Frank Little

I couldn’t possibly comment on the discussion that went into setting the Blaenhonddan precept for 2012/13, for reasons stated earlier, but I found this posting from a Liberal Democrat parish councillor in England summed up well what invidious choices face community councillors. In passing, I should say that I am glad that the Welsh Government did not apply our share of the “Pickles money” towards council-tax freezing, as the Welsh Conservatives wanted, but to education, as demanded by Kirsty Williams.

Some of my colleagues on principal authorities have concluded that, rather than take the ‘bribe’ equivalent to a 2.5% increase on the previous year’s budget, they will increase council tax. Their logic is that, one day, the bribes will stop and, when they do, the gap between income and expenditure will need to be bridged by a large increase in the precept. A little basic arithmetic tends to support their contention.

There’s an excellent report, plus video, of a recent meeting of the Liberal History Society by Mark Pack here. There were major contributions from Paddy Ashdown and Shirley Williams. Several passages stood out for me. Shirley Williams drew lessons from her knowledge of the United States* “in particular the way the limited teaching of history in the US helps shapes its leaders’ worldview – if you only teach American history, you end up with people who do not think much beyond the boundaries of America. This had ‘devastating consequences’, Shirley Williams argued, when the lessons of the Vietnam War and the state the country was left in were not applied to Iraq.” Amen to that.

I’m gratified to find that Baroness Williams and I shared a gradual change of view on the direction of the party after the 2010 general election: “The USA is also responsible for her views on coalition. Williams revealed that initially she would have preferred a minority Conservative government, with a confidence and supply arrangement rather than a formal coalition. However, she has since changed her mind, drawing on what she has seen in the USA and the dangers it shows of ‘total political polarisation’ stopping the government from taking necessary action in an economic crisis. As a result, she now thinks forming a coalition ‘was necessary and it was right … One had to make the political system work, even if it was painful and difficult to do so.’”

Paddy had “[enlightened and entertained] the audience with a sequence of many other quotes from past Liberals, including from Lord Acton: ‘A state which is incompetent to satisfy different races, condemns itself. A state which labours to neutralise, to absorb, to expel them destroys its own vitality. A state which does not include them is destitute of the chief basis of self-government.’ Acton got several mentions, with Ashdown also picking out what he described as one of his favourite quotes: ‘It is easier to find people fit to govern themselves than it is to find people fit to govern’. The quote should be emblazoned across the party’s political manuals, he said, making the implicit point that many of the lessons past liberal drew from their contemporary experience are still highly relevant today.”

It seems to me that the central practical difference in today’s politics is that Labour believes in strong central government, Conservatives in minimal government, Liberals in government at the appropriate level. There is a – sometimes uneasy – compromise on the last two views in the coalition, as shown by the Local Government Finance Bill and the Localism Act, both of which devolve powers to local government and  to local citizens.

*She and her brother were evacuated to the States during World War II. (She refers to this period in a recent Radio 4 broadcast.) She later returned to teach at Harvard.

I’m happy to give more publicity to the renovation of the Afan Forest Park visitor centre, and to the two new sections of trail: www.cognation.co.uk/trails/afan.

I was one of those Welsh Liberal Democrats opposing a move within the party early in the life of the Assembly to set policy to hand over large sections of the NHS to private providers. However, I stated at the time that there could be financial and other benefits in buying-in clearly-defined products or services from contractors where NHS policy was not affected. This is clearly the case with the IVF clinic at Singleton Hospital as described by Peter Black. ABMU’s decision not only to close it but to leave over a year’s gap in service is, as he says, bonkers.

Peter Black draws attention to Welsh Government statisticians’ decision “that it is not possible to produce comparable figures of budgeted expenditure per pupil for England and Wales for this financial year.” It is promised that “further detail will be published in a Statistical Article on January 26 2012″.

It is natural to smell a rat in a local election year, when it is certain that we Liberal Democrats (and probably the other opposition parties) will feature the huge per-pupil funding gap between England and Wales in their campaigning. It is not as if doubts have been raised in the past as to whether we are comparing like with like, and the statisticians have had plenty of time to analyse how to factor in such differences as the treatment of school transport or centrally-provided services, both advanced as reasons for the disparity. Even the academy system, which is said to be the reason for the statisticians’ reticence this time, did not appear in England overnight in 2011.

