It’s been several months since I last posted, and in that time a number of people have asked why I stopped. So I thought I’d write one more post for now, just explaining why that was.

It’s quite simple really – Since I’m no longer an elected Councillor, I know far less about what is happening locally. That makes it very hard to write a blog which is regular and interesting (although some would argue that it wasn’t interesting before!).

And besides, there are others who can let you know about those kinds of things, including the person elected to replace me as your Councillor.

I haven’t fallen out with the Lib Dems. I remain an active part of the local party, and now Chair the Bury Liberal Democrat Executive. But I have stopped campaigning to be a local Councillor in Prestwich, which is what the blog was largely about. I think it’s a good rule of thumb not to stay on the stage once the curtain has fallen, and so having been beaten in May I have left it. I won’t be campaigning to be a local Councillor in St Mary’s ward any time soon. There remain two very good Lib Dem Councillors in the ward, and there won’t be a vacancy until 2015 which is a long way off.

There might be a time when the blog gets revived. I hope so, but it’s difficult to see a situation that would facilitate that at the moment. Never say never though. In the meantime you can follow me on Twitter @richardbaum if you like. As always, it would be nice to hear from anyone who would like to say hello.

All the best,

Rick

The new leadership of Bury Council continue to do positive things and reverse the trends of their Tory predecessors in some of the exact ways I’d have done if I’d have been running the place. The latest innovation coming from the Town Hall is the Leader’s Blog, written by Cllr Mike Connolly and available to see via www.bury.gov.uk.

It could do with a publicly viewable comments function, but other than that I think it’s marvellous, and definitely a step in the right direction. Given that the former Council Leader was pathologically averse to conversing with the public, it’s a very refreshing change to have a Leader who doesn’t see the public as an irritant. Most of the Lib Dem Councillors in Bury (including the Council Group Leader and both parliamentary candidates) have had blogs for years, so it’s good to see the Council catching up. Credit to the Labour administration for doing it so quickly.

 I hope the blog is kept up and becomes a success. Anyone interested in Bury affairs should take up the chance of a direct line to the Council Leader.

Rick

Local MP and Shadow Culture Secretary Ivan Lewis has written an article in The Observer today setting out his latest thinking on Labour’s response to government policy. Unfortunately, despite clearly opposing much of what the government is doing, again there is no sign about what Ivan or Labour will actually do differently. It’s an article which, if party names were removed, could’ve been written by any politician from any party at just about any point in recent years.

In his article he promises that Labour will “vigorously oppose the Conservative-led government’s policies which are dividing Britain, entrenching inequality and will cause long-term damage to our country.” Sadly though, he needs to do three things to make this sentence anything more than a soundbite:

1) Provide evidence to back up claims of more division, less equality and long term damage.

2) Acknowledge that under the last Labour government inequality rose, as did the national debt and the deficit, and that economic necessity is the reason for a lot of government policy. 

3) Give any semblance of a clue about what Labour might actually do to reverse the problems he thinks the government are causing.

Sadly the article doesn’t do any of these things. He mentions some of the good things Labour did, and I don’t disagree with him on that. He mentions some of the reasons why they lost the last election, and I don’t disagree with him on that either. But he is supposed to be a political leader, not a history teacher.

To be fair to Ivan Lewis, he himself acknowledges a lack of detailed policy response at the moment. It’s not the right time, in his book, to have such a response. But that approach doesn’t chime with Labour calls for Lib Dems to desert the coalition (desert it for what?), nor is it fair on those who came back to voting Labour at the last local elections when it’s now clear that they were actually voting for a party which admits that it has no actual policies.

All we’re getting at the moment is lots of words around a central message that Labour don’t really like Tories (or Lib Dems). And we knew that before.

All of this soundbite stuff is a dereliction of what an opposition should be doing. Nowhere in the article are key policy battlegrounds mentioned. On the NHS, free schools, welfare and benefits, foreign interventions etc etc Ivan and Labour are silent. If they are as concerned as they claim about the government’s policies, now is the time to come up with at least an idea of some alternatives.

The degree of vagueness which is at the heart of Lewis’ article is very worrying for those who don’t like what the government is doing. Where is their alternative? What is it that the Opposition are doing to meet the obligations of their role? 

