Labour shift the deckchairs around as a £150 million cuts tsunami looms.

This week the weather improved, we even had a couple of days of sunshine, unfortunately little else seems to have got any better.

It is still certainly midwinter for the city’s finances with the Sentinel reporting on Wednesday that £150 million in spending cuts could be heading our way between now and 2021. This on top of the £80 million in cuts made so far.

This is the result of a likely reduction in the Revenue Support Grant (RSG), the money given to the city by central government, just as the projected revenue the council needs to function is predicted to rise from £214 million to £257 million.

Speaking to the Sentinel council leader Mohammed Pervez said this had created a ‘perfect storm’, in which wealthy rural areas were favoured over poorer urban cities like Stoke because they are better able to raise their own revenue.

He told the Sentinel that the ‘only way to get out of a perfect storm is to accelerate hard and keep a firm hand on the wheel,’ and cited initiatives such as the Central Business District and plans to create the country’s largest geo-thermal district heating system as examples of what was being done to address the shortfall.

Amongst those people unconvinced by his comments was Dave Conway, leader of the City Independents group in the council chamber, who told the Sentinel cuts on the scale proposed would not need to be made if the council ‘cut its cloth’ according to its means, starting with not ‘borrowing money to pay for a building in Hanley we don’t need and paying consultants to say where people can park.’

The probable reduction of the RSG is entirely down to government policies that favour leafy shires with sizeable Tory majorities over places like Stoke where the party barely exists. How the council responds to this is though entirely its own work and so far the results are far from impressive.

As Mr Conway points out building a new Civic Centre has created a burden of debt the city could well do without and the council’s love affair with hiring consultants is a habit we can no longer afford. Never mind though we will soon have four extra ‘higher tier’ managers parking their coffee cups down at the Civic, because in a crisis the thing you need more than anything else is more managers.

The Labour group, who will pay the price for this latest piece of foolishness at the ballot box seem surprisingly sanguine about things, issuing a bland statement about finding the right people for the job. Perhaps they were distracted by a reshuffle that looked to everyone outside the bubble like an exercise in shifting the deckchairs around on the deck of the Titanic just as she steams into the ice field.

Very little has changed Janine Bridges and Alan Dutton have been cast into outer darkness and Olwen Hamer and Joy Garner have been welcomed back into the fold; Ruth Rosenau has been rewarded for a leadership ‘challenge’ that was really about going through the motions by retaining her seat. Quite what all this shifting and shuffling will do to improve the quality of governance on offer is debatable.

The huge debts generated by the CBD project are likely to be hung around the neck of every taxpayer in the city for years to come, like an avalanche it has gathered so much momentum it cannot be stopped. Something can and should be done to prevent another such white elephant can be allowed to trundle over the horizon.

In any system where one party has a virtual monopoly of power the end result will always be hubris and waste on the part of the leadership. If we are going to face a tidal wave of cuts that will make the hardships of the past few years seem tame then Stoke needs a real opposition in the council chamber.

One with the courage to hold every decision made by the cabinet and council officers up to forensic scrutiny and enough votes to throw a spanner in the works whenever necessary. If a dangerously complacent Labour Party is relaxed about the hiring of four extra senior managers just as hundreds of council workers are about to have their jobs put at risk then we need to ensure they have a dozen or so fewer councillors after the next election.

What ‘Fentonians’ want is self-determination.

This week a petition signed by almost two thousand residents of Fenton was handed in to the Civic Centre calling for the creation of a town council, prompting Stoke-on-Trent City Council to lunch a review into what form one would take were it created.

Members of the council’s general purposes committee said they were unclear as to what ‘Fentonians’ actually wanted. Possible options include a fully-fledged town council funded through a precept on the council tax and the setting up of an area committee, this would have fewer powers than a town council but would still allow residents to influence services.

A town council for Fenton would consist of eight elected members and be funded through an extra 50p levied on council tax payers living in the area. Fenton Community Association, the organisers of the petition, believe having a town council will protect local services and give the often ignored town a stronger voice.

Speaking to the Sentinel Councillor Neil Day said the council did need ‘help after the number of councillors was reduced’, following the 2010 review by the Boundary Commission for England the number was cut from sixty to forty four, but said he was ‘worried that these parish councils are set up on the crest of a wave’ only for it to turn out later that ‘someone just wanted their grass verge cut more.’

