Call it brave, call it counter-intuitive, call it just plain stupid, but the Tories are coming up ’ere for their local government conference in the spring. This, after comprehensive loss of power in city halls right across Yorkshire last May. Where it had, or shared, power in Bradford, Hull, Leeds and Sheffield, the Conservative Party is now the opposition.
Eric Pickles, the former teenage Marxist who travelled right across the political spectrum and right down to Essex to find a safe Tory seat, is to welcome representatives from the shires to Leeds for their annual daffodil-time spirit-raiser. They hate being called delegates, by the way. “No one delegates us”, they snort if you even suggest it.
By all accounts, it will be a low-key affair, lasting only one Saturday – February 25 – in the plush Queen’s Hotel, in City Square, where until a couple of weeks ago a rather bedraggled Occupy Leeds camp was to be found. The weather, not the law, beat the protesters. This winter may have been milder than the last two, but you could have believed we were having a dress rehearsal for the biblical flood.
The Occupiers in Sheffield are made
of rather sterner stuff, and the Cathedral authorities there are taking legal action to clear them off the pavement. They’ve taken refuge in a nearby Salvation Army Citadel that has been empty for more than a decade. There’s something quite poignant about that.
Not that such considerations will figure in the day of mutual Tory back-slapping. They may not have much to slap about in Yorkshire, but they’ll put on a propaganda show for the BBC, the broadcasting wing of the coalition. The county’s Conservative MPs, while larger in number since 2010, are not shining at Westminster. Apart from escapee Pickles and the grand old man of Tykeistan, William Hague, they don’t figure much in the ministerial hierarchy.
The new intake is particularly disappointing, with only a parliamentary private secretary here or there and veteran Anne Mackintosh chairing the Defra Select Committee. And it’s hard to see the likes of former television sports presenter Jason McCartney ever making waves by the Thames. Most of them have simply disappeared into the House of Commons woodwork.
How different to the fortunes of the county’s Labour grandees. Leader Ed occupies Doncaster North, his Shadow Chancellor Big Ed has Morley and Outwood and his wife Yvette Cooper the Shadow Home Secretary (tipped to succeed Ed Miliband as the first woman leader if he’s pushed under the proverbial Number 11 bus in Whitehall) is well camped in Castleford and Pontefract. An arc of authority, you might say, or an axis of command. There are so many of the blighters round ’ere that Labour could afford to lose a few – John Healey and Gerry Sutcliffe – without the county becoming any less top-heavy on the Opposition front bench.
But I notice that Miliband and Balls, the notorious firm of political accountants, didn’t come north to lay down the new policy of adherence to Tory spending cuts and public sector pay freezes. The message trips off the tongue rather easier in London than in Leeds and the other big cities of the north, where thousands of local government, public agency, civil service and National Health Service jobs have gone and continue to go.
Council workers in Ed Miliband’s own Doncaster North constituency were told two weeks ago that they would have to accept pay cuts of 4 per cent to “keep” up to 250 jobs. That comes on top of pay freezes and 1,000 town hall jobs already lost in the borough. This, I suppose, is Ed’s policy to “prioritise jobs over pay” in action. The idea came from council officials, but was supported by Labour councillors and the authority’s directly-elected mayor, “English Democrat” Peter Davies.
But, faced with threats of legal actions over unilateral changes in terms and conditions, which could cost the borough more than the planned £30 million salary savings, Davies backed down and slashed the cuts to a maximum of 2.5 per cent, with those earning less than £14,733 a year losing nothing. As Tribune went to press, the unions were considering their response.
All this should be seen against the backdrop of the worst jobs crisis in years. Yorkshire and Humberside is the second hardest-hit region in the country, with dole queues growing by 10 per cent to 270,000. Figures for those in work actually fell, against the national trend. One in five children are reckoned to be living in poverty in West Yorkshire. And one local NHS hospital trust – Mid Yorkshire, the authority begging help from the British Army to staff an accident and emergency unit in Pontefract – is in debt to the tune of £20 million.
Wherever you look, the news is grim.
And that’s why I expect voters in Doncaster to end their 10-year failed experiment of directly-elected mayors in May. A Labour-supported public consultation found 90 per cent in favour of holding a referendum to scrap the post, and the poll will take place on the same day that councils are up for election. This is a free hit against the Government, and I imagine the vote could go the same way in Government-imposed referendums to establish directly-elected mayors in Sheffield, Leeds, Wakefield and Bradford.
The Tories may be coming up ’ere for a day out, but they won’t be taking home any presents from the electorate.