Ivan talks of the “clear sense of direction” which Ed Miliband has set the part on as part of its policy review. That direction “reaches out far beyond Labour’s traditional boundaries” apparently, and Ivan Lewis uses the “squeezed middle” as the one bit of evidence to prove it. But his definition of the squeezed middle is both muddled and contradictory. He describes it as referring to both middle-income and low-income earners, i.e. everyone except the richest. But he doesn’t give an income level, nor does he explain how people earning below a living wage can be in “the squeezed middle” when they’re clearly at the squeezed bottom. He also doesn’t explain how appealing to people on low and middle incomes reaches out far beyond Labour’s traditional boundaries. After all, Labour are the party of low and middle income earners, apparently. 

Even if we accept that Labour are working for a squeezed middle and that the government aren’t, once again it begs the question of how they’re actually doing it. And Ivan gives no answers.

The second half of the article is so vague that at times I struggled to see that it was actually there at all. If general platitude giving was an Olympic sport, British politicians would win all three medals and I would put money on Ivan Lewis bringing home the gold.  He talks about a “new economy” where businesses can “start up and scale up” and where everyone is treated with “fairness and transparency.” Marvellous Ivan, I agree entirely. But your job is to say how as well as what.

Unfortunately it gets worse. He could almost be writing a folk song when he says that “at the heart of Labour’s plan for the future is an ambition for the next generation to have better life chances than the last. It is a simple hope.”

I want to put flowers in my hair and rattle a tambourine as we march together towards this wonderland.But I don’t for a second think that the Tories or Lib Dems want anything different for the country. They’re just having to come up with the costed detail which Labour don’t, and the financial mess we’re in means that doing that is really very hard.

Ivan isn’t telling us how he’d actually achieve all those things, and that’s the hard part. He may as well have written “I want to make the world all full of sunshine, vote Labour.”

Lewis is right when he says that Labour need to be a party which is ”clearer about the responsibilities of government and citizens in a fair society, guarantees personalised help to people at times of transition in their lives, values older people and clarifies the relationship between contribution and benefit.” But that’s true of all parties. Again, the devil is in the detail.

Ivan set a challenge for Labour, explaining that their road to electoral recovery will mean that they “will challenge those who are rewriting history about our record while offering a credible and inspirational vision for the future.” At the moment they are doing plenty of the former and none of the latter. Until they start setting out that vision in specifics rather than slogans, then articles like these serve only to remind people that Labour exist at all. They don’t do any service to the country or to political debate.

Rick

The verdict in the latest round of Sharon Shoesmith’s legal battle against her sacking has shown the dangerous path we sometimes find ourselves on when politicians pander to the mob’s mentality.

The death of Baby P was a tragedy for so many reasons, of which maladministration at the Council concerned was certainly one. If, after a proper investigation, it was found that there were serious failings in practice and in leadership, then through the due process of employment law those responsible for that should have been disciplined. The courts have found that it was not right though for Ed Balls to circumvent this process entirely and announce on live TV that Sharon Shoesmith would be sacked. I am entirely in agreement.

In cases like that it is the responsibility of politicians not to follow the mob but to lead people towards rational conclusions. The Sun and The Mirror were calling for a head on a spike, and Ed Balls gave them one because he thought it would get him some votes. That’s completely wrong and the courts have now said so.

By behaving as he did, Balls has taken the focus off a proper debate about what went wrong and how it can be put right. Once again a leading politician has taken the easy route out of a problem without engaging in a discussion about the hard job of fixing it. Shoesmith was partly to blame for what happened, but to single her out and remove her from post without so much as a chance to hear the charges is plainly ridiculous and not how a democratic country abiding by the rule of law should be led.

Balls, like other politicians from all parties, bears some of the responsibility for what happened too. Baby P’s disfunctional family, reliant on an underfunded, complicated mess of bureaucratic services for support, meant that he would find true protection incredibly difficult. It was up to Shoesmith to manage some of that jumble of services, but certainly not all of them. And it certainly wasn’t up to her to sort out the social conditions which meant that families like Baby P’s could come to be in the first place. That job lay with Ed Balls, the latest in a long line of politicians who’ve tried and failed to accomplish it.

