Pots, kettles and an unseemly squabble about expenses

Conservative Party co-chairman Grant Shapps has attacked a report calling for the allowances paid to councillors to be increased as a way of encouraging more people to take part in local politics as a ‘cynical and sleazy’ attempt to benefit Labour.

The report was produced by the communities and local government select committee, chaired, you might have guessed, by Labour MP Clive Betts. Amongst other things it recommends that political parties do more to support councillors and that the Local Government Association’s ‘Be a Councillor’ programme be expanded.

Mr Shapps condemned the rules obliging Labour councillors to pay part of their allowance to the party, saying that ‘local taxpayers’ would be ‘shocked to learn that the Labour Party will be quids in from demands for more taxpayer’s money to be used fro councillor’s allowances.’ In my experience many local taxpayers would be shocked to learn they’ve even got a councillor so low have levels of political engagement sunk.

Clive Betts refuted these claims saying the committee had found politicians ‘achieve more when they work together’ and the public were turned off by ‘shallow point scoring.’

Quite so; which means he probably wasn’t all that glad to see Labour Party vice chair Michael Dugher riding to his defence by, erm, scoring a few cheap political points; oops.

He laid into the Tories, accusing them of ‘hypocrisy’ and drew attention to Tory councillors in Walsall who had recently voted to increase their allowances. Warming to his theme he asked if ‘Grant Shapps will now call on Conservative councillors to hand back their allowances.’

The phrase ‘calm down dears’ springs instantly to mind; this seems like one of those squabbles between the kettle and the pot that nobody ever wins, but manage to leave all concerned looking foolish. No wonder the public find such things a turn off, I’m inclined to reach for the off switch myself and I’m actually interested in politics.

There is clearly something rotten in the state of local government, turn-outs at elections are dwindling, it’s ever harder for parties to find willing candidates and those who do come forward are seldom of high quality. I’m not sure that simply paying councillors more is the answer though.

A straightforward rise in the level of allowance paid coming at a time when most councils are cutting services to the bone would be deeply unpopular. Trying to sneak some extra cash in through the expenses system is a non starter too; that was tried years ago when MPs were, relatively, underpaid and created the culture of fiddling that caused such a scandal in 2009.

The idea that the three parties should do more to support their councillors is not an entirely good one either. They can certainly provide the training needed to make a good councillor into an outstanding one; but the downside is that it will further wrest control over who gets to be a candidate in the first place from the hands of local activists.

This will result in the mavericks, the paid up members of the awkward squad who seem like trouble makers at the time only to be proved right a few years hence being pushed even further to the sidelines. Their place will be taken by the eager battalion of men and women with elastic principles for whom the town hall is just a stepping stone to Westminster. All of which is just about the last thing out sickly local government system needs right now.

What is needed isn’t the sort of mild reform proposed by commons select committees so much as a total transformation in how local government works. A new deal where power over who stands as a candidate is returned to grassroots party members, with the trade off being that any allowance beyond what is needed to cover loss of earnings disappears. Councils need both the money saved itself and the influx of people for whom politics is a calling not a lucrative sideline.

Sadly none of this will come to pass because the three main parties long ago turned themselves first brands and then ‘ghost brands’ kept alive by a trickle of votes when what we most need them to be is agents of real change.

Farewell to a rebel with a cause.

On Thursday of this week as a cold front swept in from the East and the weather forecasters did their best to make our collective flesh creep with threats of snow the news came through that a brilliant, sometimes difficult, but, I think, genuinely good man had died.

His name was Mick Williams and he will be unknown to most people outside either the Labour movement or the political scene in Stoke-on-Trent, although readers of the Guardian, Tribune and the Local Government Chronicle may well be familiar with the letters combining informed comment and often surreal humour he contributed to those and dozens of other publications.

I could tick off the achievements of his long career, three times elected to Stoke-on-Trent City Council, a holder of every branch and constituency office in his local Labour Party, a leading light of the WEA and the Trades Council, the list goes on; but I don’t think that explains why whether you knew him or not you should be saddened at his passing. This is because Mick Williams didn’t have a political career so much as a political calling; the difference between the two is important.

