One of the stories that Paul Geater is never likely to cover is that there is considerable dissatisfaction with David Ellesmere, the leader of the Ipswich Labour group.  This is despite (or because) of Geater’s close friendships with many Labour councillors.

Although there is widespread recognition that Ellesmere has been a good opposition leader there is a worry that his talents are as limited as his looks.  With the departure of Andrew Cann he could be the only thing that keeps a Tory Liberal coalition going if there is a repeat of his poor performance last year where the Labour Party essentially sacrificed the Parliamentary seat to win wards in North Ipswich but still fell short on the council.  It’s fair enough to fight the Liberal Democrats hard in the election, the Tories do that in St Margarets, but not treating them as human beings in peace time has been a big mistake which has given Ipswich at least one and, arguably, two more years of Conservative leadership than it would have otherwise had. 

The rather prominent football hooligan element within the Labour group still love Ellesmere and there’s a lot of, out bound, support for him even from the sort of Labour councillor who have never felt the urge to issue drunken death threats (they do exist).  However these things can change remarkably fast, as Jeremy Pembroke could attest (the fact that Ellesmere would never talk to the Suffolk leadership may also be a mark against him, but rather oddly it’s not a complaint I’ve heard.)

I have had wind of a bigger story but frustratingly can not find any corroboration on it.  If I do, it will run.

Nick Cohen writes a nice piece in the Spectator which is quite wrong.  The hard left are the secret weapon of the Tory party argues Nick, which is hardly original, but then says that this is the left’s fault because they tolerate the hard left in a way that the Tories do not tolerate the hard right.  This may be true (no Tory MP entertained the loyalist hard men in the same way that Tony Benn and Ken Livingstone did the IRA) but it’s not the problem that the left is really facing at the moment.

It is that the rhetoric is all wrong.  It’s a fact that the majority of the country accept that you can’t borrow three out of every four pounds that you spend.  Labour went into the election agreeing to that and still agree to it.  Yes they want to raise a few more taxes and cut the deficit more slowly but it’s in the same confines as the other two main parties and the British public.  The coalition will at the end of its term still leave us with a bigger debt than when we started it (although hopefully a more sustainable one).  These are the simple facts. 

Many Labour councils may be playing a very dangerous game of cutting frontline services to protect the middle managers, but although this is scandalous and probably not worth the risk it is not a great diversion from the accepted terms of the debate.

The rhetoric does not accept this.  The rhetoric talks about it being the end of the world, and how “there will be a riot” (the NUS’s slogan, not the TUC).  The hard left fastens on to this rhetoric as unlike the leadership of the Labour Party (or most of the TUC leaders) they actually believe that nonsense.  We have Norwich’s very own John Cook twittering about challenging Nick Clegg to a fight which Cook would neither want nor could win.  We have the leader of the NUT in Suffolk saying, and then sort of unsaying, that the riots may be better than democratically mandated cuts.  We have Bridge Ward’s treasure Bryony Rudkin calling those remarks “unhelpful”, a mealy mouthed non-condemnation that suggests that it was the fact that it was written down rather than the intentions behind it that was wrong.  Is there any realistic chance that Dame Bryony thinks that her leadership is wrong in the need for cuts?  Is there any chance that she thinks that Labour should be on the wrong side of the public on this?  Why is she engaging in such shameful and self abasing toadying to a senior figure in a union which could decide whether she gets the Labour nomination for Ipswich?

In short the left has rediscovered the heady joys of consequence free rhetoric, and it’s like a drug.  The problem with drugs is that you never really know when your recreational habit becomes an addiction and you may not be able to convincingly clean up before you present yourself on election day.

It’s nice to see the treasure of bridge ward, Dame Bryony Rudkin, is still going strong with her column. It is rather odd that she gets this column rather than say, Labour Group leader David Ellesmere, but I suppose that the picture editor may have had a say in that decision. It’s also nice to see that the beacon of the big society, the Ipswich film theatre gets a mention. (Understandable, as it is closer to her house than Cardinal Park.) “long may it continue” I believe she wrote.

I wonder if this is a relation to the Bryony Rudkin who poured scorn on the film theatre in the letter pages of that same newspaper a few months ago when Ben Gummer praised the enterprise? 

Flip flopping faster than a Ukrainian gymnast is a desirable quality in Ed Miliband’s Labour Party.

Of course she doesn’t use it so you can understand why it’s not on her radar (although it is on the Labour leaflet’s radar, oddly) but as our County Councillor you would expect her to make a stink about Stoke Library being at risk of closure.

But according to Ipswich Spy it really wasn’t an issue to her, and she made no effort to try to keep it open.  Obviously winning the Ipswich Labour nomination is more important to her.

I have no doubt that the Labour councillors mean well, but the reason why they are so ineffective in representing us is because they have their eye on different issues.  As a ward we’re necesarry for their career, but we’re hardly sufficient.

That’s why, regardless of party this ward needs a local person who is going to take pride in upsetting the applecart rather than simply talking about north Ipswich bus routes or Evening Star columns.