The actions of Ed Balls were completely wrong. A responsible, even-handed and steady response to the situation would have been to examine the evidence, present a case against Shoesmith if there was one, and allow her to defend herself. That though would have been awkward for politicians who may themselves have been left with difficult questions. It would also have been time-consuming and wouldn’t have satisfied the tabloid newspapers baying for blood. It would though have been right. In fact it would have been just about the only dignified part of the whole sorry tale. It may well have left Shoesmith without a job, but wouldn’t have denied her the pension she’d worked for over decades or left the taxpayer with the potential for a compensation bill.  And most importantly it may have brought us close to the answers to some of the still-outstanding questions on child protection, even if those answers are the types of uncomfortable truths that the tabloids or the politicians don’t like exploring.

Politicians can’t just do what they like to get cheap headlines and votes. It chips away people’s faith in just about everyone involved, cheapens the rule of law, and doesn’t solve any problems in the long run.

Rick

So, it’s official, Labour run Bury again. Bob Bibby isn’t Council Leader any more (nor is he Bury Conservative Leader, replaced in that role by Cllr Roger Brown – the Tories replacing with a barrister someone who was pleasant enough in private but who often struggled to string a sentence together in public, and let his frustrations show in the process).

In Bibby’s place leading Bury is Cllr Mike Connolly, whose previous misfortunes (like this one, which wasn’t particularly funny, and this one which was) have been forgotten since the tidal wave of “We don’t know what we like, but we know we don’t like cuts much” hysteria brought him and his policy-free party into unexpected power.

Many of their first few pronouncements have been predictable, but the devil is in the detail of such things as a “review” of youth service cuts. If they can find a sensible way of saving front line services whilst at the same time making the overall budget cuts that they need to make to pay off our share of the national debt and budget deficit, then I’ll praise them for it. But there are some very tough decisions ahead.

Labour have a good team in place. If I had to pick half a dozen Labour Councillors from the group I worked with until a fortnight ago to form a Cabinet, I’d have picked pretty much the ones who’ve been picked. They have immediately come good on their pre-election promise to make the Town Hall a more open place, in exactly the way the Lib Dems would have done were we to have been elected to lead. Straight away they have set about reforming the rules around asking questions at Council meetings. The Conservative system made it impossible to ask a question without almost a week’s worth of notice, which was ridiculous. Now a question can be asked on the night, with no notice, and that’s a good step forward. The “Strong Leader” model of governance has also been changed so that public Cabinet meetings will now be held, and membership extended to opposition groups leaders. Again, well done Labour, and silly Tories for not making the changes when they had the chance.

Another thing I am glad Labour have tackled immediately is the special responsibility allowances paid to some Councillors. I was in receipt of one of these myself last year, of almost £6,000 to chair a Scrutiny committee. This wasn’t an easy job, and it was time consuming, but had I wanted to I could simply have turned up to one of the half dozen meetings I had to Chair, and then gone home and pocketed my cash, which worked out at £1,000 per meeting. I did a lot more than that, but not £6,000 worth. A cut of 10% is being hinted at, but I think 50% would probably be nearer the mark. Of course, a chunk of all Councillor’s allowances are paid by Councillors to parties to fund campaigning etc, which may be why any party is reluctant to scale them back massively, but if we were starting from a blank piece of paper I’d set the special responsibility rate for committee chairs at a lot less than £6,000 (as well as doing various other things to allowances, like increasing the ones for Cabinet members, which is probably why I’d never be elected Leader in the first place!).

 I hope the trend towards increasing openness continues, and is matched by a change in tone from the Bibby years. There was a lot of arrogant, ill-judged stubbornness about the Tory former-leader’s approach – refusals to accept criticism, and a definite lack of contrition or empathy when things were going wrong. If people are to keep faith in the Council during hard times then we need less of that, and it seems like Labour recognise that. Mike Connolly’s first baby-steps as Leader are in the right direction.

Rick

The government’s attitude to rape has been called into question today after Justice Secretary Kenneth Clarke revealed plans to give offenders credit for an early guilty plea. During a radio discussion on the matter, he also said the following:

“Rape includes date rape and 17 year-olds having intercourse with 15 year olds. Serious rape, I don’t think many judges give five years for a forcible rape, frankly, the tariff is longer for that and a serious rape where there’s violence and an unwilling woman, the tariff’s much longer than that.”