Politics, national or local, has always attracted its fair share of charlatans and they fall into two broad categories. There are the determined ladder climbers, ‘back stairs crawlers’ a George Orwell called them’, who believe in very little beyond the inevitability of their rise to greatness; there are also those who style themselves as ‘rebels’, making a lot of attention grabbing noise but taking very few real risks.

There is also another, much rarer sort of person drawn to politics; those for whom it is a sort of faith, providing them with principles they are not willing to abandon in the name of expediency. Mick Williams belonged to this latter group, at times this could make him difficult to work with; but it was also the source of his brilliance.

If he sometimes stood too stubbornly on points of principle or chased lost causes he also had an awkward, for the holders of vested interests, determination to stand up for what he believed was right. Nobody else could have galvanised the campaign to rid Stoke-on-Trent of an unworkable mayoral system or been more shamefully treated by the party he served for nearly half a century as a result.

It was this rejection by a Labour Party he felt had lost touch with its true principles that prompted Mick’s last; unsuccessful attempt to win election to the council in 2010. I had the honour, I don’t use the word lightly, of working closely with him during this campaign and came to be impressed by his remarkable energy and the passion with which he sought to engage a jaded public with political issues.

The energy faded as ill health slowly took hold, but the passion for politics remained undimmed to the end. Just before he went into hospital for the last time I spoke to Mick on the phone and he told me that he was still ‘pushing’ the council on several issues and we agreed to meet and lay our plans when he was discharged. It was not to be and those of us who knew him will miss his wise counsel, his irreverence in the face of pomposity and his untiring commitment to building an honest, open and inclusive democracy.

Dylan Thomas famously wrote that the old should ‘rage, rage against the dying of the light,’ meaning the dying of the light of physical potency. Throughout his remarkable career Mick Williams raged against the dying of an equally important light; that of a democracy threatened by the ambition of cynics with careers to build and principles to jettison the moment they start getting in the way.

Those of us who knew Mick Williams and want to honour his memory could find no better way of doing so than raging in the same cause ourselves.

A new year and the same old problem over tuition fees

It’s a new year, the season for cold mornings and new resolutions to be thinner, fitter and more sober in the year ahead. Along with these comes the return of an old familiar problem, how to get more people from disadvantaged backgrounds into university.

The government isn’t making much of fist of things at the moment thanks to its decision to raise tuition fees to £9,000. A fact attested to by a report from the Universities and Colleges Admissions Service (UCAS) which shows the number of applicants having fallen by 6.6% to 653,600 with 188,700 of those prospective students failing to secure a place.

Labour shadow higher education minister Shabana Mahmood told politics.co.uk that the government’s policy on tuition fees had ‘put a brake on aspiration and has led to people considering applying for university to decide against doing so at precisely the time that higher level skills have never been more important to secure their future;’ before going on to add that this was also ‘holding back the potential’ of the UK economy.

The UCAS report says that students from disadvantaged backgrounds are 10% more likely to attend a ‘high tariff’ university; ministers have used this to claim that the poor are not being hit disproportionately by higher tuition fees. The report also shows that more females than males are applying to go to university with white working class males the most likely to miss out.

Mary Curnock, chief executive of UCAS said this trend was ‘striking and worrying’ and that the financial burden of going to university was putting off many prospective students. Sally Hunt of the Universities and Colleges Union said that ‘fewer students at university represents the failure of the government’s higher education policies;’ adding that ‘if we are to open up access to university to our most talented people we need to remove punitive financial barriers.’

Defending the government’s position higher education minister David Willets said that he expected the total number of students going to university to be higher than in any year since 2010. Where we groundlings see only a wilderness of contracting opportunity Mr Willets sees the sunlit uplands of the Promised Land; you clearly get a better class of view when looking down from an ivory tower.

The waste of potential is always tragic; when the potential in question is that of young people it is positively criminal. David Cameron and his ministry of almost no talent whatsoever seem content though to watch that happen, blithely unaware of the impact not going to university will have on the health and economic outcomes experienced by millions of young people.

