Week 2 2014

Tendring Topics……….on line

The Politicising of Local Government

          One of the saddest developments that I saw during my thirty-three years in the local government service was its gradual politicising.  Mostly I have worked with small authorities.  My first two years, prior to World War II, were with Ipswich County Borough Council (nowadays it would be called a unitary authority) but my position then, as a junior clerk/trainee sanitary inspector, was so lowly and insignificant that I gave no thought to the councillors and chief officers.

            After the war I qualified as a sanitary inspector (later to be redesignated public health inspector and ultimately, after my retirement, as environmental health officer) and obtained a post with the Gipping Rural District Council, a very rural area in East Suffolk, just north of Ipswich.  In 1955 my family and I (by that time my wife and I had one son) moved to the Clacton area for me to work for the Tendring Rural District Council, an almost equally rural district adjacent to Clacton and taking up the greater part of the area of the Tendring Peninsula.  After a year (and the birth of another son!) we moved to my present home in Clacton and I became a public health inspector there, but later was appointed as the Council’s Housing Manager.   Clacton Urban District was another quite small authority comprising the town and holiday resort of Clacton-on-Sea and its seaside suburbs of Jaywick Sands and Holland-on-Sea.

            During my years working for rural authorities in Suffolk and Essex and for a small urban authority in Essex, I was scarcely aware of the political complexion of my employers.  A majority of Gipping Rural District councillors were either farmers or parsons.  Most declared themselves to be Independent and represented only the interest of the local community that had elected them. There were, I think, just two Labour councillors.  The vicar of Needham Market also declared himself to be independent but he made no secret of his socialist political convictions and his very ‘high church’ (Anglo-Catholic) theological outlook. He was deeply loved by his mostly-conservative congregation who voted him back with a comfortable majority at every council election.    The farmers and other members of the clergy probably voted Conservative in national election but I am quite sure that when they considered the local matters that came to their attention they, and the Labour members and Needham Market’s eccentric priest, all genuinely considered them on their merits without giving any thought to national politics.

            I never really got to know the Tendring Rural and Clacton Councillors as I knew those in Suffolk but I have no reason to believe that they were materially different. In those days and in small authorities, a political label was just an indication of the general philosophy of the councillor.  I am quite sure they would all have been shocked if they had been told they were expected to stick loyally to ‘a party line’. I do know that, for the year immediately preceding local government reorganisation in 1974 the overwhelmingly Conservative Tendring Rural District councillors chose as their chairman, Derek Crosfield, a well-known local Quaker and an active member of the Labour Party. I know too that throughout the time I was in their employment the strongly Conservative Clacton Urban District Council refused to sell off their council houses, though they encouraged and supported tenants who bought their own home, thus leaving a council house available for letting.

            Sadly, all that changed in 1974.  Harwich Borough Council, Frinton and Walton, Brightlingsea, and Clacton Urban District Councils and Tendring Rural District Council were abolished and replaced by a single Tendring District Council with a population in the vicinity of 100,000.   Five smallish authorities with very little in common beyond their geographical situation within the Tendring Peninsula became one large authority

1973 was a very worrying time for local government employees.  I had hoped to get the job of Director of Housing for the new district.  I didn’t.  It went to the Housing Manager of the Tendring Rural District.  I could, I suppose, have tried for the job of Deputy Director (probably on a higher salary than I was on as Clacton’s Housing Manager!).  Or I could have reverted to my original job of Public Health Inspector.  Neither possibility appealed to me.  Luckily the new Council wanted a Public Relations Officer.  I had by that time acquired a great deal of successful experience of both spare-time freelance journalism and public speaking.  I knew much more about journalism than most local government officials and much more about local government than most journalists.  I got the job;  not nearly as high a salary as ‘Director of Housing’ but much more enjoyable and satisfying!

            With reorganisation came politicisation.   The Government had decreed that all Council Committee Meetings and meetings of the full Council must be open to the press and public – so that members of the public could see every moment of the decision-making procedure.  It sounds wonderful, but it didn’t happen like that. Politics suddenly became all-important.  The majority party held private meetings (they were ‘unofficial’ and therefore allowed) to discuss every aspect of the Council’s functions and the agenda of every forthcoming committee meeting.  Recommendations were agreed at these meetings and any committee members who had reservations about them were expected to toe the party line.  Similarly, when the Committee report and recommendations came to the full Council, members of the majority party were expected to support them loyally.  Thus decisions affecting the whole of the district could be – and often were – made not by a majority of the members of the Council but by a majority of the ‘majority party’, which certainly was not necessarily a majority of the whole Council.

            Even that didn’t satisfy central government’s desire to make every council chamber a mini-House of Commons.  Councils were to be reorganised and were given two choices.  The first, and government-preferred, option was to have a directly elected Mayor – like the Mayor of London, who has executive authority only partially checked by a ‘London Assembly’ with ‘scrutiny powers’.   We hear a great deal about the activities and opinions of London’s Mayor, Boris Johnson, but I haven’t heard a whisper of the activities of the London Assembly.