These comments have been seized upon by the Labour opposition, who accused Mr Clarke of not considering date rape to be serious. Labour Leader Ed Miliband called on the Justice Secretary to be removed from his position by the end of the day, and Yvette Cooper the Shadow Home Secretary has said that the remarks show that the government doesn’t take rape seriously.

I think they do nothing of the sort, and have been distorted for political gain by Labour who are ignoring obvious truths and the wider context of Mr Clarke’s remarks for the sake of cheap headlines. It’s political posturing from Labour, who want to appear tougher on crime than the government (odd for a party which wants to be the ”progressive alternative”, but there you go).

I think Labour are being wantonly choosy in taking Mr Clarke’s comments out of context, and in doing so are ignoring the opportunity for a proper debate on rape.

Perhaps if Mr Clarke wasn’t on live radio he may have chosen his words slightly better, but surely it’s obvious that not all rapes are the same. Some inflict more harm than others, some are carried out with more violence than others, and some rapists plead guilty earlier than others. In my view, a man snatching a woman off the street and violently raping her at gun point is more serious than two people getting drunk on a night out, going back to a hotel room and then one person changing their mind whilst the other carries on. Both are extremely serious crimes, both are rape, and the perpetrators of both need to be severely punished. But, in my view, one is clearly more serious than the other, and sentences reflect that as I think they should. It seems to me that Mr Clarke was just stating facts. You can say that some rapes are less serious than others without saying that the less serious ones aren’t serious at all.

What’s absolutely not in doubt is that only a tiny fraction of rape charges end in conviction, and the government’s plans today are part of efforts to address that. Rape trials put victims through enormous stress, delving into deeply personal and traumatic events in a public courtroom and forcing victims to come face to face with rapists. Any attempts to ease that should be welcomed.

The government are not proposing reducing sentences for rapists who don’t plead guilty at all or who don’t plead guilty early. But for those who do plead guilty, and thus save victims the trauma of a trial, an extension of the existing tariff reduction scheme is proposed.

Instead of having a serious debate about this, where the government could put their case and Labour as the opposition could put an opposing case, we have a political free-for-all because of one word someone said whilst on live radio. It may well be that Mr Clarke is wrong, and that increasing tariff reductions or differentiating different types of rape sends out the wrong message. But for Labour to say that the government doesn’t take the issue seriously is obviously completely wrong. Yvette Cooper has said that Mr clarke’s remarks show that he has an unacceptable “kind of attitude to rape, kind of attitude to rape victims and kind of attitude to women across the country.” I think that hyberbolic madness.

It’s a crazy response from Labour, who should be doing more for the serious debate and less for the headlines. They do rape victims a disservice by behaving that way.  They also, once again, do a disservice to the power of political debate to make positive changes and influence public opinion in a positive, constructive way.

Rick 

Congratulations to organisers of the Prestwich Clough Day, which was a great success today despite the weather doing its utmost to try and ruin things. I went down fairly late on, hoping that the longer I left it the more chance there would be that the rain would stop. It didn’t, so I got wet. Dampness didn’t deter the thousands who went down during the day today though, to experience the stalls, shows and music from local groups. As ever the highlights included the birds of prey displays, morris dancers and musicians.

Last week was a week off political things for most of the people worn out by the local election campaign. So tomorrow sees them get back in the swing of things. I won’t be involved for the first time in four years after my defeat the other day. I did chuckle inwardly when I saw the surviving and new Councillors getting drenched collecting money at the Clough Day today (I actually laughed outwardly at Cllr O’Hanlon, in his face, knowing he could take the ribbing!) knowing that it was one duty that defeat had relieved me of. I was grateful that could take solace indoors, but nonetheless whilst I won’t miss that, I suspect I will miss the drama of being in the room when the Council changes control officially at Annual Council on Wednesday.

Tomorrow night sees an “election de-brief” with the remaining and former Lib Dem Councillors, where we’ll pick over the bones of election day and re-group and plan for the future. The local political dynamic will definitely change now that Labour are in charge. There’ll be no hiding from cuts for them any more. So we’ll be talking about how best to work in opposition to them, coming up with the ideas for Prestwich which will put local service provision first in whatever guise will best see it protected amidst the cuts.

And that’s my last scheduled meeting! I checked my diary last night, and there’s no official business in it after tomorrow, the remainder of my life stretching away before me like a barren desert punctuated only by the occasional wedding and birthday. Ah well, better men than me have coped without regular Scrutiny Committee meetings, so I suppose I will have to as well! I will have to learn to do normal things like socialise and laugh again.

