There’s nothing like a councillor in trouble to jump on a bandwagon.

The Smock on Maidenhall Road, right in the heart of the Maidenhall Estate and next to Stoke High School, has an entirely inappropriate licencing application that will make this pub in the middle of the estate into a night club.  Phil Smart is opposing this, which is quite nice of him as it will not affect him in the slightest as he lives as far outside the ward as he has for all the two and a half decades that he has been the absentee councillor for Bridge.

But there’s something strange here. 

Who completely overhauled the licencing laws at the behest of the alcohol lobby?  Phil Smart’s Labour Party.

Who sent a text message to younger voters in the 2001 election saying “couldn’t give a ‘four x’ for last orders? Vote Labour on Thursday for extra time“.  Phil Smart’s Labour Party.

Who imposed the utterly non-sensical smoking ban that made the community pub unsustainable, putting all night drinking as the only way for many pubs to avoid closing?  Phil Smart’s Labour Party.

Now it is certainly the case that all political parties make mistakes.  The Tories have made more than their share of mistakes from the Maastricht treaty to the threatened closure of the Stoke Park library.  The difference between a decent representative and a party hack is not whether you mean well, but whether you put your constituents before your party.  I live in Bridge, it’s easy for me to make the choice.  But what about the present Labour councillors?

I feel strongly about it because I live in Belstead Avenue, literally up the road from the Smock.  I remember from when I was living in Rectory Road the Friday and Saturday nights (and early mornings) in summer that we had to endure, and I don’t want them repeated here with an all night drinking den down the street.

Phil Smart is not a bad man.  He may be socially awkward and find it hard to accept constituents’ opinions that differ from his own but he means well.  He is not weirdly and coldly ambitious unlike another Bridge Ward councillor (although let’s be fair she could represent anywhere, if it already had a large Labour majority).  He looks vaguely human and you imagine that he would not sell his mother to get up another political rung, unlike his group leader.  And he doesn’t get drunk and blurt out absurd death threats as yet another Labour councillor does.  By the admittedly low standards of the Ipswich Labour party he’s just about OK.

However the question is when it comes to the crunch will he stand by his party or his, admittedly distant, constituents?  So here’s a test by which he can redeem himself:

Will he admit that his party made a complete hash of licencing reform at the behest of the alcohol lobby?

Will he praise Ben Gummer for voting for a partial relaxation of the smoking ban in pubs and condemn Chris Mole for his wholehearted support of the destruction of community pubs?

Will he condemn the 2001 Labour campaign, of which he was a key part in Ipswich, for so enthusiastically calling for all night drinking?

I would love to be wrong on this, but I don’t think he will.

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.

In the last budget the income tax personal allowance was raised substantially, a move that overwhelmingly benefited those on or above the minimum wage.  Ed Balls, speaking for Labour, called for income taxes to keep hitting those just avove the minimum wage  to enable VAT to be kept down for people on Ed Balls’ salary – MPs pays a larger proportion of their income in VAT than someone on the minimum wage.

Not a single Labour politician slapped Ed Balls down, although in private both Alastair Darling and Ed Miliband have argued for a rise in VAT in cabinet.

Now Councillor Phil Smart – the Holywells Resident Councillor for Bridge Ward –  thinks we have another reason to tax those just above the minimum wage. He wants shop assistants to pay higher income taxes  to lower the train fares that people like myself and Phil Smart pay to get to work.  Both of us commute, both of us are stung by the higher fares and both of us earn above the average wage – like most commuters.

I don’t like paying higher fares, but I recognise that to get Gordon Brown’s deficit down I have to.  I also think that people like me and Phil Smart are better placed to pay to get this deficit down than a part time working mother struggling to pay child care or a pensioner with a few thousand extra a year in their work provided pension.  Phil Smart thinks that they should pay before he does.

Labour have for years been a party of white collar public sector middle managers who think that the rest of the country should revolve around them.  Phil Smart is a white collar public sector worker on an above average salary who thinks that you should continue subsidising his rail fares.