University admissions aren’t, of course, the only game in town, the chronic lack of apprenticeships and the slow death of Britain’s FE colleges from a thousand tiny cuts are cause for concern too; but they do grab the lion’s share of media attention. Not least because children growing up in leafy suburbs are being priced out of a university education too and their parents are angry and articulate enough to make things uncomfortable for David Cameron at the next election.

A bad situation is made much worse by the fact the education policy seems to be trapped somewhere between the rocks in David Willets head and the hard place occupied by Michael Gove’s ambition.

Willets has allowed his considerable intellect, he revels in the nickname ‘two brains’, to make him complacent. He simply can’t conceive of the notion that someone so clever as he is could make a mistake about raising tuition fees; by the time events prove him wrong it will probably be too late.

Michael Gove, a k a the busiest man in politics, seems intent on wrecking schools with a mixture of misplaced nostalgia and deranged ambition with a little pure eccentricity sprinkled on top. This is the man who wants to bring back lessons in Latin, turn the history curriculum into a replay of the ‘drum and trumpet’ one abandoned in the sixties and sent a copy of the King James bible to every school in the land within which his name appears in larger print that that of either King James or the lord god almighty himself.

Important issues like tragic levels of illiteracy amongst pupils going up to primary school and the lack of decent vocational courses don’t even make it onto his radar. His every action since taking up office has been an overt play to win the approval of the Tory turnips he thinks may one day help him to win the party leadership he so unconvincingly pretends not to want.

Just before the conference season lumbered into motion we all had a good belly laugh at Nick Clegg’s apology for opposing tuition fees during the election campaign only to go back on his word once in office. Looking back from a few months hence the delivery still seems laughably inept; but its beginning to look like was demonstrating a rare hint of conscience on the part of a senior politician.

The education system is being slowly wrecked by people who either don’t know or don’t care how much harm they are doing. Schools are being transformed into places that teach young people to know their place rather that opening their eyes to what they can achieve through hard work. The universities are going back to being a glorified finishing school for Sebastian Flyte and his chums while a generation of doctors and engineers we’re never going to have flip burgers or draw the dole.

Some day soon this will make us all as sorry as Nick Clegg was pretending to be in his laughable video; but by then nobody will feel much like laughing.

An Olympiad of dunces

Spotlights rake the skies over Stoke, the red carpet has been laid out in front of Wetherspoons and Elton John is hosting an after party at the Monzil Indian Restaurant. Yes its time for me to hand out my annual awards to the movers and shakers of 2012; here we go then.

Worst idea of the year: There is really no contest on this one; the gong has to go to Chancellor George Osborne and his infamous ‘pasty tax’ announced in a budget so dire they had to invent a new word to describe it. You’d have to be a special kind of stupid to think that slapping a tax on one of the few small luxuries people can still afford wouldn’t cause mass outrage and it turns out that is exactly what Boy George is.

Least convincing apology: He’s sorry, really, really sorry and with a big fat cherry on top too; Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg apologised for reneging on his pledge to oppose a rise in tuition fees in a Youtube video that made Gordon Brown’s risible efforts of a few years ago look almost competent. Cynics say that in politics if you can fake sincerity you’ve got it made; it looks like Numpty Nick can’t even get that right.

Special award for removing herself from public life (sponsored by Charles Darwin): Despite strong competition from Louise Mensch this has to go to Nadine Dorries, her brief sojourn on ‘I’m a Celebrity…’ mean that she and her odd collection of prejudices will be leaving the political stage at the next election; try not to get hit by the door on your way out dear.

Comeback of the year: It’s been a good year for Ed Milliband, he’s repeatedly put David Cameron on the spot at PMQ’s; Red Ed might not quite look like a prime minister in waiting but at least he’s been taken seriously now.

The ‘oh cripes!’ how did this happen award: This has to go to Boris Johnson, not for winning a second term as London’s mayor, Red Ken is a spent force and none of the other candidates came close, but for his utterly unlikely popularity with the public. Despite carrying on like a posh Homer Simpson on acid he’s one of the few politicians able to ‘connect’ with voters, despite his loud protestations that he has no ambitions to be PM David Cameron should watch his hack around Bojo.

