Or possibly Newcastle council inaction!
On Wednesday, along with 5 other Majority members, I attended the Newcastle council meeting which was predominantly a discussion and vote on next financial year’s budget. A new experience for me and a bit of an eye opener.
The public are allowed to observe from the gallery which is up several flights of stairs however I believe there is also a public viewing section on the ground floor at the back of the chamber. The chamber itself is UN like, with a raised platform for the chair and admin and nice looking comfortable seats with tables arranged in several rows in a semicircular type fashion for the councilors.
The session starts with some sort of medieval cosplay parade by the Lord Mayor and associated serfs. Really? It’s the 21st century why do we carry on with this ridiculous stuff. I get tradition and all that - although in many cases tradition is just peer pressure from dead people - but this sort of useless pomp just serves to distance the population from our representatives.
Anyway - after a few procedural items and announcements there were a couple of questions from the public. Both were responded to with a load of “information” which in both cases didn’t actually answer the question. Both questions could and should have been answered with a simple yes or no and an explanation why.
Then we moved onto the budget discussion. My expectation was a concise presentation of the budget with major items and any significant changes highlighted. Perhaps with a follow up review of the big budget service areas followed by presentation of amendments from others and a vote.
What we got from the very first “speech” was political laden mudslinging interspersed with a few (very few) good and passionate reviews of key services - child services and libraries were two of note. There was a lot of repetition and many councilors said a lot of words without communicating very much at all! There were however some very interesting comments which were mostly, although not exclusively, made by the “opposition” or non-labour councilors.
One of the Green councilors made a good contribution which was essentially around having much more public engagement and wider engagement across the council to develop an approach that was not just more managed decline. This was repeatedly attacked by labour councilors as doing Newcastle a disservice with many of the same speakers then bemoaning 15 years of austerity which has lead to around £370m cuts at the council resulting in the council having to resort to managed decline. A particular highlight was a labour member pointing out that a lot of the opposition aren’t originally from Newcastle and if they didn’t like it they could leave and go back to where they came from - Farageesque!
After wasting so much time there had to be a motion to extend the session to finish the budget “debate”. After some final personal and grubby insults the labour budget was passed and all amendments defeated. This included an amendment to keep the city library open for some some extended hours which included a proposal to make this self funding.
If I had not known which group was which, I would have assumed from the speeches of most of the members of each side that the “opposition” were predominantly community minded and the labour group were predominantly classical Thatcherites!
I found the whole experience quite fascinating and the 3 1/2 hour session didn’t seem anything like that long. However if the vast majority of the public had witnessed the spectacle they would have been quite rightly disgusted at it and the virtual complete lack of interest in the public particularly from the labour group. There must be a better way?
Having said all that I will go back and would encourage others to do so. I think it will give people the ambition and confidence to stand next year. It will also be good to have a visible Majority attendance to let our current representatives know we are there to hold them to account. And we can go for a pint and a debate afterwards!