As Peter concludes: “This is one row the Welsh Government do not need and should sort out as soon as possible. If we do not have these figures then we cannot hold Ministers to account on their promises and that is not good for democracy, nor is it good for pupils, parents and teachers who need to know what support they are getting in delivering a top quality education service.”

I have been hearing these whispers that 2012 was the year that the Conservative Party was determined to make a breakthrough in council elections in Neath Port Talbot. The annual spring conference is an obvious springboard for any election later in the season, and local candidates would no doubt have been counting on Llandudno to give a publicity boost, to their policies even if not to them personally. However, the 2012 conference has been cancelled at virtually the last moment. This will more than disappoint candidates, it will annoy activists, on whom any party depends to deliver their message. What is worse, it will have severely disgruntled correspondents as Tweets from consultant Daran Hill of Positif Politics have shown. The Conservatives can look forward to rough treatment from the press corps who have had their plans for a weekend at the seaside disrupted.

It is not as if the Conservatives are short of a few bob these days. Of all the parties, they can most afford conferences. This makes what looks like a self-destructive decision even more puzzling.

The president of the Liberal Democrats in a message to Liberal Democrat activists has called for Ed Miliband and Ed Balls to apologise to the British public for “deceiving them for 18 months before finally admitting that what the Liberal Democrats have been doing in Government [making cuts to reduce the structural deficit] is broadly the right approach. However, there is one apology we didn’t call for publicly, but which they still should make – that’s an apology to you!”

He goes on: “Last May across the country, from Lancaster to Sheffield and Manchester to Newcastle, many of you lost your council seats to undeserving Labour candidates who were fighting their elections on a false platform with dishonest messages. They stood on a platform that the Eds now admit was wrong. Shame on them.” He should have added that we in Wales lost one good AM for the same reason.

In the face of evidence from the Institute for Fiscal Studies and HM Treasury that the coalition’s cuts are in fact £1bn less than those proposed by the last Labour chancellor (but which Labour were afraid to spell out in their 2010 general election manifesto), it was a line that was increasingly difficult to hold. But no doubt Labour will try it on again in May’s local elections.

See also http://aberavonneathlibdems.blogspot.com/2012/01/twelve-cuts-labour-dont-talk-about.html

Carl Sargeant, the Cardiff minister for local government, has announced consultation over a move to delay the local council elections scheduled for 2016 for a further year. My view is that we had started to settle in to a fixed four-year cycle for each of the major elections and that four years is quite long enough for a councillor’s term.

There is a special reason for not extending the life of the next council: overdue boundary changes. If it had not produced outrageously illogical revisions, the Boundary Commission for Wales would have seen an evening-out of ward sizes in Neath Port Talbot. There has been further population movement since.

The RNIB, in conjunction with HM Revenue and Customs, has launched a new service to support blind and partially sighted people with “tax and benefit issues”.

Details here: http://www.rnib.org.uk/livingwithsightloss/yourmoney/pages/tax_advice.aspx

The council has taken action since they were made aware of the contents of the report referred to in my December posting. The cabinet authorised additional recruitment in September and the officer at the head of Children’s Services has now left by mutual consent.

However, the council clearly needs to go further. We need to recruit a new head of children’s services with a proven relevant record. The service needs its own scrutiny committee, augmented by outside expert help if necessary. (Liberal Democrat group leader Keith Davies has been able to use the Policy and Resources Scrutiny Committee to some extent, and I Personnel, but these methods are too indirect.)  Above all, there has to be a change of culture from “the organisation knows best” to “what can we do which is best for the client”, the client in this case being the child, not to mention his or her family.

It has been difficult to write this posting. Over the years, I have been concerned that too open a criticism could be counter-productive in causing complete distrust of the system, which has many good people working within it.  (In fact, my first question to council in 2008 was about the care of children, and I withdrew it in favour of correspondence at the leader’s request in order to avoid any risk of public panic.) However, the faults are out in the open now and the council must not attempt to cover them up again but take vigorous action now.