Councillor Martin Garner suggested any governance review should be expanded to cover the whole city, the committee decided to focus on Fenton. Also speaking to the Sentinel he said he had ‘yet to hear any arguments why Fenton is special and needs a separate town council,’ adding with some flippancy that they might just ‘want revenge on Arnold Bennett,’ the author famously ignored the town in his novels.

This is in no way a personal attack on Councillors Day and Garner, both are, I am sure, conscientious servants of their constituents. Unfortunately events have conspired to push them out front and centre to articulate an attitude on the part of the council that tells you everything about why political engagement in Stoke has fallen off a cliff.

To save the mandarins down at the Civic Centre a little chin stroking I’d like to make a suggestion as to what ‘Fentonians’, as they so patronisingly name then, want. It really is quite simple; they want self-determination.

There is nothing, as such, that is ‘special’ about Fenton, the town is fairly typical of most places in our city. A little down at heel certainly, but with a strong sense of and pride in its unique identity, it also has a sizeable portion of the voting public who are tired of the old deal between the Labour Party and local communities. You know, the one where we are suitably grateful for what little we’re given and don’t question the status quo because nanny always knows best.

If ten percent of the electorate in Fenton are in favour having a town council then the city council is legally obliged to look into how one could be set up. Trying to suggest exercising their rights is an attempt to gain special treatment does not make me feel confident the resulting review will be as open to the possibilities of change as it should be.

What really causes offence though is the suggestion the people in Fenton are motivated by nothing more than a desire to get their grass verge cut more often and suchlike trivia. Nothing could be further from the truth, they are deeply worried about the loss of local services and angered by a regeneration process that seems intent on putting Hanley first and everywhere else a distant second.

Fenton Community Association have proved themselves to be determined defenders of their town, as shown by the way they have fought to save the former magistrates court from joining the long list of buildings in Stoke demolished because someone thought there was a few quid to be made from sticking something more ugly in their place. Perhaps that’s the problem, they’ve given nanny a scare by showing they are more than capable of standing on their own two feet.

A town council in Fenton needn’t be a threat to the city council, in fact it could be an asset. Were there to be one in all six towns it could help to drive forward regeneration by giving local people a genuine sense of involvement in the process.

The downside, from the city council’s point of view anyway, is that a little of its power would be diluted, egos would have to be reined in and grand projects like to CBD and the still to materialise City Sentral shopping centre might face stronger scrutiny, mostly from people who can’t be leant on by a party hierarchy of they ask awkward questions.

Threatened or not the city council may just have to suck it in and learn to live with the idea that in the interconnected, wired, world of the twenty first century people want to have a greater say in what happens in their area. Where Fenton leads other towns and many smaller communities will follow.

Stoke council to close its recycling centres for two days a week.

Stoke-on-Trent City Council is to close its two main recycling centres for two days each week to save £50,000 a year.

The tips in Burslem and Stoke will close on, respectively, Wednesdays and Thursdays and Mondays and Tuesdays.

Speaking to the local press council officials said the closures were part of the £20million in spending cuts to be made over 2014/15 as a result of government austerity policies.

At the same time the council is recruiting extra staff to deal with an ongoing problem with fly-tipping. The four new members of staff will target areas of the city most at risk from illegally dumped rubbish.

Speaking to the Sentinel Andy Platt, cabinet member for environmental issues said ‘we’d like to keep both sites open all week, but we haven’t been given the money by the government to do everything we used to do.’

This latest of what seems like a thousand cuts highlights much of the flawed thinking going on inside the Civic Centre about where to make cuts.

As on so many occasions the cut to services seems to be counter-productive to say the least, the £50,000 saved will count for little if extra staff have to be engaged to deal with an epidemic of fly-tipping.

Closing recycling centres for two days a week also seems to fly in the face of attempts to make Stoke into a greener city; that would suggest creating more opportunities to recycle not less.

What will anger local people most though is the apparent lack of clear priorities when it comes to spending. The council have committed £1.2million to a doomed attempt to bring HS2 to the city and yet can’t keep a vital service open.

Attempts to blame the partial closure of recycling centres, along with many of the other spending cuts on ‘government cuts’ to which the council has no response other than to cut everything in sight is wearing thin to the point of transparency.

