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

Local people may have received a glossy leaflet from the Labour party yesterday. I know I did. Eagle-eyed readers will have noticed that it didn’t mention Bury, Prestwich or St Mary’s once, nor did it talk about the Labour candidate or how he intends to help Prestwich despite not living in it. It did though talk lots about the Lib Dems, and particularly mentioned our stance on tuition fees.

As I’ve said many times, I think that when we broke our promise not to raise fees it was the worst thing we’ve done. There are rights and wrongs to every bit of policy, including that one, but what no political party should do is promise one thing and then do the opposite. That’s why I would never have voted to raise fees without a clear display that the public wanted it, even though I think the system as proposed by the coalition is better than the one we have now. I still think university should be funded by the state.

That’s obviously not good enough for Labour, as yesterday’s leaflet shows. And Ivan Lewis, Bury South’s Labour MP, still hasn’t told anyone what he thinks should be done to sort out the issue either. He is very much against the government’s policy, that much became clear four months ago when he wrote to the Bury Times and me criticising the government’s policy.

What wasn’t clear then, and still isn’t clear is how he would fund higher education. We know he voted to introdcue tuition fees, and then to treble them, whilst part of the Labour government. But when the coalition increased them still further, he was apoplectic with rage. I asked him many times what he favoured instead, but he isn’t telling me or you.

Today the Labour Party leader Ed Miliband joined the criticism of the government. He’s welcome to do so of course, but again he offers no detailed alternative. Interestingly, he has once again indicated an interest in a graduate tax. It’s interesting because this and the coalition’s policy are almost identical. It would be crazy for a party so angry at the government’s plans to support a graduate tax. I’d ask Ivan Lewis what he thinks, but I suspect he wouldn’t tell.

Consider the similarities – The government’s plans see tuition fees paid up front by the government and then paid back by students as an extra tax on their wages once they graduate.

Miliband’s Graduate Tax proposals, whilst not detailed at all as yet, would be exactly the same thing overall, i.e. no up-front payment by students, and then an additional tax paid for out of income. It would be the government’s policy, with a different name.

Labour argue that their level of tax would be lower because state funding for universities wouldn’t be cut as much under a Labour government. But, again, Labour are scant on detail. Not cutting university funding means one of three things – either cutting something else instead, putting a tax up, or paying the deficit off slower and thus paying even more than the £120m in debt interest payments hat they country is paying every single day.

Until they come clean on their overall tax/cuts policy, the detail will be obscured. But the principle is the same – Ed Miliband has once again come out in favour of taxing graduates in exactly the same way as the government propose, just as he did prior to the election when his Labour party set up the Browne review which led to the government’s policy.

Once again it’s become clear that one of the great tragedies of the university funding debate is how it’s being presented to students. Labour want a Graduate Tax, and even the NUS have suggested the same. But both are rabidly against a government fee proposal that is more or less exactly the same thing, because it has been appallingly branded as a £9k a year fee. Would-be students are being put off. Even the Helena Kennedy Foundation, a charity encouraging social mobility, have said that misinformation and ignorance about finance are putting students off going to university.

Students are frightened by big fee numbers, even if the reality is different. And they are comforted by the idea of a graduate tax becuase it sounds safer, even if it’s the same thing as the government’s plan. I wonder sometimes whether if the government had called its fee rise the Buttercup and Smiley Sunshine Plan whether it’d have got an easier ride…

The government have been foolish not to press the case for their policy and make students aware of what the reality is. Labour have been complicit in this and, as Ivan Lewis and yesterday’s glossy Labour leaflet has demonstrated, have been happy to scaremonger and put young people off going to university to score political points. But, on the off chance that there are any would-be students reading this, they should know that the government’s plans will leave them better off at university and every month for years afterwards than the current system. I graduated in 2002, and by now I’d be £5,000 better off under the proposed system had it existed back then. That’s a chunk of a deposit on a house.

So please don’t fall for the Labour half-truths. Until Ivan Lewis and Labour come up with an actual alternative policy, they have nothing and don’t deserve your votes. If you don’t want to vote Lib Dem because of the broken promise then fair enough, but to me there’s 99% of the party left even if that 1% got spoiled. With Labour, all they have is an angry, glossy leaflet. And what use is that? 

Rick

It’s my 30th birthday today, and I’m coping with it by writing a self-indulgent blog post in the hope that it’ll make me feel better. Sorry about that. Feel free to not read it if you’d like.