Disappointment of the year: The ‘Occupy’ movement, this time last year their protest outside St Paul’s captured the attention of the world giving them a platform from which to say something important about the need for a fairer and kinder society. Unfortunately they fluffed it big time, preferring to preach to the converted instead, since then some former members have talked about doing outreach work in schools, which is all very worthy but does nothing to hide the fact that a once in a lifetime opportunity has been scandalously wasted.

Relief of the year: Barrack Obama beating Mitt Romney in last month’s US Presidential elections. The thought of the free world being led for the next four years by a weird android from planet Mormon who thinks ‘corporations are people too’ and that the almighty cares what sort of pants he wears would have been to scary for words.

Gold medal for self congratulation: This has to go to Lord Coe and the organisers of London 2012, ok Team GB won loads of medals (hurrah), but the opening ceremony was pretentious nonsense and the ticketing system an embarrassing shambles; worse still the promised legacy from the games looks like being consumed by a costly legal wrangle. Only if there isn’t tumbleweed blowing through the Olympic park in four years time should anyone involved in organising the games be patted on the back.

The ‘jumped the shark’ award: Sadly this has to go to Newsnight, the one time flagship of BBC News bottled it badly over the Jimmy Saville sex abuse scandal and has forfeited much of its credibility; like the Fighting Tameraire its next port of call should be the breaker’s yard.

I’d like to wish everyone who has read this blog in 2012 a merry Christmas and a happy new year; now I’m off to see if there are any onion bhajis left at Elton’s bash.

Is studying history about to become a thing of the past?

The study of history in schools in the UK could be about to become, ahem, history, as students appear to be falling out of love with the subject. A report for the all parliamentary group on history released this week that entries to study history at GCSE have dropped below 30%.

This will not please Education Secretary Michael Gove, who recently expressed concern that many 18 to 24 year olds didn’t know that Nelson won the battle of Trafalgar or who built Hadrian’s Wall. You have to guess that they must have questioned the dimmer half of the demographic since there is a big clue in the latter question.

Anyway young people don’t know enough history, Michael Gove won’t be happy about it; so it follows that something will have to be done.

In its report the group criticises schools for teaching just an hour of history a week to thirteen year olds and for doing so in a way that doesn’t follow a logical chronology. Apparently it’s all Hitler, Henry (the eighth that is) and the pyramids with little to link things together. This, as Chris Skidmore MP, vice chair of the group told the BBC, produces a sort of ‘Dr Who history’ that made it ‘very difficult to generate understanding and a sense of chronology in such abbreviated time periods.’

The group would like to see history included in the English Baccalaureate (EBacc) when it replaces GCSE’s and for the curriculum to focus more closely on key events in British history. They fought shy of recommending that history be made a mandatory subject up to sixteen, but it was recommended that citizenship be forced out to make room for more extended teaching of history.

In response a spokeswoman for the Department of Education told the BBC that the government was ‘looking at history’ as part of its review of the national curriculum and wanted to ensure that students were ‘engaged and inspired by the subject.’ Commenting on the proposal to replace citizenship with history in the new EBacc Andy Thornton of the Citizenship Foundation said proponents of the change were ‘defending their own subject based on ignorance of another’s.’ He added that through studying citizenship students were ‘inducted into the social order of the day, empowering them to play their part in its stability and prosperity.’

The teaching of history, particularly British history, is vital, if you hold anything like liberal views that it is a given that you accept the best way of learning to respect and value the culture and traditions of others is by understanding your own first. The trouble is we seem somehow to have ended up in a situation where people on the right of the political spectrum believe themselves to have a unique understanding of our nation’s history and how it should be passed on.

This has produced some truly odd ideas, many of them firmly lodged in the busy brain of Michael Gove. He seems to view history, as he does most subjects, through an odd sepia toned filter, as something carried out by kings, princes and, we might suppose, Education Secretaries with their eye on the main prize, at which we groundlings can merely gawp in wonderment.