A sceptical and increasingly restive electorate may not be convinced that the gains made, if any, have been worth the pain incurred in the name of balancing the books when they go to the polls in less than a year’s time.
Politics Forum, Monday 5th May 2014

You don’t create a financial crisis by building hospitals- you do it by employing too many bankers.

The Hope Centre is a large evangelical church located on Upper Huntbach Street in the city centre of Stoke-on-Trent. It shares premises with an NHS mental health centre and so the entrance is somewhat fortress like.

When I arrive at around half past six on a grey spring evening a cheery red and green leaflet fixed to the reinforced glass doors tells me this is where the North Staffs People’s Assembly is holding its inaugural meeting. A trail of similar posters guide me up to the room where the meeting is to be held, its early and I’m almost the only person there and there is a palpable sense of concern as to how many people will actually turn up.

I wander around the room looking at the posters on the wall describing the church’s work with charity groups overseas and, more tellingly with the local food bank and am reminded that the left and the more socially active sections of the church have always been linked. The fight against austerity has, if nothing else, given both an opportunity to let down their often self-created barriers and engage with the wider community.

There are also stalls representing CND and local anti-racism campaign group NORSCARF. In one corner a group of women from Wool Against Weapons are showing off the long bright pink scarf they have knitted as part of a national project to be unrolled between two nuclear weapons establishments. It is a brilliantly day-glow riposte to the most deadly military braggadocio of them all.

Later in the evening Anti de Klerk of the People’s Flotilla Against Austerity will talk about the treatment of people living on the canal system following the sell- off of British Waterways by the coalition. Describing as she does so treatment so prejudicial it is hard, or rather we’d like it to be for our own peace of mind, to imagine it happening here; but it all too sadly is.

By a quarter to seven there are around fifteen to twenty people in the room and by the time the meeting proper starts this has risen to around thirty, not bad for a political meeting in Stoke.

The atmosphere is friendly, most of the people present seem to either know each other or at least to be comfortable with having a shared perspective. That could be somewhat insular, but on this occasion is more positive and thankfully free from the sensation that a bitter split over some issue that will be incomprehensible to anyone outside the loop might break out at any moment.

The meeting is introduced and chaired by Jason Hill, a long time campaigner against austerity representing the local Trades Council. He gives a brief overview of the impact government austerity policies have had on the local area since 2010, saying there is a ‘massive task’ ahead to reverse the damage done by a systematic attack on public services.

Jacqui Howard of the People’s Assembly Against Austerity outlines the origins of the movement as a response to the effect austerity has had on working people and the public services. The movement originated in London and there are now a hundred local groups around the country, all working to coordinate efforts to campaign against austerity and to promote the belief that it is possible to create a society based on social and economic justice.

She is young, articulate and clearly has a passionate engagement with her subject. All of which makes for a refreshing change from the usual run of semi-robotic aspiring politicians, most of whom though adept at engaging with the media tend to be animated by the fire of their own ambition rather than a zeal to do good for society.

Next to take to the podium is James Meadway of the New Economics Foundation who in his contribution aims to ‘peel away’ the ‘rhetoric’ surrounding the government’s austerity policies. He launches into a spirited attack on Chancellor George Osborne, currently being hailed as the author of an economic miracle, although most people are yet to feel the benefits of the supposed recovery.

He says the government have convinced the public that the last Labour government were wildly profligate with their money, despite the inconvenient fact that up to 2008 Labour spent just 39% of GDP on public services, the Major and Thatcher governments spent, respectively, 40% and 41%. The resulting push to reduce the deficit at all costs has caused a decline in living standards of a severity not seen since the thirties and is part of a politically motivated attempt to rebalance the economy in a way that benefits the wealthy few rather than working people.

What is needed, he says, is a concerted effort to challenge all and every cut, with exceptions perhaps for obviously unnecessary exceptions such as scrapping Trident, and a determination to propose and defend an alternative economic model. One where decent, secure jobs can be created through increased investment in public services.

Most people in the hall accept this as a fact, many outside it would agree with what James Meadway says on an instinctive level, but they have had a hugely effective snow job done on them by a largely right wing media. A constant drip of stories about ‘scroungers’ and threats that the left wants to spend, spend, spend until the country is bust have somehow persuaded the people most likely to lose out if public services are chopped down that they should help to swing the axe.