            The other alternative, adopted by the great majority of local authorities, was to have a small executive ‘cabinet’ of the ‘majority party’ to decide the policies of the local authority and to get them ’rubber stamped’ at Meetings of the full Council.  Thus, decisions were made by a majority of an even smaller group of councillors, and party members were expected to endorse them.   We now have a Council resembling the House of Commons with a ‘government’ an ‘opposition’ ‘three line whips’ and all the other parliamentary nonsense!  Even more sinister in my opinion, has been the relegation of the Council Chairman or Mayor to a merely ceremonial role while  real power and authority lie in the hands of the Council’s political ‘leader’, usually the senior member of the Majority Party.  I am reminded of the situation in pre-war Nazi Germany when, parallel with existing forms of local government, there was always a Nazi Gauleiter to keep them on the ‘right path’.  Similarly in the Soviet Union every local Soviet (or council) had its political commissar to ensure compliance with the wishes of the Supreme Soviet.

Victims of Politicising

            The end of the year brought two Essex victims of politicising onto the front pages of at least the local and regional newspapers.   One for whom I have the greatest sympathy is Peter Halliday, former leader of Tendring Council.   He was a working builder who believed in fairness, straight talking and straight dealing.  He clearly wanted to serve the local community, became an active member of the local Conservative Party (though I don’t think he would ever have been described by the late Lady Thatcher as ‘one of us’)  was elected to the Tendring Council, became leader of the Conservative majority group and thus political Leader of the Tendring District Council.  

            Early in December he resigned from the leadership and from his membership of the Council.   He had evidently found himself being urged to put Party interests before what he considered to be those of the local community and could endure it no longer.  He did not depart gracefully and discreetly but very angrily and with all sorts of allegations against former colleagues. He was a very obvious victim of politicising.

Lord Hanningfield

            Veteran readers of Tendring Topics, who remember my strongly worded criticisms of Lord Hanningfield when he was Leader of the Essex County Council, may find it astonishing that I should regard him as one of the victims of politicising.  I criticised his enthusiasm for expensive schemes remote from the statutory duties of a county council (there was the County Council Bank that nobody wanted and the Essex County Council branch in mainland China to boost Essex exports), for his wildly expensive  globe-trotting (with compliant councillors and senior officials)  to every corner of the world ostensibly to encourage exports, his eagerness to claim credit for any good the County Council did while passing the blame further down the line .  He once remarked that Essex could be an independent state; only joking of course, but there’s little doubt as to whom his Lordship had in mind for that state’s  President.

            Pride comes before a fall – and Lord Hanningfield’s fall was spectaculr.  He was convicted of fraud in his role as a member of the House of Lords and was given a remarkably short prison sentence of which, for reasons that are beyond my understanding, he served only a few weeks.  

            He was also suspected of fraudulently claiming expenses in connection with his leadership of the Essex County Council and was briefly under arrest in connection with an investigation into these allegations.   However no action was taken about this not, so I understand, because Lord Hanningfield was very obviously ‘not guilty’ but because of the difficulty of distinguishing between justified and unjustified expenses.

Most people in Lord Hanningfield’s position would simply have been thankful and have kept a low profile – but not his Lordship.  He sued the Essex Police for wrongful arrest and obtained substantial damages! Unabashed, he resumed his attendance at the House of Lords. This got him into further trouble. A few weeks before Christmas 2013 a newspaper revealed that for most of his visits to the House of Lords, for each one of which he had claimed £300 'attendance allowance', he had spent less than forty minutes there!

            How, you may ask, can he possibly be considered ‘a victim’ of politicising? He clearly has done very nicely out of it.  Quite so – financially; but exposure as a fraudster, a spell (even though brief) in prison and finding himself the subject of humiliating exposure in the popular press, must have been deeply painful experiences. On earlier interviews broadcast on tv he has appeared well dressed and smart but not so on his latest interview.  I thought he looked unkempt, his beard looking more like one whose wearer 'couldn’t bother to shave’ than one that had been neatly trimmed. I felt sorry for him.  I know, from my own experience, how easy it can be for an elderly man, living alone, to ‘let himself go’; something I am determined not to do!

            I believe that none of this would have happened had not Essex County Council been so thoroughly politicised. Had other members of the County Council not felt that they owed a debt to Party Unity he would never have been allowed to get away with his expensive jaunts abroad, his lavish hospitality (with our money) and his use of a County Council car and driver to take him to and from the House of Lords.

            It would certainly be easier to sympathise with him in his present plight if he were to show the slightest degree of regret and remorse – but he doesn't.  Lord Hanningfield is convinced that he has only done what everyone else was doing and that he has been unfairly picked on.  Of the latest revelations regarding his  brief attendances at the House of Lords to claim his £300 allowance’, he says that he has done nothing wrong, it is just ‘a storm in a teacup’ and that instead of concentrating on his alleged peccadilloes we should be thinking of his many years of service to the community.

            And I have little doubt that if his elevation to the peerage and the politicising of local government, hadn't put into his hands the power that corrupts, that is just what we would  have been doing.