In reality the world and the subject have moved on, the teaching of history, unless it is merely to be a process of dinning dates into the heads of students, has to reflect the diversity of experience and origins to be found in British life. As for making history part of the new EBacc, all well and good but something else will have to be pushed out to make room, unless, of course, the new qualification is going to share the sad fate of GCSE’s by becoming a bloated repository for whatever fad happened to be preoccupying the Westminster villagers the week before last.

If, as seems likely, it is citizenship that gets the push then the people responsible really don’t understand their subject. One of the dominant themes in all of human history is how power is devolved from the hands of the few into those of the many. It is a story that is still being played out today in Egypt and Syria and one that may, if we aren’t careful, skip back a few chapters here in Europe.

Young people, and those of us who aren’t so young, should study history because if you don’t understand the mistakes made in the past you are doomed to repeat them; not understanding how democracy works and what we all need to do to keep it working produces the same sad result.

A good week for thumping the poor

Cuts to benefits could put the poorest people living in Stoke-on-Trent into debt and into the hands of high interest loan dealers. For the most vulnerable people the bad times that started rolling in 2007 are fast turning into an avalanche.

According to figures released by the Citizen’s Advice Bureau (CAB) over the weekend the number of people seeking help with council tax arrears has risen from 610 in 2008/09 to 1236 this year, the total debt has risen over the same period from £466, 97 to £1.3million.

Further cuts to childcare payments, out of work benefits and sickness benefits are also going to hit the most vulnerable people hardest.

In a truly Victorian touch the council will be required to deduct £25 from working claimants of council tax benefit as an ‘incentive to work’. If you’re an investor now might be a good time to take out shares in gruel; the workhouse may be making a comeback.

A spokesperson for the CAB told the Sentinel that the changes to benefits will increase levels of personal debt and force vulnerable people to ‘borrow, often at exorbitant rates, from home credit providers, payday loans and pawnbrokers.’

Deputy Council Leader Paul Shotton told the Sentinel ‘welfare reform is not something we choose to do but something forced upon us and every council nationally,’ the council was, he said, ‘mindful of the potential impact and we want the changes to be as fair as possible.’

Whatever your opinion of their regeneration plans, and mine isn’t high, there is no argument that the council have been forced into a corner by the government over welfare reform. They have been unwillingly recruited as the hired muscle for a programme of withdrawing the support of the state from the most vulnerable members of society that revives notions about the deserving and undeserving poor belonging to a bygone age.

Pious talk about giving claimants and ‘incentive to work’ rings hollow when jobs are rarer than hen’s teeth. Many people lucky enough to be in work are struggling as food and heating costs continue to rise whilst wage levels remain stagnant, for them benefits aren’t a windfall; they’re a lifeline.

There was a time when I had a certain degree of respect for Iain Duncan Smith, unlike many former leaders of the Conservative Party he didn’t retreat into a cosy world of executive directorships and gentleman’s clubs; instead he set out to see how the other, poorer, half live. At least he’s supposed to have done, which makes it surprising that he’s managed to survive the experience with every one of his prejudices intact.

The biggest of these is that anyone, working or not, receiving benefits is a ‘scrounger’ living high on the state reared hog while everyone else struggles. This is demonstrably wrong, a fact attested to by the sad lines of people queuing up at food banks, the alarming rises in homelessness and mental illness to be found in areas blighted by high unemployment and low wages; areas just like Stoke in fact.

A life on benefits isn’t a free ride, it’s a miserable trudge through dependency and despair that all too often leads to a very dark place indeed. It isn’t just the government that wants to get people off benefits and into work, the vast majority of claimants are desperate to work too, this won’t be achieved though by telling people to pull their socks up and try harder.

Pretending it can might play well with the sillier sections of the Tory party and the tabloid press, but politicians with expensive educations and serious responsibilities should take a more nuanced approach. It isn’t a matter of carrots and sticks so much as working constructively with people to find them work that actually pays; not an easy task but a vitally important one none the less.

If the current misbegotten government can’t grasp the necessity of carrying it out then vulnerable people in Stoke and many other towns around the country will continue to struggle. Alone and abandoned with the only help on the horizon a loan from a company that hides sky high interest rates behind a cheery jingle.