Actually, next weekend I am going to see my wife in a play at Radcliffe Civic Suite. The building has been the subject of very animated debate at the Town Hall over the last couple of years, with the Tories wanting to try and privatise it and being accused by a volcanically angry campaign group of wanting to shut it completely. It’s a shame I couldn’t have gone three months ago, it would’ve made a nice picture in Focus! I think the campaigners were wrong and I think their campaign is both unfair to the Council and wrong-headed in principal, but the fact that I get to enjoy the Civic Suite in my spare time just goes to show that there’s no separating Council and personal life if you know where to look. For someone who no longer has an access-all-areas pass to the Town Hall but who is passionate about trying to improve local Council services for Bury, that’s a good thing.

Rick

Labour took overall control of Bury Council last week when they achieved the final seat they needed by drawing straws after a dead heat. Now that the cheers have subsided, they need to come up with a plan to fill Bury’s budget hole, and they need to do it quickly.

Since Labour’s victory, their Leader (and, I presume, soon to be Leader of the Council) Cllr Mike Connolly, has made a couple of welcome promises including reform of the public question time rules at Council meetings, and a return to the old Executive system which was replaced last year by the unpopular “Strong Leader” model which placed far too much power in the hands of the Leader of the Council (although, interestingly, this change was as the result of an edict from the then Labour government). I’ve said for ages that these things need to take place, and if these changes happen, they’ll have my full support.

However, Cllr Connolly has also announced that the Council’s “Transformation Strategy”, which opened the door for the private and voluntary sectors to begin to provide Council services, is now “dead in the water.” This isn’t surprising, given that Labour in Bury voted against it last month. But if they are intent on scrapping it, they quickly need to come up with an alternative because without one we’ll run out of money very quickly.

The point of the Transformation Strategy wasn’t to change providers for the sake of it. It was a response to the fact the budgets are being massively cut. Bury Labour can protest as much as they like about that, but it remains a fact, and now that they’re running the show they’re going to have to deal with it. Simply opposing cuts won’t do. The government tells Councils how much money they’re getting, and Councils have to make that money last the whole year.

Transforming services and changing the way that they’re run, is the only alternative to cutting them. It may be that the Council is the best provider in all circumstances, and the Transformation Strategy didn’t rule this out. It sought to find the best provider, in terms of quality and efficiency, and seek to have services provided by that provider. But I doubt that the Council is the best provider for every single service, and in ruling out alternatives Bury Labour seem to be coming to conclusions before finding out proper answers. It’s the type of ideological stubbornness which has seen Labour-run Manchester City Council make some staggeringly enormous cuts whilst Councils run by other, more pragmatic and sensible parties, cut much less and re-design much more.

One of the biggest frustrations I had whilst trying to negotiate a budget amendment for the Lib Dems last year was that the ruling Tory group wanted to press ahead with cuts quickly rather than borrow money up front and spend a year re-designing services to preserve them. By ruling out all providers but the Council, the Labour party in Bury risk making the situation even worse.

We need to hear what Labour will do, not just what they won’t do, and we need to hear it now, otherwise local cuts will get worse, and they’ll only have themselves to blame.

Rick

The coalition is one today. In the wake of last week’s cataclysmic election results, and if one listened to the doom-mongers in the media who are predicting that by 2015 I’ll be the only Lib Dem left alive, celebrating its birthday would feel a bit like celebrating the anniversary of the discovery of the flu strain that’s going to wipe out all of humanity. But I’m doing it all the same. Over the last week people from every political persuasion and none have been saying that the day the coalition was born was the day my political career in Bury died. I wish they’d have told me at the time, as I’d have spent a hell of a lot less energy leafleting in the meantime!

I am not one of the nay-sayers though. I am a coalition fan, in a manner of speaking. Of course I’d prefer a Lib Dem-only government. But after all, the coalition is a far better option than any of the other three available to the Lib Dems a year ago – an unstable Tory-only government which would have called and decisivley won an election last autumn, a “rainbow coalition” which would have lasted about fifteen minutes, or the Lib Dems propping up the Tories without moderating the government in any way.