The fact I’m thirty means that I am now older than my father was when I was born, and that I am categorically unable to describe myself as youthful except when with a gaggle of exclusively ancient colleagues. One of my friends got me a “Toy Story 3, Woody the Cowboy Magic 8 Ball” as a present. Ask it any question and it will give you an answer. I asked it if I was still young. It said “Yee Haw Partner! No.”

Luckily I am a Bury Metropolitan Borough Councillor (for the next three weeks at least) and thus find myself in the company of older people fairly often at meetings attended by people who retired when I was in infants school. The other day at the last Scrutiny meeting of the year we thanked a retiring member who has been a Councillor since  eight years before I was born. I feel a bit shame-faced describing my age-angst in his company, especially since he and everyone between him and me don’t seem half as worried about the clock ticking as I do. How are old people not beset with continual, blank-eyed panic about the lack of time left? Maybe they have more important things to worry about… Whatever the reason, I’d be shocked if they don’t feel as I do about the speed time flies at. Surely somebody somewhere must be able to slow it down. The people working that large hadron collider at CERN, for instance. I’m looking to you fellas. Help me out here.

I’m very grateful for the happy birthday wishes I’ve received, but I wonder how people can be so sure that “Happy Birthday!” ends with that exclamation mark. I would be a bit more comfortable if it were “Happy Birthday…?” followed by a carefully listed consideration of the pros and cons of everything involved.  

True, that list might note, on the plus side, as a 30 year old I have a wife and a happy home, I have no need to ask my parents for lifts places, and no problem talking to girls. Worries about all of these things hampered my teenage years. If someone would’ve offered me on my 18^thbirthday what I’ve got on my 30^th, I’d have bitten their arm off with my youthful teeth.

But, the list may continue, on the minus side, the fact that I have that wife means I have to curtail talking to those girls I am now at ease with. I also have to start worrying about people getting ill and old.  And the fact that I can drive myself places means that every day that I drive myself to my good, enjoyable, but fairly mundane job I am not driving myself off into a glorious sunset somewhere having accomplished a life’s work. Is that another wasted day? Could I be doing more for everyone? Another Council meeting and still the problems of Prestwich remain. As time goes on, what more could I be doing?

On top of my worrying, I’m fairly sure my knees ache more than they did yesterday, although that’s probably due to the election campaign and my slave-driving councillor colleagues who will not rest until we have suffered death by 10,000 leaflets. And the news isn’t helping. I am precisely the same age as the NASA Space Shuttle, the maiden flight of which touched down the day I was born. It is disconcerting to note in the papers today that in June this year the final Space Shuttle will be scrapped, deemed too old and surplus to requirements. If something so quite literally space-age can be outmoded at 30, that’s not a good sign.

Did I once blaze a trail somewhere, only to be considered, at thirty, past useful function? Like the Spcae Shuttle, do people worry that every time I get up bits will fall off me, and that I might disintegrate when I try to sit down?

Having said all that, I am still only a day older today than I was yesterday, after all, and there awaits me this evening some kind of celebration befitting someone who feels guilty about not being out canvassing. And, let’s face it, having been born in the late twentieth century in a fairly stable home in a first world country puts me in the top 0.000001% of lucky human beings in the history of time, and I’ve carried on being fairly lucky since. Here’s hoping the luck continues for all of us.

A Bury Labour Councillor friend of mine is also 30 today, so happy birthday to him, and to anyone else who’s celebrating today. Happy birthday!

Rick

The news that Eric Pickles is planning to intervene in cases where it is perceived that Councils are “unfairly” cutting grants to charities worries me.

Mr Pickles seems to be back-tracking on his previously asserted desire to give Councils much greater autonomy. How can he be best-placed to decide what is and isn’t a good spending decision made by a local Council? He plainly isn’t.

A Council’s first priority is to its citizens. It should decide how its money is spent, and if local people don’t like it they can vote in other Councillors every time there’s a local election (which in Bury is three years out of every four).

The government’s decision to scrap a lot of previously ring-fenced monies to allow Councils to decide more for themselves how to meet savings targets was welcome. It’s the localism I think will make Britain a better place, and will also help the “Big Society.”

But localism obviously has the impact of creating variance from one authority to another, and of meaning that in some areas unpalatable spending decisions are made. The idea is that local people (via their locally elected representatives) decide what’s best for a local area, and then learn from other areas about what works well and what doesn’t. It’s how progress is made.