The start of an awkward conversation about the city’s budget

On a wet Tuesday evening last week I headed down to the Civic Centre to attend the launch of Stoke-on-Trent City Council’s budget consultation for 2013.

The event took place in the Jubilee Room, a rather gloomy wood panelled space with heavy red drapes at the windows and a print of George V in full ceremonial uniform glowering down from the wall, a reminder of the slightly fly-blown civic grandeur that will be lost if the building is sold off to developers.

All the big guns of what the council, somewhat pompously, bills as its ‘cabinet’ were present, sitting at the front of the room and looking for the most part more than a little uncomfortable. They, as did most of the audience, knew this was not going to be an easy evening.

Front and centre was council leader Mohammed Pervez, a portly man in a grey suit with a speaking style that alternates between nervousness and exasperation; not a good combination in a politician with something unpopular to sell to the public. The consultation was to be, he said, part of a ‘meaningful conversation’ with the public about the city’s finances; specifically how £21 million in savings can be found in addition to the £56 million already made overt the past two years.

He reiterated what are to regular observers of politics in Stoke familiar themes about the lack of a financial settlement from the government, it is expected some time in December and is unlikely to be generous and the refusal of ministers to recognise the challenges faced by the city. The meat and drink of the presentation that followed though was that the council will have to tighten its belt and go on doing so for years to come, if predictions made by the Local Government Association are correct there may be little in the budget beyond funding for statutory services.

The latest round of efficiencies will, he said, involve large ‘savings’ from the budget of each of the council’s directorates, the sale of buildings and the merging of departments along with another two hundred to two hundred and fifty job losses. Those council employees who keep their jobs will, again, go without a cost of living increase in their pay settlement, although the council have agreed to give the lowest earning workers the minimum living wage of £7.45 per hour; cold comfort in hard times.

The language the bad news is delivered in is drawn straight from the lexicon of middle management, it is all about ‘efficiency savings’ and cutting ‘ back office costs’; the council is going to move from providing services to ‘commissioning’ them from companies in the private sector. It seems that three years of austerity economics have provided our culture with as many words for spending cuts as others have for snow.

The delivery veers between the dull and the downright bad tempered, like many a politician before him Mohammed Pervez knows all too well the soporific effect of statistics and provides a blizzard of them here. He also gets more than a little testy during the question and answer section what asked how the council can justify taking out a huge loan to build a new Civic Centre whilst at the same time cutting vital services.

The logic behind this move, if you can did it out of rather a lot of waffle boils down to ‘if we build it they will come’, meaning that if the council moves to the new Central Business District on the outskirts of Hanley investors will soon follow. If you think this has more than a touch of magical thinking about it you’d probably be right.

Pouring investment into Hanley is both a bone of contention and an article of faith under the ‘Mandate for Change’ that is the bedrock of the council’s regeneration strategy. Residents of the other five towns making up the city feel aggrieved that so much investment is being aimed at the city centre whilst their own communities are being left to crumble; Mr Pervez and his cabinet cite this as an example of the parochialism that has held the city back for decades and say that if investment if focussed on Hanley the benefits will, eventually, trickle down to the rest of the city.

Whilst it is possible to feel sympathy for the Council Leader as he struggles to balance a budget without much help from a government that sees no votes for either coalition partner in Stoke, the unavoidable fact is that much of the thinking underpinning the city’s regeneration strategy is flawed. Almost every former industrial town in the region is trying to re-invent itself along the same lines and there is only so much money to go round.

It was hard not to come away from the evening without feeling a sense of gloomy resignation, the council it seemed, was defending a position on which it had already decided rather than seeking suggestions from the public. It was suggested that the council would consider suggestions sent in as to how to save money and promote the city to investors, I can imagine the postbags filled with letters saying don’t sell the Civic piling up to following day and promptly being tipped into landfill.

As exercises in public engagement go this felt more like box ticking than the real thing, sadly Stoke council has form in this area having run a Community Empowerment Network that folded because it wasn’t taken seriously or given much in the way of independence. That inevitably fosters an atmosphere of weary cynicism; people feel there is little point in taking part in a conversation if they aren’t going to be listened to.