Sarah Honeysett of the local CAB takes to the stage to outline the impact of government ‘reforms’ to the benefit system on local people. The loss in income following changes to the benefits system equates to £108 million, it would take, she says, ten thousand jobs paying the minimum wage to make up the shortfall; and they’re hardly likely to materialise any time soon.

She also highlights the cruelly contradictory nature of the new benefits regime with the ‘bedroom tax’, unreasonable methods of assessing whether people are fit to work at all and aggressive ‘sanctions’ combining to trap claimants in a nightmare worthy of Kafka.

You get the impression from listening to someone with wide experience of how the reforms are being implemented on the ground that a benefits system intended to help people facing adversity is being remodelled into one designed to punish the poor. Which sounds dangerously Victorian and should scare witless exactly the same people who are being whipped into a frenzy by the tabloids over ‘scroungers’ living high on the benefits hog.

The gaps between speakers are filled in with poems from former Birmingham Poet Laureate Stephen Morrison-Burke. Political poetry is sometimes derided as being overly earnest and maybe a little bit silly, as he rolls beats effortlessly and name-checks a roll call of radical icons from William Blake to Rosa Parks this talented young man shows that in the right hands it can also be funny, entertaining and even profound.

The crowd for this event was undeniably smaller than the organisers must have hoped and also much less diverse, getting people motivated in a city where political life has atrophied due to years of Labour hegemony is a struggle. It was though a positive evening, it brought people with a shared purpose together to combine their efforts and may, in the long run, give some much needed hope that austerity can be resisted.

It will take more than a charm offensive to make people satisfied with this council.

Last week Stoke-on-Trent City Council announced that it intended to launch a ‘charm offensive’ to win back disillusioned citizens after a survey showed their reputation is amongst the worst in the country.

The survey, conducted by consultancy firm Westco cost £25,000 and was carried out in 2012 although the results were only released last week.

It shows that only 50% of people in Stoke are satisfied with the way the council does its job as opposed to a national average of 72%. The council is also seen as performing below the national average on giving value for money, just 30% of the people questioned said that it was compared to a national average of 56%.

In response the council plan to launch a revamped communication strategy aimed at highlighting their achievements in attracting investment to the city.

The local press are seen as key to delivering the new communication strategy, the survey found that just 44% of Sentinel readers were satisfied with the performance of the council compared to 64% of non-readers. This, its author’s remark with a surprisingly straight face, is due to the paper reflecting the views of its readers; blimey fancy that.

The council seem to have spent a lot of money to be told things they should have known anyway. In fact any advantage they may have gained from the survey will have been undermined by public anger at yet more money being wasted on consultants when services are being cut to the bone.

There is also something slightly unsettling about the survey’s failure to understand a few basic facts about the relationship between the press and politicians in a democratic country. Any press officer deserving of the name dreams of placing a ratio of two to one positive stories with the local media, most though are intelligent enough to realise that isn’t going to happen.

Put simply countries where the press lavishes unreserved praise on politicians are seldom free, Britain, for all its faults, is a free and open democracy. The Sentinel is quite right to reflect the views of its readers; that’s its job, if Mr Pervez and his cabinet don’t like that they should either pull their socks up or get another job and leave the politics to people with thicker skins.

That the council could and should communicate better is self-evident, doings so though won’t address the problems at the core of public dissatisfaction with their performance.

The stranglehold exerted on the political life of the city by the Labour Party means there is no effective opposition in the council chamber. It is a truth universally acknowledged that hegemony will eventually turn into hubris, hence decisions such as moving the civic centre to the CBD and the council’s continued illogical faith in the ability of Realis to deliver the City Sentral shopping centre are defended with dogged determination not because they are believed to be the right thing to do, but because admitting their mistake would cause the leadership to lose face.

The absence of an effective opposition means the scrutiny system does not work properly, handing a huge amount of unsupervised power over to unelected council officers, reducing councillors to little more than a rubber stamp. If the key decisions are taken out of sight by people they have never heard of is it any wonder local voters are dissatisfied with the council?

By far the biggest problem though is the poor quality of the majority of councillors currently sitting in the chamber.