Workers of the World - Subsidise Me

I’ve been saying, both on this blog and whenever someone’s asked me, that Phil Smart is someone who is dedicated to public transport and who really cares about that issue.  The problem that I have with him, and another councillor, is that they see Bridge as a platform and not an end in itself.  It’s very easy when you don’t live there.

Consider this, from the council agenda for Wednesday:

To consider the following motion moved by Councillor P Smart:

This Council notes with concern the decision of Suffolk County Council to close Bury Road Park and Ride and calls on the Executive of Ipswich Borough Council to work with local bus operators and others to establish a replacement service from this site.”

This will involve quite a considerable amount of money being spent on Norwich Road bus routes.  This may be a perfectly good thing for a councillor who represents the Norwich Road area to be doing, but this is money that Suffolk or Ipswich will not have to help Wherstead Road, which has a far more pressing issue with the buses.  The most frustrating thing about this is that Wherstead Road would need very little extra money, instead needing  co-ordination with the bus companies to space out their services.  Something that stupid EU regulations insist that  councillors need to be involved in.

Park and Ride is very nice, but shouldn’t there be some focus closer to home?  Or failing that, closer to your ward?

Related articles

• Suffolk: Bus routes face the axe (eadt.co.uk)
• Council to ‘outsource everything’ (bbc.co.uk)

I was at the South West Area forum yesterday. It was quite far away, in the Triangle Church in Dickens Road, but there were issues that affected Bridge being discussed there.

Sadly there were no councillors from Bridge there. No newly re-elected Jim Powell, no soon to stand for re-election Philip Smart and no double County and Borough councillor Bryony Rudkin. For shame.

The other two county councillors from the area were present and there were councillors from the other three wards in the area. There was a debate in which the policing priorities were set for the South West area of Ipswich. Not surprisingly Bridge did very poorly in this. Last year it was generally remarked upon by other councillors of both parties that Bridge was being better represented as the councillors were scared that they could lose to the Tories. It’s now been commented that as Labour thinks Bridge will be in the bag next year that the Bridge councillors are returning to their bad, self indulgent habits of quango hunting and wittering on about pet subjects. I didn’t want to believe it, but when the bread and butter of local representation is neglected like this, then what can you believe?

This is why Bridge must never revert to being a safe Labour seat.

I received this today from Councillor Alasdair Ross, the Games Master at Ipswich School:

James
This local candidate issue does not stand up to scrutiny- I live in Rushmere and I am the Cllr for the ward- unlike Mrs Terry or Smith who both live outside the ward, but Mrs Smith is a great local Cllr, so are people that bothered? And before you keep going on about Cllr Smart – sort out your own party- Cllr Pope lives in East Ipswich but represents Stoke Park, I think you will find that is further way than Cllr’s Smart and Rudkin. even in Bixley the safest Tory seat, only one of the Cllr’s lives in the ward.

Well let’s ignore the fact that it was apparently Soo Smart, Mrs Philip Smart, who brought up the question.

The fight for Bridge will be within the ward, not in Bixley. Yes I do believe that local councillors are better. And that does put me at odds with many in my own party (not for the first time),

All politics is local. It is not about party. Party is important but one of Alasdair Ross’s (and Philip Smart’s) abiding failures is their inability to see that the party should come behind their duty to their constituents. A long way behind.

The party is simply a label. I believe in low council tax, economic growth, efficient services and strong families. The Conservative Party by and large believe in these things too, and so it is a good label for me. If I stand under the Conservative banner then people know where I’m coming from.

However, it is merely a label. What is most important is representing your patch. Although I don’t doubt that Philip Smart cares about Bridge, I don’t believe that he originally chose Bridge because of the links he had with the place. I’d love to be proven wrong. And as for Dame Bryony…

I simply think that a person is not as good a representative if they don’t live in the ward, shop in the ward and socialise in the ward. This is not some silly point of contrariness this is why I’ve refused to stand outside Bridge. I don’t mind another (local) candidate taking over – well I mind quite a lot, but I’ll accept it – but I will not stand where I don’t live. And yes, writing things like this paragraph does drive other Tories in the Association to the point of distraction.

