Bert Crane

Last week I went along to the full council meeting at the town hall. It is not something I do very often, maybe once or twice in the last five years, but last week was a very special meeting – the last one ever to feature Bert Crane as a councillor.

He has been a councillor since before many of us were born, and possibly longer than anybody else in the country – 58 years continuously. Not on the same council of course. Local government has been reorganised a few times while he has been there.

He started on Horsham rural district council then the urban development council and finally on Crawley borough council. This year his four-year term is up and he has decided not to stand again.

At the meeting last week the mayor presented Bert with a badge which will continue to give him access to the town hall facilities after his retirement. She described it as being an honorary councillor and having the freedom of the town hall (though I think he already has the freedom of the town) but in practice it just means he will be able to go into the members’ room for a coffee and the read the newspapers.

Perhaps he will enjoy being able to continue his long-established routine, or perhaps he will try to catch up on 58 years’ worth of jobs around the house, but at least he has the choice and it was a well-meant gesture by the council.

The dark side of it all is the well of mean spirits that the event uncovered. The way I understand it, this gesture was thught up by somebody on the Labour group and agreed with the leader of the council. All was well until he raised it in a Tory group meeting and there was a lot of resistance to doing this small thing. Why and how could you object to it?

Really this is a once-in-a-lifetime event. I can’t imagine many people, if any, have served so long in the same place without a break, and I can’t see it happening again. It is well known that Bert would not accept any sort of official honour like an OBE or CBE or whatever as he has a robust view of the whole honours system, but this is something from people he knows and who know him, so that’s OK.

Bert isn’t in the best of health these days but he is still sharp and puts a lot of energy into being a councillor, even after so long. Anybody who would not have some admiration for him or who would begrudge him a small token of appreciation must be a very small-minded and spiteful individual indeed.

Talking of whom, I just listened to Maude’s so-called ‘car-crash interview‘ on the Today radio programme on iPlayer. He seemed to be trying to say “so what?” at the same time as denying it all. Not the smooth performance I normally expect from my erstwhile opponent. It could only have been worse if he had tried to suggest that this was an example of caring conservatism’s new egalitarianism , opening up access to anybody, rich or poor, as long as they pay £250,000.

Personally I think the excuse that it was just one rogue co-treasurer rings about as true as News International and their one rogue royal reporter phone hacking defence.

What might be most unbelievable is the sheer gullibility of Cruddas in falling for a variation on the fake sheikh trick.

The worst aspect of it all is the way the Tories are trying to divert the whole fuss into an attack on Labour’s links with the unions. As a union member myself I see the political levy as form of membership fees for affiliate members and not as a donation. Hearing the accusations about union leaders expecting to influence policy of the Labour party all I could think was “Of course. We are members and members of a party want to influence policy”. The irony is that the affiliated members in the unions have so little influence, just as individual proper members have so little influence on party policy.

Is that the answer for trade unions? Send members two direct debit forms – one for the union and one direct to the Labour party as an affiliate member?  The Tories could respond by increasing membership fees to £50,000 a year…

The whole thing is almost enough to make me regret not reading newspapers any more.

Not a good day to be a Tory MP really, with that terrible balancing act between keeping on the right side of Cameron and appeasing the local association, and if you decided to vote ‘for’ you find yourself in in the lobby with such a likeable crowd… (Redwood, Dorries, Paisley, Chope, Carswell, Cash, Hooey, Vaz)

I see from the list of ‘rebels’ that Crawley’s Henry Smith provisionally voted ‘for’. I say provisionally because I haven’t seen the list of who voted against, so can’t be sure that he hasn’t done another of his hyperactive abstentions.

Yet again, I found myself watching it fixated not so much on the issue of the day so much as the sheer idiocy of having business at that time of night combined with the amount of time it takes to vote on a simple yes/no matter because of having to traipse through lobbies instead of pushing a button and getting an instant result.

It turns out to mean pseudo-charities like Atlantic Bridge and individuals like Adam Wewwity taking over from the civil service and arranging meetings for cabinet ministers with foreign businessmen. Why didn’t they just say so in the first place?