That Pickles is now threatening to intervene in these supposedly unpalatable cases is wrong. Any Council spending decision is the result of decisions made by locally elected, locally accountable people. If those decisions are viewed as unreasonable, and if they are made by Councillors viewed as incompetent, then local people should boot those people out.

Intervening in that centrally is a step away from the localism I think government should be championing. I don’t want a man in Whitehall telling Bury MBC what its priorities are. We should be moving away from that now.

That’s not to say, of course, that cuts to charities are right or good. But cuts are necessary to balance the books of the Councils. They are the reality that all parties promised and that everyone knew were coming. There’s no escape from them, and if Pickles mandates that charities get more cash from Councils, that obviously means less Council cash for other things like libraries, swimming pools, care homes etc.

The important thing is that locally elected Councillors get to make the decisions. If the government can decide on a whim that it doesn’t like them, then what’s the point of Councils at all?

Rick

My new(ish) wife tells me, every once in a while, about the dreams she had in her youth concerning her future husband. Since I am no Brad Pitt in the looks, fame or wealth departments, I have to make up for it in romance.  Occasionally we have strayed into her thoughts on how she might spend her first Valentine’s Day as part of a married couple. In the course of those conversations, which contain such predictable themes as champagne, chocolates, flowers and those bizarre furry handcuffs I see in the window of Ann Summers when I scurry past, not once does she ever mention her husband spending the evening at a meeting of the Bury Council Licensing Committee.

And yet that is what I am doing tonight. Ever the romantic, I am spending my first married Valentine’s Day in the company of a room full of ageing men and naughty taxi drivers.

Still, I got her a card and a tube of Love Hearts, and what more can a man do?

Actually, last night I also cooked her a roast dinner which has yet to claim her life through food poisoning, and after slaving in a hot kitchen for three hours imploring stubborn Yorkshire Puddings to do me the honour of rising, Licensing actually represents a welcome break.

Tonight’s agenda is similar to normal, as we decide on the fitness of various applicants with troubled pasts to work as licensed taxi drivers and private hire vehicle drivers in Bury. It’s a difficult job, and actually Valentine’s Day, with its penchant for getting people a bit tiddly, reminds me why it’s so important. When I think of people a bit worse for wear getting into a stranger’s cab, it’s vital that we make sure the driver is fit and proper to do the job.

So sorry Tam, duty calls. And I’m taking you out for lunch tomorrow, so I hope I’m forgiven.

Rick

The letter in this morning’s Times is right to criticise the Secretary of State for Communities, Eric Pickles. He is not a champion of local government, as the holder of his position should be. His attitude, set alongside cuts which are undoubtedly very severe, is hugely disappointing. His inflexibility in frontloading the cuts and not allowing their effect to be spread more evenly is deeply frustrating.

I worry though that the letter’s criticism of Pickles might be misinterpreted as a criticism of the government’s wider agenda. In fact, the authors seem to relish the challenge to make savings, as I do, but find themselves hamstrung by the Secretary of State.

Say what you like about the government, but in cutting Council budgets so much it is giving local government a huge challenge which, if the sector wants more power, it needs to meet. If Lib Dems are serious about localism and about the positive changes to communities that empowered Councils can bring, they need get on with the job, no matter how hard it is. We all want to, including the authors of today’s letter. Unfortunately Mr Pickles doesn’t seem to be helping.

Some Councils have shown that with a bit of imagination and forward planning there are alternatives to simply exchanging the salami-slice cuts of previous years with a meat cleaver this time round. Councils have had months to prepare for these cuts, and many have done. But Mr Pickles’ lack of support for the vitality shown by some in the Local Government sector isn’t encouraging the slackers to catch up.

In Bury we have been let down by our Council. The first and only public consultation event on cuts was last week. It should’ve been last Summer and there should’ve been dozens since, with service transformation at the very top of political and officer agendas. I see little evidence of that in Bury, and in many other places by the sounds of things. There’s been nothing from Pickles to prod us into action. In not meeting the challenge, Councils are proving Pickles right.

Councils have millions of pounds in reserve to use to postpone the effect of cuts by buying time and re-designing services. Why aren’t they using them? Of course they shouldn’t use one-off monies to fund services until those monies run out, but that’s the whole point of this changing world – Services can’t carry on the way they are and need to change. Changing job roles and the objectives of services to reduce demand and do things in a different way can save money and produce better services.

The government is championing staff ownership and service provision by new types of provider. These are all potentially good things which Lib Dems should be supporting, not railing against.