I want to represent my patch and do what’s best for my neighbours. To me that is a far higher honour than being the youngest recorded mayor of the borough or the chairman of Ipswich Buses. I know that this does not “stand up to scrutiny” if your party is more important than your constituents. If your constituents are more important than your party, then what I said makes perfect sense.

A story reaches me about the small business hustings at the General Election.

A questioner asked whether the General Election candidates lived in the Ipswich Constituency. Chris Mole answered that he had been around for thirty years. Ben Gummer said that he was living in the constituency and had been in Suffolk all his life. Mark Dyson (who’s now left the scene) came out with some waffle about Battersea being like Bristol being like Ipswich.

An interesting question, and I wasn’t at the hustings so it wasn’t my particular obsession coming out again. Or was it?

The questioner was Susan Smart, who runs a successful design agency Double S Designs. She’s probably better known to readers as Mrs Philip Smart, the wife of the youngest mayor of Ipswich, Labour transport spokesman, former chairman of Ipswich Buses and proud resident of Holywells Ward. Oh, and a councillor for Bridge Ward, I suppose he needs a platform and Bridge was as good a safe seat as any when he started.

So is this a guilty conscience, or a nagging fear?

Whoever the Conservative candidate for Bridge is at the next borough election I’m going to move heaven and earth to make sure he or she lives in the ward. Can Labour promise the same?

As it’s Philip Smart’s turn to be up for re-election, that will be an interesting question.

Labour activists have a strange attitude to the white working class. This was shown when Gordon Brown called an innocent Labour voting pensioner a “bigot” for daring to ask him questions about the effects of Eastern European immigration.

This will be placed as a question of the Prime Minister’s two-faced nature and his temper. Perhaps it will stretch to questions about Brown’s, ahem, mental stability or the judgement of Labour MPs like Chris Mole who know Brown one hundred times better than we do and who still wanted him as leader of their party. Those are all questions that should be asked, but frankly they are not the most worrying question.

The fact is that middle class Labour activists treat the white English working class with horror. They may think that they speak for them, they may depend on them for their votes and they may even pretend to be like them.

However they can not stand the views of the working class, and they genuinely do regard them as bigoted. This is especially so with immigration. What is in effect a narrow sectional interest – a desire for cheaper restaurants, gardeners and nannies – is transformed into a moral crusade and everyone else has to knuckle down.

When this hurts the loyal white working class, then there is no real sympathy. Obviously if you have been on the doorstep you know that the feeling is intense compared to ten years ago, and curiously non-racial. There is just a feeling that unchecked immigration has lowered wages, raised rents and put a strain on services.

When the white working class complain about immigration they are not calling for an all white Britain but some control over their circumstances. The problem is that from Corder Road or Severn Road this looks like bigotry. In most cases when the class interests of the representatives differ from the clearly expressed interest of those that they wish to represent, the representatives knuckle down and, well, represent.

This has been turned on its head. The people have to be “led”. God help them.

I am just about old enough to remember the 1980s and nerdish enough to have cared about politics (and from a left wing perspective). When the Labour Party was in opposition they cared about the waste of unemployment. Although it’s clear that if it wasn’t for Thatcher’s medicine (and Healey’s before that) the country would have gone bankrupt, they had a point. Even though there really was no alternative, this critique of Thatcherism was self-evidently right – even if it missed the other parts of the picture.

So how much do Labour care for jobs when they are are in power? Although Labour have actually started to address immigration some old time Labour hacks do think that any protection of the working class through control of immigration must be dismissed as pandering to the BNP. However the issue is not what some ex-members think, but the sheer amount of time for Labour to look at immigration as an unsustainable economic boom did not lead to higher wages for the worst off – the very section of society that Labour was formed to protect and advance. This party was saying that there was “no natural limit” for the amount of people coming in, which makes sense if you own rather than rent your own house in Corder or Severn road and the gardener looks like they’re putting up their rate.