He then goes on a bit longer explaining why he decided to abstain, which didn’t really make sense. He says he wanted to send a clear public message that further large bail-outs should cease. I would argue that abstaining (or voting for and against) is not a very clear message. Voting one way or the other is a clear message. Voting both ways is a mixed message. All it says is “I am against this but I don’t want the vote to go the way I feel because I don’t want to upset the whips and miss out on a junior ministerial assistant job in the future.”

But of course, the real criticism from the Autonomous Mind and EU Referendum blogs was not that he effectively abstained (although they obviously don’t like that either) it was that, having abstained, he tried to give the impression that he had voted one particular way. On finding himself listed as one of the MPs who voted ‘for’ he did not get in touch to say that he had actually abstained: he got in touch and just referred them to the list of MPs who voted ‘against’.

That was the real criticism, and nobody seems to have noticed that Henry’s reply to the Obby avoided that completely but instead answered the much less important question of why he voted both ways. Incidentally, I can never understand why MPs put up with such rubbish. Why don’t they change the protocol so that abstentions can be registered? Building a third lobby would be a bit difficult admittedly, but then why are they still voting by such an old-fashioned, impractical and time-consuming method anyway? Surely Caroline Lucas can’t be the only MP out of 650 who thinks it is time to move to the 21st Century? Even the 20th would be a step forward.

Anyway, the cherry on the top of the cake is the final comment from Henry:

I don’t often read blogs as my time is very limited and I haven’t read any critical blog comments regarding this issue but I respect their right to free speech.

That would be fair enough but… this all started when the EU Referendum blog published a critical comment in the form of listing Henry as one of the MPs who voted for the bail-outs and he sent them an e-mail asking them to remove him from their list. A pretty clever trick if he hadn’t read because, as he says, he hasn’t “read any critical blog comments regarding this issue”.

The EU Referendum site reckons Henry is being “a tad disingenuous” about this so it is only fitting that his response to those criticisms should also be a tad disingenuous. In my mind his response has not answered anything. It has just responded to an accusation of bending the truth with an outright lie.

At the vote in Parliament he voted for it and also voted against, effectively abstaining.   Personally I don’t have a problem with abstention as such.  If you don’t have enough knowledge of an issue to form an opinion, or just don’t have an opinion then why vote arbitrarily, or vote the way somebody else tells you?   I would go further and say that it makes a nice change from MPs having to pretend to know everything and have an opinion about everything.

But why do it that way when staying in your seat would have exactly the same result, why go to all that bother?  I can think of one good reason and one bad reason.  The good reason would be that voting twice at least shows up as a vote, a positive abstention if you like.   When TheyWorkForYou publish their stats of how many votes an MP attends there is no other way to register that you were actually there but didn’t care one way or another whether to spent £9billion of public funds on the IMF while councils are laying off staff.  By just abstaining you are lumped in with those MPs that couldn’t, or didn’t want to, turn up.

The bad reason?  Well when you meet a constituent, journalist or blogger with a stronger opinion than yourself you can, semi-legitimately, say you agree with them to the extent you voted the way they wanted you to.  You just don’t mention that you also voted the other way too.  Whether this was Henry’s intention or not he certainly seems to be exploring the possibilities of it, as Autonomous Mind has pointed out – and pointed out using enough sarcasm that any more would be superfluous.  The EU Referendum version of it is quite amusing too.

As far as I can make out, Conservativehome was running a list of MPs who voted against the increase, hailing them as Eurosceptic heroes.  The EU Referendum site, on the other hand, were listing those who voted for the increase, listing them as traitors.  Henry emailed them, asking to be removed from their list and then… referred them to the the Conhome list as proof that he voted the other way.  EU Referendum, in a masterpiece of understatement called this “a tad disingenuous” when they went to Hansard to double check.

Had he asked to be removed from the list because he effectively abstained that would be fine.  Had he asked to be removed from both lists that would be fine.