There are too many Councils and Councillors who haven’t taken up the changes in all public services which demand radical new ways of looking at services. The right type of political leadership can mean embracing change rather than railing against it. We need a Secretary of State who appreciates this and supports it, showing those areas which are let down by their Councils that it needn’t be this way.

Local Councils have the chance to show the government how it can meet this biggest of challenges head on. If they do it, that’s the best possible signal to government that local Councils should get more powers. That’s a key plank of Lib Dem-ism which I wish the Secretary of State shared.

Rick

I hope everyone has had a nice weekend. Mine has been varied, if spent entirely in the confines of Prestwich. After yesterday’s Saturday Surgery and door-knocking escapades, I hosted a party fundraiser in the evening. The “Pizza and Politics” event was high on both pizza and politics, but sadly not high enough on snackfood consumption to enable the house to be a temptation-free zone today. I have already devoured what remained of the crisps, and may well be forced to move on to the chocolates later. If I drank all the spare booze I’d be dead.

Today I took a day off political activities (partly to eat all of last night’s junk food!), and settled down to watch Manchester City’s latest laboured performance against a team two division below them and about two hundred billion pounds less well off. I think I may be unable to attend the reply, which is a blessing. I also attempted to burn off some of the calories I took in with my gluttony by running for a few miles down the Irwell tow path and back. It’s a good job I am an experienced leafleter, as the years fending off yapping dogs which lurk on the other side of gates and letterboxes prepared me well for similar feats of escapeology when chased by various canines on my run. At one breathless moment I feared being overcome by a chihuahua, but I survived.

Tomorrow marks the start of another week and the end of another month. January has flown by with alarming haste. I may have mentioned this pet-theory of mine before, but I am convinced that ever since the scientists at CERN started messing with the Large Hadron Collider and trying to recreate the dawn of time, time itself seems to have speeded up. I can still taste the Christmas turkey, and yet in 30 hours it’ll be February.

February, of course, is Council budget month, when the municipal equivalent of a mother showing her children that the cupboards are bare occurs. Prior to that the actual shape of the budget needs to be finalised. Will that shape be mushroom cloud, or will it be circular, like the entrance to a deep, dark, potentially bottomless cavern? I have no idea, but one way to find out is to take part in the consultation events on offer. Unfortunately the Council have scheduled only one, on Tuesday evening at the Elizabethan Suite in Bury. But there is another, less formal one, taking place on Monday night (tomorrow) at the Library in Prestwich, at 18.30, specifically to talk about the Sunday closure plans of that library, which are part of the budget consultation.

I hope to be there, and I understand that it is a public meeting so anyone who wants to come can join me.

Hope to see you there.

Rick

A few weeks ago it snowed, which was nice. But then is snowed and snowed and snowed and snowed and snowed some more until lots of people were mightily fed up with the whole cold, wet, sorry mess. A white Christmas is lovely, but not if you want to walk to the end of the street without sliding around like Torville and Dean after seven pints.

One of the particularly annoying things about the snow is that the gritting capacity of the Council is only large enough to keep major roads clear. If you live an anything smaller than the A56 then it’s difficult. I think this is fine. I don’t think it’s reasonable to spend a fortune on grit trucks capable of doing every cul-de-sac in Bury.

But if we don’t have these grit trucks we should have grit bins instead. These are the things which are placed on side-roads and have grit inside for people to use themselves and grit their own streets.

At least that’s the theory. The reality is that there aren’t enough bins, and crucially that they aren’t full of grit when the snow comes.

When it snowed, the ones that weren’t already empty soon become so, and now I’m getting lots of queries as to when they’ll be refilled. This is reasonable, since the threat of more snow hasn’t gone for the year just yet.

The Council tell me that the re-filling of bins has been scaled down because the weather is currently mild, and that they’ll be refilled when the weather forecasts a cold snap.

This strikes me as a bit mad.

If it was June I could understand. The Council could take its time safe in the knowledge that it probably wouldn’t snow again for months. But it’s January. It may snow again this afternoon. Relying on the weather forecast is OK, but it’s hardly foolproof, and besides, if John Kettley foretells a snow shower, the Council will have to drop everything and run to try and fill up all the bins in time rather than doing it slowly and steadily over time.

If there was a hole in the Town Hall roof, the Council wouldn’t wait for a downpour to fix it, so why wait for snow to fill grit bins?

