Entries Tagged 'Ipswich Borough Council' ↓

If people thought the results in Ipswich were grisly for the Tories last week then thank the Lord that UKIP is not active in Ipswich.  There are a number of historic reasons for UKIP’s absence, the main one being tha the 2005 election candidate for North Ipswich left the party to found UK First.  The effort is now led by the likeable but rather uncharasmatic Chris Streatfield who doesn’t even live in Ipswich.  They don’t even get borough candidates.

And this is excellent news for the Tories.  In Ipswich the Tory base is incredibly fed up – and Labour is currently less toxic than it was when Chris Mole was around.  Some of this dissension is hard to pin down, and some of it (although far less than any of us thought) is a genuine dislike of the austerity measures – particularly if they are falling on a particular group – however a lot of it is the puzzlement over what on earth the point of a Conservative government is.

Although I’d like to say that this is driven by Europe, although the British electorate agrees with UKIP (and all every Ipswich Tory activist under 50 except Stephen Ion) on the need either for radical renegotitation or withdrawal, the level of importance is nowhere near as high as it is with UKIP.  Ten years ago the British people agreed with UKIP on the direction but not the destination of where they wanted to be on Europe.  Now they agree on the destination but disagree on its importance – placing it between fourth and eighth (itself a step up).

However it’s the general feel of the government that seems to fuel UKIP.  Despite what some Tories think House of Lords reform hasn’t upset the Tory base, but gay marriage has – I get this every bleeding Sunday at the moment.  So has the governemnt’s failure to follow through on its pledge to tackle the high immigration that we have.  The fact that its cornerstone in helping the nuclear family is the institution of same sex marriage is beyond bizarre.

So thank God that UKIP is so poorly organised, as we’d have been nursing the loss of Holywell’s and Castle Hill rather than Stoke Park and Rushmere.

Ipswich Spy said that Labour now have Ipswich in a “vice like grip“.  And organisationally this is true.  The 1% to 2% of the Ipswich population who actively support the Labour Party are in an enormous number of positions of privilegein the Borough.  It has become the raison d’etre of the Labour Party in this place. 

However, their grip is not really vice like.  For years Labour was the party of the working class.  It represented the working class and not just in pushing for socialism but also for other things such as access to education. It was the party of the Daily Mirror.  But even at the start there was the party of the Guardian, the anti-establishment middle classes.  These people really hated the Tories and so the Labour Party was the best battering ram around.  And it was a fruitful relationship, the Guardian readers could be realists like Shirley Williams and Bryony Rudkin or borderline lunatics like Baron Anthony Wedgewood Benn and our own Andrew Coates, but they provided some expertise and a sense of intellectual depth that the political arm of the trade unions may have otherwise been without.

So a broadly patriotic, socially conservative and socialist party somehow muddled into the 1950s.  In the 1960s the Guardian reader extraordinaire Roy Jenkins became Home Secretary with a socially liberal agenda to make divorce rampant and the unborn murdered.  But the Labour Party was still the same creature but this time with a definite socially liberal streak.  However it was the 1980s that changed everything.  Despite a Conservative government the anti-establishment middle class were popping up everywhere.  They were running the BBC news programmes, theywere designing more and more “progressive” educational curriculums, they were becoming judges and bishops.  This had been happening for years, but the 1980s were a definite tipping point, the anti-establishment middle class now are the establishment.

They also started jetisoning the working class in the Labour Party.  The suicidal left ward turn of the Labour Party in the 1980s was certainly a start of this, but Tony Blair’s leadership was when this was cemented.  He represented his mates while crafting his message to the strivers of Swindon – the working class were out of the equation and  just expected to shut up and vote Labour.  On the right there was a move against socialism, while on the left there was a general lifting of immigration controls.  The rich got cheap nannies and gardeners and the working class got stuffed.

So what has this got to do with Ipswich?  Well its the vice like grip.  The Labour Party has now thoroughly abandoned the working class as a partner in power and only sees them now as a vote bank.  Look at the vitriol that solicitors husband John Cook and private school rugby coach Alasdair Ross direct towards Kevin Algar, a jobbing gardener who thinks for himself.  The working class are not expected to do that as far as Labour are concerned.

The Labour Party cannot win Ipswich without the working class, yet at the same time they hate them.  What’s more important to your average Labour councillor, cutting down on immigration or bringing in gay marriage?   How can a party survive if it fritters its time on gay marriage when people’s livelihoods are up for grabs.  That last sentence could also be addressed at my own side.

So the prize is there for the Tories.  They can win again in Ipswich as they have many times before.  The Labour Party in Ipswich  is now a corrupt little shell obsessed with its own interests, albeit a well organised corrupt little shell.  If the Tories may not exactly be a working class party, but unlike the other side we don’t hate the working class.  And that’s our advantage.

Well I lost again and lost big.  375 voters still came out for the side of right against 853 for Labour.  I’ll write more on the general results in Ipswich later.

I congratulate Mama Rudkin on her victory. 

Bridge will only represented properly again when people believe that it can be lost for Labour.  Hopefully next year we’ll give them a scare, or perhaps miracles will happen and they’ll start paying a bit less attention to their party organisation and a bit more attention to the darkened lamps and potholed roads in Bridge.   Miracles, do happen.  It’s just that they’re quite rare.

Do these people live in the same world as the rest of us?  I only ask because I saw this bizarre tweet from the treasure of Bridge Ward Bryony Rudkin:

#reggaebritannia on #BBC4. Worth every penny of licence fee

Every penny?  £145.50 for a TV progamme or two.  No wonder Ipswich Labour are wasting our money so freely.

But there is a serious point here.  Hundreds of people are sent to a prison due to the BBC licence fee.  Not middle class people, bus some of the most vulnerable people in the community.  Some of the people that Labour was set up to represent until they started selfishly lobying for feathering the nests for white collar public servants who are of no discernable use to society.