So we move to Tesco. Here are up to 900 jobs being created within walking or cycling distance from every bit of Bridge ward. I know a large number of people who’ve lost their job recently, I was one of them, and many of these people were not as lucky as I was to get a new (albeit less well paid) job quite quickly. The Tesco jobs will not be dream jobs but they still pay good money.

So where are Labour on this? Well it’s electorally popular to bash economic development, and this is what Labour did – they voted against it. This included Bridge Ward councillor Comrade Philip Smart. This was even though the planning committee is not allowed a party whip, so there’s no excuse there. And this development disproportionately helps Bridge because a major employer is opening on our doorstep and we have some of the worst long term unemployment in the country.

No, simply put Phil Smart thought that the people who were rightly worried about an increase in traffic down Belstead Road were more important than those worried about their home being repossessed because they didn’t have a job, or those who’s sense of self respect was going one slow drawn out day after the next. The people, I would have thought, that Labour was designed to protect and advance – the people that Phil Smart, who is a decent man when you strip out the partisanship, joined the Labour party to help.

Maybe the people worried about traffic volume are more likely to switch their vote (and to vote at all) than people who are being encouraged to go on one scheme after another to get them off Jobseeker’s allowance. Perhaps.

But we need the jobs. Every day spent canvassing in Bridge means that I will meet at least one more able bodied person who wants a job but has through some sleight of hand been taken off the unemployment register. Tesco offers a way out for some of them.

They may not vote. If they do vote they may never consider voting for a Tory. But I didn’t go into politics to make their life worse and if there is an opportunity to make it better I will take it. Labour will only do so when the votes stack up. That’s why they need a rest.

I’m going to spend most of this post annoying my Labour supporting readers, so I might as well start by annoying the Tories.  The worst election for the Tories was not 1997, but 1992.  They needed a time in opposition and the win in 1992 convinced them that they were invincible.  The lost their humility, and when you lose that you start to lose a grip on your humanity as well.

Labour’s at that point.  If they scrape a win this time they could finish their party off They have lost their humility and humanity and are not fit to direct a parking bay let alone the country.

This little gem from Ipswich Spy shows why we need to have another turn of the wheel.  Labour clearly think government is a freehold rather than a leasehold position.  Not in a democracy it ain’t.

Let’s miss the brouhaha about whether the Labour were at a group meeting or leafleting, it’s perfectly possible to be doing both.  It’s hardly relevant.

What is that there seems to be no humility in their response.  It is possible for both sides to make mistakes.  The Labour councillors for Bridge ward clearly made a mistake here.  Three councillors aren’t needed at a group meeting when two could go.  Councillor Philip Smart would have been told about this meeting as he was a member of the Ipswich Transport  Society, as Ross seems to admit to Ipswich Spy (if either Ross or Ipswich Spy want to send a copy of the email I’d be glad to publish it here).  Did he not see the importance, did he forget?  Who knows.  He made a mistake.  He should have fessed up.  I hope I would have been a big enough man to do so.

But no, it was spin instead. 

Now they claim (or Ipswich spy claims that they claim) that members of the public could not go along to the meeting with First Eastern.  But I was a member of the public.  I was there.   I paid £2.50 to get in.  So did the Wherstead Road residents.  What Alasdair Ross claimed was not true. It was the direct opposite of the truth. What is true is that the councillors made a mistake.  It’s not the original mistake that kills you, it’s the cover up.

This is boring.  Trying to spin your way out of what was clearly a stupid mistake born of complacency, a mistake that Labour has made time and again with Bridge is why we need a real alternative in Bridge.  The fact that the Labour party from the lowliest councillor to the Prime Minister himself need to simply learn humility shows that they need a rest.  It’s time to go in opposition and let the Tories get complacent, forgetful and rusty.