In an environment where one party has a virtual choke hold on power qualities such as independence of mind and a willingness to be awkward when you believe your cause to be right do not flourish. Ambitious members of the Labour Party who want to be selected as candidates and then shooed into safe seats rapidly become adept at toeing the party line and saying only the words written for them by regional office.

There are a few notable exceptions amongst the Independents but their voices tend to get drowned out by Labour councillors saying and doing what they’ve been told to. A few candidates with ability from any party might come to the city for a short time to use it as a stepping stone to bigger and better things, but for the most part it is the time servers who prosper, making the political life of our city much the poorer as a result.

If we want a council to be satisfied with then it is up to the people of this city to do something about it. We have to buck the trend of recent years and get out and vote in significant numbers, it is impossible for any council to build a real mandate if much of the electorate refuse to vote.

When we do vote more of us must break the surly bonds of habit and vote for someone, anyone, other than the Labour Party. As a former member that isn’t an easy thing to say, but we need a revived and more representative council, one that isn’t under the thumb of a complacent party willing to squander money on being told things it should already know while its tenants fear eviction and the lines at the food banks grow longer.

There is more than a ‘feel’ of too many about government phone intercepts.

Police may be overusing their power to gather information about people’s communication data, so says Commissioner for Interception Sir Anthony May.

In 2013 there were 514,608 requests for information such as who owns a particular phone and who the owner may have called, this, Sir Anthony says, ‘has the feel of being too many.’

His report clears GCHQ of breaking the law, an accusation levelled at it by Edward Snowden. Concern has also been expressed that the police are using their interception powers in areas the law does not intend them to and that may infringe civil rights, the report finds that only a fraction of the requests made were for purposes other than the detection of crime.

Responding to the report Prime Minister David Cameron told the BBC that it showed that ‘public authorities’ did not engage in ‘indiscriminate random mass intrusion.’

Foreign Secretary William Hague, also speaking to the BBC, said that a ‘senior and independent judge’ had looked into whether the police and other agencies misuse their interception powers and ‘concluded the answer is emphatically no;’ the government was though, he said, open to suggestions to strengthen the oversight framework.’

Speaking about the number of phone intercepts Sir Anthony May told the BBC that it ‘really does require to be investigated whether there may not be an institutional overemphasis in police forces on progressing their criminal investigations and an under emphasis on privacy.’

During the period covered by the report there were 970 errors made in the interception process, two of which resulted in warrants being executed at the homes of innocent people.
Don’t you just love judges, they have such a way with words. Be it puncturing the egos of cultural icons, ‘who are the Beatles?’ or, as in this case wielding understatement like a scalpel, they can do the most remarkable things with the English language.

Saying that 514,608 has about the ‘feeling’ of being too many is roughly equivalent to Scott of the Antarctic lifting the flap of his tent and saying ‘blimey it looks a bit chilly out’.

To me it has the ‘feel’ of a massive disconnect between we the public and the agencies who are supposed to be protecting us.

In the post Snowden world the old line having nothing to fear it you have nothing to hide no longer cuts the mustard. If the police and the government feel obliged to intercept phone calls on this scale then even the most innocent amongst us will start to feel we have something to hide and much to fear.

Whilst I realise that the apprehension of terrorists and serious criminals will always require some degree of interception of phone calls and other forms of communication surveillance on the scale at which it is starting to be carried out now does nothing to keep our society safe. In fact it might make it a more dangerous and less trusting place in which to live.

At worst we could end up in a situation not dissimilar to that faced by the hapless residents of the former GDR, where husbands and wives routinely spy on each other and walls really do have ears; usually attached to a stasi agent. A society where everyone it watching everyone else crushes trust and allows every mean spirited bully the chance to become a tyrant just by turning informer.

Does all this sound a bit far- fetched, maybe even a little paranoid? Consider then the calls made with the smirking support of the coalition by certain sections of the media for you and I to rat on the ‘benefits scrounger’ in our street; a dystopia of suspicion and public denunciations is only a moral panic away.

I defer to Sir Anthony’s superior knowledge of the law when he says the police and other agencies haven’t breached legislation as it currently stands. That doesn’t though stop me from thinking that if phone calls are being intercepted on this scale in a single year then the law is badly in need of being changed, because it is an ass.

Bedroom tax protesters take to the streets in Hanley.

Yesterday people around the country took to the streets to mark the first birthday of the government’s ‘bedroom tax.’