It may be a small thing, but if somebody can lie about something so easily checked then what else are they up to?  Is ‘lie’ too strong a word or is it just spin?

Or maybe Henry finally made his mind up on the trifling matter of £9billion and is now regretting and denying his other vote.  Now how about that vote on bringing in legislation for constituents to recall MPs?  I think a few people in Crawley might fancy a go at that if they knew their MP’s statements on even something as straightforward as which way he voted were as trustworthy as a News of the World reporter.

And talking of reporters… maybe those working for our local press will manage to get more of an answer from Henry then EU Referendum did.

Hat tip to Peter for sharing this on his Facebook page.

Well it looks like they have their eyes on TUPE now.  Interestingly the rhetoric on this is using two tactics they have already found used elsewhere:

1. Saying that removing workers’ rights is actually good for the workers – that TUPE rules destroy jobs rather than save them.
2. Calling TUPE protection “gold-plated” with its echoes of the public sector’s supposed ‘gold-plated pensions’

I could spend a long time picking apart even the few details given in that story, but I’m not sure I have the energy this late.   There are not many details given, but it looks like redundancy will not only be the cheapest option instead of the last resort it used to be, but it will now be even easier.  What next?  Reduce the statutory minimum redundancy payments (soon to be referred to as platinum-coated no doubt) because “actually it destroys jobs”?

If somebody is harrassed or hounded out of a job are they now going to have barriers placed between them and the prospect of justice at a tribunal just because a few people have made vexatious claims?    Not that the anybody in the story is saying that happens or that it happens a lot – just that employers are worried it might happen.

The other scary story in the news is about Westminster council wanting to change the rules on council housing.   This uses another favourite tactic of the Tories, often aided and abetted by the Daily Mail who will always find some tasty examples, where they find an extreme case of some sort of apparent abuse of a system or apparent injustice and use it to justify some measures which will do a whole lot more than address the supposed problem.

In this case Westminster council want to be able to raise council rents in relation to earnings, saying that there are people in council properties earning £100k a year while others are homeless.

It is all coached in such terms that to argue against it sounds like defending the indefensible, but I think we must argue against it on both political and practical grounds, but before that, just a couple of thoughts…

• This is Westminster council we are talking about: isn’t at least part of the problem there down to them flogging off huge swathes of their council accommodation  in what was proved by the courts to be gerrymandering?
• Do we actually believe that there are 2,200 of their council tenants earning £50k a year and 200 of them earning £100k a year?

I’m taking their claims with a pinch of salt until I see the methodology of how they arrived at those numbers and in the meantime I’m applying Occam’s Razor to them.  How likely is it that they went to every council tenant, asked them how much they earn, got replies from all of them, have that many high earners (let’s ignore even the Labour leader’s remarks about middle-incomes.  £50k puts you in the 90th percentile easily) and that those high earners give honest and accurate answers?

How much more likely that they have guessed or extrapolated from one or two cases which may or may not be apocryphal?

I may continue with this tomorrow, and rant about the practical reasons why this is such a bad idea.  In the meantime, note how they stress again that any changes would not affect existing tenants.  Whenever I hear that I always imagine them finishing the sentence in their heads with “for now”.

However, since the chief exec had his union involved, at which point the secretary of ALACE was quoted as saying “The way Mark Hammond has been treated by his council is outrageous” it does sound unlikely that everything is amicable.   There has probably been an arrangement, with his diplomacy or silence one of the conditions of pissing a large chunk of our council tax up the wall to compensate him for his mistreatment.

Anyway, the use of the word ‘amicable’ is not the most inaccurate part of the short article on the website: that comes right at the end.

For the full story and reaction see the County Times- out on Thursday.

Somehow I doubt we will be getting the full story.

When Labour lost the election in May it was no great surprise, but when it became clear that the Tories hadn’t won either there was a glimmer of hope: at least those nice Lib Dems would rein in the worst excesses of the Tories wouldn’t they?   And then, like a scene with the Borg in Star Trek, they were assimilated all too quickly and the trappings of power seemed to take over.