Have you driven down Maidenhall approach recently?  Prince of Wales Drive?  Wherstead Road?  And why do you think that the bit of Belstead Road away from town is in far better repair than the big dipper impression you get when you’re almost in town.  And that’s before you take a bus.

The main roads in Bridge have always been a challenge and even under the Tories there were pot holes.  But boy are they worse this year.  It’s not as if the road budget has been cut to the bone – it’s just no longer being spent in Bridge.

Is this anything to do with the fact that only one of the three councillors lives in Bridge, and that councillor doesn’t drive or ever speak up against his party?  Or that Phil Smart, although himself a car driver is a believer that less important people should travel everywhere by bus or train?

Probably not.  It’s more to do with the fact that Labour think that Bridge is in the bag.  Labour is ruthless in funneling money to marginal wards.  If you want Bridge to get road repairs, you  better hope that it becomes a marginal ward again.

The more leaflets that Labour feels it has to deliver in Bridge the quicker your pot holes will be repaired.

Labour supporting blogs such as Ipswich Spy and Alasdair Ross have moaned about Freedom of Information requests and how much they cost.

So on 11 January I thought I’d save the Council some money and asked:

Could you please forward me the decisions that were made on the Rent discounts to voluntary and community organisations, particularly as they apply to the Maidenhall Residents Association.

Remember decisions already made.

So the reply I received was:

Thank you for your email. Minutes of the Executive Committee meeting on 10th January are currently being prepared and will be available soon. Unfortunately, due to certain legal procedures that need to be followed, it does take a while before these can be made available for publication. In the meantime, letters are being prepared to be sent to organisations which will set out how they may be effected by the proposals and inviting feedback. This feedback will be considered at a future meeting of Executive Committee prior to a final decision being taken.
 
I’m sorry I cannot give you a definitive answer at present but I hope to be able to make contact with the affected organisations soon

 And six weeks later there is still no answer.

Now Labour are in power clearly their 1980s mantra is back, “No Compromise With The Voters”.

So the neighbourhood forums went ahead on Wednesday and Thursday and no one seemed to notice. I could not get to the South West forum on Thursday as 5.30pm is not exactly work friendly.

Kevin Algar has a good report on the South West forum, which points to a certain futility to the whole experience. Sally Wainman also writes about the North East and North West area forums although without Kevin’s rather biting style. She still thinks that this is not a game to Labour, bless her. Sally had one very good idea – monitoring public attendance.

From various reports we seemed to have the following results

• Resident participation for all four forums put together was in single figures
• The forums were held for the councillors’ rather than the residents benefit – being in the council chamber which is closer for Phil Smart or Bryony Rudkin than a drafty church hall in the middle of Bridge or Chantry (not to mention councillor’s parking)
• The meetings were far too formal
• There was no notification to people who had attended before
• As Ipswich Spy has pointed out the forums seem to have one over-riding aim now – to replicate what had gone on before

The acid test of this change – supported by the Liberal Democrats and Ipswich Spy, and with Tory abstentions – was whether it would bring more people in. It brought in less. Fingers on one hand type numbers.

There had been no attempt to see if similar changes had been tried before in other councils, no attempt to debate other changes and suggest these to neighbourhood forums. It’s a complete shambles.

Neighbourhood forums are not important to councillors and council officials but they are the closest thing to direct democracy that we have in Ipswich. They are important because they are a chance, admittedly an imperfect chance, for the people to control the agenda.

This was not simply a failure of the Labour Party in Ipswich – that David Ellesmere is an incompetent manager is hardly news – it’s a failure of the whole political class in Ipswich.

£587,957 - the amount Suffolk taxpayers pay to unions every year – fully supported by Ipswich Labour

£47,200 - the amount Ipswich Labour wishes to charge scout groups, charities and residents’ associations – closing down many of them

Now I’ll let you guess which group pays affiliation fees to David Ellesmere’s Ipswich Labour Party.

With the current Labour structure in Ipswich there is very little chance for influencing decisions unless you are within whispering range of the leadership.  However you can, and should, protest.

There are two meetings coming up which could be quite important to this part of the town.  The first is on the 10th January which is the Council Executive at a 6PM start at Grafton House on Grafton Way.  They should be discussing their plans to put voluntary groups out of business.

There is also a meeting of the South West Area Committee – Labour’s attempt to neuter local involvement (as if they weren’t neutered enough).  This will be meeting at 12th January at the work unfriendly time 5.30 at Grafton House.  Apologies for the work unfriendly time but they are holding all four committee meetings in two evenings, to get the unpleasant business of local representation over with as soon as possible.

Ipswich Spy at times seems to exist in order to parrot the Labour Party line, and today’s been no exception.  In a typical act of playing the man rather than the ball they decided to attack me, while also somehow blaming me for Paul West not turning up.  Now I’m not chuffed with Paul West’s abscence (as he knows) but I can’t be blamed for it.  However the Labour Party person who briefed Ipswich Spy certainly thinks that I can be.

However I smelt a rat on this, because the Wherstead Road Residents Association would usually be upset by something like this.  It was unusual that any objections from them had not been noted.  So I asked them.  They had not even been asked.  This is the oldest continuously functioning residents’ association in Ipswich, they’ve been around for (just) longer than I’ve been alive.  Yet on a matter that really affects their influence they weren’t even given the courtesy of a local councillor telling them what was likely to happen.

Of course two of the local councillors are now too important to represent their ward, while the third is not too enamoured of Wherstead Road – so why should they bother?

Either this is a high handed act by councillors who see local residents as an irritating irrelevance or a deliberate act of gerrymandering.  Either way, it stinks.