perhaps this is where we can learn something from the Americans. The process of transition allows a degree of separation, you can recover from the exhaustion of campaigning before you have to get down to the business of government, you can reflect and take stock rather than react immediately. But most of all I think there is something very special about the act of inauguration.

It’s a transparent (you get to see the President-elect become the President), open celebration of democracy – not a celebration of a particular candidate or party but of the peaceful democratic process as one government ends and another begins.

And it can serve as a rallying point – partly because of the distance from the electoral process the partisan politics can be left behind and a country’s President, rather than a party’s candidate, can speak.

A classic example is Kennedy’s first, and only, inauguration. Most will have heard phrases from it like “ask not what your country can do for you – ask what you can do for your country”. Few remember that he had won the preceding election only narrowly – winning fewer states than Nixon and with only a 0.1% lead in the popular vote.

Indeed, how many today discuss the hard battle between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton for the Democratic Party nomination. If anything it was that process (and the peculiarities of the Democrat’s primary process) that meant today’s ‘history-in-the-making’ will be the first African-American, rather than female, President.

But the sordid details of electoral politics are behind us now. And rather than dwelling on the past there is a poetry to the occasion, which gives it the ability to unite and focus a nation. Something clearly apparent today as millions crowd into DC to see Barack Obama become the 44th President.

It is incredibly self-indulgent of me to offer my thoughts on the occasion. There will be no shortage of opinions on the media or the internet about the significance of today’s event. And while I don’t want to take anything away from Obama’s achievement (and know I couldn’t even if I did) it is worth reflecting on and celebrating the system that made it possible, just as much as the man who did it.

Wedgewood's anti-slavery logoAs Wedgewood becomes another victim of the recession we should remember that this company has a substantial history. Coffee House, the Spectator’s blog, points out Wedgwood’s contribution to the anti-slavery movement.

It’s very easy to think that corporate social responsibility is a new thing, and that historically profit was the key motive. But over 200 years ago Josiah Wedgwood had his craftsman design a medallion for the abolitionist movement which helped bring the anti-slavery message into people’s day-to-day lives. He manufactured and distributed these at his own cost and they found themselves on hat-pins, broaches and could be inset onto other items.

By wearing or displaying it you showed your solidarity with the abolitionist cause in exactly the same way as wearing a poppy, ribbon or wrist-band now and the medallion helped increase public awareness of, and opposition to, slavery.

It is sad that Wedgwood has become another victim of the recession, and sadder still that we might lose one of the names that has played such a big role in the nation’s history.

What will make you feel safer?  400 more politicians or 700 more police?I missed the news yesterday that the government has u-turned on having directly elected members on police authorities.

I cannot deny that I think this particular u-turn is good news – just the other day I  highlighted the petition on the Number 10 website against it.  But I’m also a bit shocked by Jacqui Smith’s comments.

Apparently her decision was motivated by her desire to avoid ‘politicising’ the police.  This shows a remarkable lack of self-awareness by the Home Secretary, since I can’t think of any government who have been more responsible for politicising the police than the one in which she serves.

She even tries to pin the blame for this on Boris Johnson and Damien Green.  Boris, she claims, was wrong to have no confidence in Sir Ian Blair.  Given the number of times Sir Ian was in the news for the wrong reasons I would have thought the Mayor’s lack of confidence entirely rational.  And then to suggest that Damien Green somehow provoked the police into arresting him by receiving a Home Office leak beggars belief.

Above all I’m shocked by her comments because she is just plain wrong about politics; she seems to think that politics are somehow bad or sordid and should be avoided wherever possible.  Now this might be because she is a rare self-loathing politician, or, more likely, she wants to keep policing power centralised in the Home Office.

In fact, politics are about matching public resources to public priorities.  The police are no different.  They have to follow the priorities set down for them, whether by legislation or government policy.  The problem is that these priorities are set far too far away from the people who will have their own views on what they should be;  on one street it might be anti-social behaviour, on one estate it might be a spate of car crime.  People want and need a way of having a dialogue with the police to express these priorities and hear what the police are doing, and a way of passing judgement on what they see happening.

And some of the best people at communicating with their communities are their local politicians, it’s what they do – they listen to their residents, the act on their behalf, and then they are answerable at the ballot box.

The Home Secretary shouldn’t be worrying about politicisation of the police force, she’s already part of that.  What she should be worried about is that the politicisation she’s overseen is one of increasing centralist control, and she’s not doing anything to move power back towards the people.