Grit doesn’t go off. It can be kept in a covered bin for months, even years, and still be useful. It’s not milk. It doesn’t go sour. So why not keep re-filling grit bins across the borough just in case it snows? It makes more sense than leaving the bins empty until the snow starts, when it surely won’t be possible to fill them all up in time.

Next year we should look at more grit bins. This year we should make sure that all the ones we have are full.

Rick

There are few more exciting things in the known universe than the intricacies of local council governance arrangements, so I am a lucky boy indeed to be spending this evening debating them. And you are lucky readers getting to read all about them here.

I have been invited to the Council’s Overview Management Committee in my role as Chair of the Scrutiny Committee, to give my thoughts on how well scrutiny is operating at the moment. One of the last acts of the last Labour government was to change how Councils are run, placing all the power in the hands of a “Strong Leader” who appointed a Cabinet to take decisions with him.

Unfortunately, the government didn’t realise that “Strong Leaders” aren’t necessarily good ones who use their powers in a constructive or collaborative way. Under the old system of governance, the Leader led an Executive of Councillors, including some opposition members, who met publicly to take decisions together. Now decisions are taken individually, in private, and all that stands between Cabinet Members and them being able to do what they like is our Scrutiny Committee. Sometimes we scrutinise and find that big mistakes are being made, but it makes me wonder what we miss.

In making their change to a “Strong Leader” model, the Labour government didn’t ask Councillors what they thought either. In Bury, Councillors on all sides have said that the new model isn’t working, and has been a retrograde step. It could work in theory, if the Strong Leader himself was capable of making it work in a way which was inclusive, open and democratic. Where this isn’t the case, it’s a disaster for local democracy. And as we’ve seen recently, the Leader of Bury Council doesn’t always have openness at the heart of his agenda. This is the man who’s restricted the rights of Councillors and the public to ask questions of him, and who leads the borough without living in it.

I think that scrutiny itself is working well, under the circumstances. Meetings are public, members can be questioned by anybody who comes along, and recently we’ve done some good work on school transport, homelessness and children’s centres to name but three things. Unfortunately we serve as the only line of defence against the Cabinet, who can proceed at will with no opposition input. The system is a charter for unilateralism, both of Cabinet Members and, even more worryingly, unelected Council officers whose proposals seem far too often to be nodded through by a Cabinet member.

Hopefully tonight’s meeting will address some of these concerns.

Rick

Yesterday teatime I was asked my prediction for the result of the Oldham East and Saddleworth by-election, and I said that I predicted with some confidence that the Lib Dems would end up with no fewer MPs than they had yesterday. And I was right.

Sadly, we ended up with no more either, but when I heard the result I was relieved that the doom-mongers were proved very much wrong.

I think that after an incredibly intense campaign the result doesn’t say very much. Certainly, predictions of disaster for the Lib Dems were completely wide of the mark. This is a seat we’ve never held, and we still lost it to Labour in May at the height of our popularity and the depths of Labour unpopularity. We could’ve won it yesterday, and might’ve stood a better chance in better times, but it was never going to be easy.

Yesterday’s Guardian, which has become the most shrill mainstream critic of the coalition, contained an article headed “Are Lib Dems staring into the abyss?” The answer is no. Our vote-share increased on the one we achieved in May, and we did much better than the polls predicted. There is clearly some ill-feeling towards the party from some, and understandably so. Perhaps the make-up of our support was re-aligned last night too. What’s clear from the result is that more people voted for the coalition and its approach to tackling the debt and deficit than voted against. When it comes to the General Election in 2015 and the two parties in that coalition present their different views of how to take the country forward, I hope that goodwill will continue and we will have convinced the country that we took the necessary difficult steps whilst Labour did not.

For me, last night was not all good news for Labour. They won, and congratulations to them and the new MP. But their main opposition in the seat has never been less popular, and they are the sole opposition to the government. It should’ve been an easy ride, and it wasn’t.

Although Labour increased their majority, this is pretty much par for the course for opposition parties in by-elections (as we’ve found to our benefit over the years winning some highly unlikely victories). They didn’t win by the gigantic margin some predicted. Whilst there is naturally some opposition to the coalition and the Lib Dem role in it (not least from me sometimes), it seems clear that lots of people do realise the need to make cuts, and do see that at the moment Labour have nothing to offer.

I’d have thought that Labour’s vote would have been energised to come out and give the coalition the kicking Labour told everyone it deserved. The message I got last night was that only a few hundred more people voted Labour in the by-election than at the General election.

Rick