As it is, conservativehome.com, which is hardly our most effusive supporter, reckons that there’s more of the Lib Dem manifesto in the coalition agreement than there is of the Tory one. Any low paid worker who is now paying no income tax has the Lib Dems and the coalition to thank. Any opponent of Trident has the Lib Dems and the coalition to thank for it not being swiftly renewed. And any millionaire has the Lib Dems and the colaition to thank for not getting an inheritance tax cut.

Of course, every student has a different fees regime, every public servant an effective pay cut, and every Council a massive budget hole as a result of the Lib Dems and the coalition, and if that’s enough to mean nobody votes for us any more then so be it. But voting for Labour instead means people think things would’ve been better under them. I dispute that very much indeed.

Nick Clegg, who occupies the space between Christiano Ronaldo and George W Bush in the “most unpopular man in Britain” competition, has emailed me today (amongst others, I presume) with his thoughts as the coalition turns one. He re-affirms what we all know in the party but which we’ve been truly terrible at comunicating – that the current government is a coalition of necessity.

It is relieving in a selfish way that people seem to have forgotten in just one year the absolutely toxic state of the economy which Labour left us. A year ago the coalition was formed, and a year and one hour ago, Liam Byrne, the outgoing Labour Chief Secretary to the Treasury, wrote the note saying that there was no money left. I am relieved that people have forgotten this so easlily because with any luck they’ll once again flip their opinions about the Lib Dems by next year and we’ll be winning again.

Of course, it would be much better if people hadn’t forgotten in the firts place that these cuts aren’t being inflicted with glee, but through the necesity of an enormous debt and deficit, and that this coalition wasn’t entered into by two star-crossed lovers who’d been itching for a chance to leap into bed together, but by the only two main parties not responsible for getting us into the mess in the first place.

Nick Clegg’s letter says that in the next phase of the coalition, both partners will be able to be clearer in their identities, but equally clear about the need to support the Government and government policy. This is good. At the moment we’re getting more of the policy, but less of the credit, and that’s obviously not right.

Nick Clegg also makes some interesting points about our relationship to the other parties. He says that we are not left, nor right, but defined by decades of liberal politics. We are not the anti-Tory party, nor the anti-Labour party, nor the anti-politics party. Instead a party of enterprise and fairness; a party which knows we can do more together than we can alone. I agree with Nick.

Rick

I’ve spent the post-election weekend in Brecon, south Wales. It’s a place about as far from the suburban political madness of last week in Bury as it is possible to be, but I was helping out at a friend’s wedding there and sharing a barn with about six families-worth of screaming toddlers, so a rural rest it was not. The barn also appeared to have been converted from agricultural to residential use without its proprietors realising that human beings are taller than stalks of wheat – I banged my head on beams at least half a dozen times and was lumpy throughout the nuptials.

On the way down I passed the village of Four Crosses. This was what the average Lib Dem received during the elections on Thursday. Soon afterwards I passed the village of Refail, which is what many of our candidates will do at the next elections unless we sort out how to make the electorate see what I think is the reality of the country’s situation and the coalition’s role in sorting it out. I am glad today to hear that we’re asserting ourselves a bit more. I don’t doubt that this was happening in private before, but people need to see it in public.  Unfortunately during my trip  I didn’t encounter the Welsh village of “Massive Lib Dem Victoryogogogoch”.

Whilst I’ve been away the AV vote has been lost as well, of course. ”No” would’ve been my second choice.

It really staggers me that people rejected electoral reform so comprehensively. First Past The Post is demonstrably unfair, and whilst AV wasn’t much better it was certainly a departure from the old system and its acceptance would have signalled an end to any one system being “the one we have to have because we’ve always had it”. People have stupendously short memories about how angry they were with complacent MPs. And I particularly didn’t understand the Labour No to AV camp. If anything is certain to give the Tories an unfair electoral advantage it’s First Past The Post. But I guess weary confusion and a lack of understanding is a fairly predictable characteristic for a “Yes” campaigning Lib Dem right now.

Anyway, I’m back in Prestwich now, and am going to take stock and see what to do in the future with my spare time. In the meantime, this blog might shift down a gear or two. There’ll be a lot less to write about now that I don’t go to Council meetings. Maybe the type of content may shift a bit too, but we’ll see about that. I’m not disappearing comletely though, so don’t worry (or rejoice).

Rick