Riding by bus up to Hanley to take part in the local protest I couldn’t help looking out at the suburban streets passing the window and wondering how many people living there had had their lives blighted by the ‘bedroom tax.’ Out of all the austerity policies inflicted by the coalition it seems the most overtly cruel, striking as it does at one of the most basic requirements of a worthwhile life, the need for shelter.

The figures are stark, on Friday the Sentinel reported that since the introduction of the ‘bedroom tax’ 1304 people have fallen behind with their rent, many of whom have never previously been in arrears; 5189 people have applied for emergency help to pay from the council and the number of people using food banks has also increased.

When I get to the town centre the protest is smaller than might have been expected, this isn’t a carnival of outrage like the March on Stoke, just half a dozen or so people gathered around a trestle table in the rain. All around them shoppers rushed here and there clutching bags on the hunt for a bargain they probably didn’t need, a symbol, perhaps, of a culture where retail therapy is the treatment of choice when it comes to dealing with the uncertainties of modern life.

The placards several of the protesters hold are mostly handwritten, emphasising this is very much a grassroots driven protest, mainstream politicians seem to have a somewhat tortured relationship with the ‘bedroom tax’ and the whole austerity agenda. Nationally the Labour Party have intimated they will scrap the tax but few people at the protest believe this is more than an election promise liable to be broken rather than kept. Locally the ruling Labour group has won few friends by implementing savage cuts to public services whilst at the same time lavishing money on a new council headquarters.

Darryl, the quietly spoken young man who seems to be nominally in charge of proceedings, tells me the main purpose of the event is to highlight the help available to people struggling to pay the tax, the council fund set aside for this purpose has been poorly advertised. When I tell him I used to be a member of the Labour Party but left when the lack of internal democracy within the organisation became unbearable and have since joined the Green Party he says his own allegiance lies with ‘revolutionary’ politics, specifically the Socialist Workers Party.

He might just have a point, locally and nationally there is a need for some kind of radical change. The political system seems ever more like a cosy club for people who all went to the same schools and universities and have only a limited understanding of what life is like for average families. Quite how that change will come about though is unclear, the first past the post system makes it all but impossible for parties outside the three dusty monoliths to make a real impact and many voters seem to operate on instinct when they get to the ballot box.

The atmosphere is convivial, most people seem to know each other from one protest group or another, and many are involved with several groups, a reminder that the pool of politically active people is small.

Gillian, who works for a housing association and has travelled to the protest from Stafford tells me that she sees the impact of the ‘bedroom tax’ at first hand every day of her working life. She tells me about people being driven to despair by the financial burden of paying the ‘bedroom tax’ whilst struggling with the brutal and arbitrary sanctions imposed by the benefits system.

The worst of it, she says, is that the public seem to support the welfare reforms even though they are both ineffective and demonstrably unfair. Most people seem unaware that one stroke of bad luck could put them on benefits and in an often intolerably pressurises situation with little support, as Martin Niemoller might have put it if when they came for the benefits ‘scroungers’ you went shopping who will be there when they come for you next?

Lisa, another protester with an impressive list of groups she actively supports talks enthusiastically about the soon to be launched North Staffs Peoples Assembly. It certainly offers an opportunity for the disparate and sometimes fragmented network of groups opposing austerity to work together and make more of an impact.

She also tells the half dozen of us still standing around the trestle table that a friend attending a similar protest in London has called to say they’ve had more than a hundred people attending and even had a positive reaction from ‘white van man’.

It would be wishful thinking to say the Hanley protest has made anything like that much of an impact. A few members of the public have approached the stall and most have been supportive, but the day has really been more about people who are already politically active networking.

By one o’clock the whole thing has come to an end, the trestle table and leaflets have been packed away, the handful of protesters still standing around the stall shake hands and go their separate ways. Sitting in a nearby pub making notes about the day I watch the shoppers rushing past the window and think that most view the crisis of social justice slowly unfolding in this country through the media generated prism of a conflict between ‘strivers’ and ‘skivers’.

I couldn’t help thinking of Gillian and the tales she told me of people knocked flat by the system that should be giving them a hand up. How many of the people rushing past the window, I wondered, realised they were walking an economic tightrope with only the flimsiest of nets there to catch them were they to fall off?