Far from acting as a brake to the Tories’ plans they popped up fronting some of the worst and offering justification for others.  My erstwhile opponent, Francis Maude (AKA the Tory Peter Mandelson – I bet he loves that description) even felt able to say that the coalition is more radical than the Thatcher government.

As an aside: how well do you think they would have done if that had been their election slogan?  They have spent years trying to ‘detoxify the brand’ which in practical terms meant putting a lot of distance between the new cuddly Tories and the old nasty party; a tacit admission that they knew the general voting public wouldn’t see out-Thatchering Thatcher as an attractive proposition.

Last week I managed to get my hopes up again when I saw a headline in the Guardian about eliminating child detention.  This is one of those extremely illiberal situations that Labour really should be ashamed of that needs sorting out.  I would prefer it if a Labour government did it, but if the coalition sort it out then that is OK too.  Getting it sorted out is the important thing.

Then I read the actual story and found that the children would be freed from detention by being deported. Within two weeks. In some cases, though admittedly not all, the ‘freedom’ they face at home is far worse than detention in the UK could have been.     That is like saying all the right things about reducing the prison population and then revealing that the mechanism for doing that will be capital punishment – although to be fair Ken Clarke hasn’t said that yet.

A fine example of saying the right thing and then doing the wrong thing.  It reminds me of Peter Cook in the film Bedazzled where, as the Devil,  he grants Dudley Moore’s wishes but does so literally in a way that he really doesn’t enjoy.

Anyway, for those of us who like to think that there might be some hope for the Lib Dems after all, Simon Hughes popped up to criticise Cameron’s plans for social housing changes.  Hot on the heels of that is the news that he is not alone, and that the majority of other Lib Dems oppose the plans.

Of course if they had decided to not form a coalition, but let the Tories form a minority government, I would like to think that all of them would not only oppose the plans but be free to vote against them.

So far they are just saying the right thing and it remains to be seen whether they will follow it through with actually doing the right thing too.  We will have to wait and see.  My more cynical and Lib Dem-hostile colleagues would say that this opposition says more about the atrocious, ideologically motivated proposals than about the Lib Dems.

Meanwhile, if anybody needs a great example of what the country would be like with fixed-term tenures for social housing, just look at this story from Friday’s paper.

A day after Dave announced his intentions, Kensington & Chelsea council were onto a lady living alone in a two-bedroomed flat telling her that she had better move to a smaller place now while she can still choose where to go, because they will soon have the power to force her to move wherever they like.

Forget that Dave reckons it is all just an idea at the moment, and that even if it went into law it would only apply to new tenants and not affect existing tenants, we can see how some councils are absolutely raring to start harassing their tenants.

The lady in the story says:

I could not sleep for the last two nights. I have lived here for 22 years and my husband died 14 years ago. I told them the spare bedroom is very useful as I have grandchildren and I can have them to stay.

My children gave me £2,000 to paint my flat and put in new carpets because the council would not. So will I lose all this too? I know all the neighbours and my friends. Why make me move? I do not want to go.

Which captures a lot of the arguments already given for opposing the policy: tenants living in perpetual fear instad of feeling secure, the forced break-up of settled communities, and the removal of any incentive for tenants to decorate or furnish their homes properly.

Remember that all this pressure is being piled on before the policy even takes effect – a policy that is supposed to not affect existing tenants like this lady anyway – not to mention that most councils and housing associations define excessive under-occupancy as having more than one bedroom in excess of what is needed.  Current practice is to accept that a spare room is not an unthinkable luxury, but Kensington & Chelsea seem to think otherwise and maybe their hardline approach is pointing the way to what the future really holds.

If the Tories do force this policy through  – which they would surely need the support of the Lib Dems to do – that will be the hard part.  Extending the new erstrictions to existing tenants and redefining what underoccupancy means will be seen as tweaks that can be slipped in under the radar later. Or perhaps sooner rather than later.

I have to say that I would feel a lot more confident in the ability of the Lib Dems to prevent this if they were not embroiled in the coercion coalition and were not led by Nick Clegg.