A riverside view has scooped me by almost a week on yet another job to take Dame Bryony away from Bridge, she’s a new columnist for the star.  Now this looks remarkably like a bid to become the next Labour candidate for Ipswich. 

I wonder if David Ellesmere is feeling like he missed a trick? 

Although as one Tory said to me on Friday, I should be in clover at the start of every week.

Why are there cuts being made to school crossing patrols but Stonewall, a left leaning pressure group, is getting £2,000 a year.  I somehow suspect that the County councillor for Bridge Ward will not be taking that case up.

County Councillor Bryony Rudkin works for the Local Government Association which, er, survives on subscriptions from Stonewall.  If Suffolk and Ipswich cut that subscription then it would save far more front line services.

I’ve been looking into the company documents around the BT Customer Services Direct fiasco and something seems to have come out that seems to border on negligence, Suffolk County councillors for the first crucial year was not represented on the board of Customer Services Direct, the ten year multi-multi-million biggest public-private partnership in Suffolk County Council to date.

There were two company secretaries appointed Newgate Street Secretaries Limited, a City outfit and Philip Richard Willis, who although he has an address in Wickham Market I can find no other trace of him.  The directors include Stuart Gemmil, a Mid Suffolk District councillor (but not Suffolk County Council) and Michael More, the then chief executive of Suffolk County Council.

There are four other names, Peter Carruthers, Stephen Crabbe, Andrew Peach and Michael Reynolds.  They all have addresses that are out of the county, but to make sure I’ve looked for them on Google, checked their names with two County councils and checked their name against the 2001 County Council election results and I can’t find a single County Councillor there.

So it seems that in the first crucial year there was not a single County Councillor on the board of Customer Services Direct.

I’ve gone to the current appointments and both Jeremy Pembroke and Andrea Hill are listed as directors.  Jeremy Pembroke joined the board on 15th September 2005.  Mid Suffolk are still represented, this time by the council leader Tim Passmore.

So what on earth is going on?  Why did the electorate of Mid Suffolk have a voice on the board of Suffolk County Council’s biggest public-private partnership and Suffolk County Council did not?

There clearly was not a problem later.  Did Bryony Rudkin’s prejudicial interest in the matter mean that there was no one to speak out for the council tax payers?  If so, why couldn’t she delegate the task to another elected member?

PS.  I’ve got another Freedom of Information request to ensure that I’m not missing anything out.

One aspect of the customer services direct fiasco that has not been explored very much has been the unenthusiastic response of the district councils.  This has been pointed out to me by a number of people who see this as the dog that didn’t bark.

As Mid Suffolk was involved then it clearly was designed to get the other councils on board.  But to date Mid Suffolk is the only district council on board.  Was the design of the system predicated on the majority of district councils coming on board, and the councillors in charge too proud or too inflexible to change the structure of the deal when it was clear that they could not come on board?

There may have been a suspicion of the Labour run Suffolk council in this, but Mid Suffolk was a Tory council, Ipswich had a Liberal presence in the administration and Suffolk became Tory a year and a bit later – so the district councils could have got on board then.

I’ve a report from St Edmundsbury borough council (2006, so two years after) which say that CSD wasn’t customer focussed enough and that the promised savings were “aspirational” (a polite way of saying piffle). I’ve also got some minutes from Suffolk Coastal where it’s quite clear that both they and Waveney did not think CSD was up to the job, although it’s not clear why.  I’ve put in a freedom of information request for the reasons from Ipswich, and hopefully this will beef up some of the things I’ve been hearing off the record.

If it was predicated on economies of scale, this does not seem to be clear from any of the public documents that I’ve seen so far – understandably- although it stretches credulity that CSD was only expected to run with Mid Suffolk.

This dog really seems like she was born without enough legs to run.

UPDATE:  Looking for something else, I came across this “When the joint venture company is up and running, the partners expect more organisations to become involved as the project develops to meet the needs of the county”

Kevan Lim once (rightly) commented that the Conservatives on Suffolk Council were stricken with amnesia as to who, exactly, hired Andrea Hill.

It’s not only the Conservatives.  Labour thinks that the Customer Services Direct contract has absolutely nothing to do with them, as shown by the purple prose apologia from a Labour supporting writer in Ipswich Spy.

Naturally the tin foil hat brigade lapped it up with Ken Bates and Alasdair Ross retweeting the Labour defence.

The current administration have serious questions to answer on the conduct of this, and at least in Jeremy Pembroke’s case there is also the question of what role did he play during the contract negotiations and whether this blunted the opposition scrutiny that this deal clearly needed.  But this does not mean that the Liberal-Labour administration should be beyond scrutiny.

There is also a genuine concern about the general role that BT seems to play in local politics, in 2004 both the Labour leader of Suffolk Council and the MP very well disposed towards them due to personal links (not helped by an uncritical attitude from Jeremy Pembroke and supine Liberal Democrats).  This soft cross-party corporatism is never going to turn out well.  Why are Labour supporting websites such as Ipswich Spy so keen to shout down such concerns by alluding to a “right wing blogosphere”?