December 11, 2007

More and more, thanks to Mr Broooon and his Gloomy Band of Mini-Broooons, I am finding myself in agreement with the ranting outpourings of the Daily Mail's Richard Littlejohn.

His column today is a work of art, music to the ears to anyone who's ever had the misfortune to have anything whatsoever to do with any tier of bureaucracy in this increasingly misguided and misled land. Here it is:

When I started out in this game in 1971, the leader of the local council was an engine driver called Charlie Swift, who ran the city in his spare time.

Meetings were always held in the evenings and he'd frequently hitch a ride to the Town Hall with me in the office mini-van, in exchange for a scoop for next week's paper. He was his own press officer.

Charlie's surgery was the front room of his terrace house in the ward he represented. He didn't receive a penny from the ratepayers in salary or expenses. Neither did any of his fellow councillors, who all had real jobs and gave their time voluntarily.

But the streets were clean, the parks immaculate, the corporation buses ran on time, the roads were in good repair, the schools had a pretty decent record, the car parks were free and the dustbins were emptied twice a week.

That was about all anyone wanted from their local authority.

The Town Hall was an impressive edifice, slap bang in the city centre, a symbol of solidity, stability and civic pride.

At the risk of coming over all Waterhouse, I can still remember the name of the town clerk, which was proudly inscribed on the side of all municipal vehicles (sadly, not trams).

As it happens, I'm writing about Peterborough, where I cut my journalistic teeth. But it could be any town or city in Britain in the early Seventies.

Within a few years, the system of local government which had served us so well was swept away in a frenzy of Heathite corporatism and "modernisation".

Traditional borough boundaries were erased and historic local authorities were merged into gigantic super-councils. A new era of "professionalism" was ushered in.

The old breed of town clerk with a sense of duty was replaced by a managerial class of chief executives out of the Guardian jobs pages, who pretended they were employed to run major commercial organisations - and expected to be paid accordingly.

Councillors began to receive outofpocket expenses and allowances, paving the way for full-time council leaders earning £60,000 a year.

Imposing Victorian town halls found themselves redundant, as shiny new - uniformly ugly - civic centres sprung up everywhere and councils embarked on a recruitment and spending spree which would do justice to a sailor on the shore leave.

Out went the frugal "ways and means" departments, devoted to keeping costs down. In came corporate finance divisions, money no object.

The parks committee became the "leisure and amenities" directorate. Bandstands, swings and roundabouts were neglected, while hideous new leisure centres were built at vast expense.

And so we arrived where we find ourselves today - with grandiose council "cabinets", vast PR departments, local authorities with foreign policies and anti-nuclear zones, "diversity" directorates and "carbon footprint" committees.

The sanitation department morphed into "environmental health", which thinks the way to save the planet is to empty the dustbins once a fortnight, not twice a week.

These days they'd rather employ inspectors to rifle through your bin for the 'wrong kind' of rubbish than dustmen to take it away.

Staff are hired on the basis of sexuality, disability or ethnicity, not their ability to do the job. If they must have a quota of lesbians, give them all a broom and send them out to sweep the streets once in a while.

Councils are run for the benefit of those who work there, not for people who pay for them. Is it any wonder council tax has doubled under Labour?

Where once the council chamber contained butchers, bakers and builders, we now have a generation of full-time councillors who have never held down a proper job in their lives.

Planning decisions are taken not by someone who lives round the corner - and is therefore accountable to his neighbours - but miles away by faceless bureaucrats and rubber-stamp political lobby fodder, acting on a central government directive.

So remote have local authorities become from the paying public, in political and geographical terms, that few think it even worth bothering voting in local elections any more, because they don't believe it will make the slightest difference.

Turnout has dropped so low that there's talk of bribing people to vote by giving them free doughnuts and lottery tickets.

Is this really why women chained themselves to railings and dived under racehorses?

Now, in an outrageous scam, the Government is proposing to jack up town hall allowances and salaries still further and give councillors a £10,000 "parachute payment" when they're kicked out of office.

The ludicrous Local Government Secretary, Hazel Blears, even thinks councillors should get ratepayerfunded pensions.

Meanwhile, the "services" we pay for are appalling.

Town halls employ legions of elf 'n' safety nazis to find out what we want to do and then stop us. With their armies of inspectors and parking wardens, they are part of the Punishment Culture, aimed at screwing every last penny out of us to fund their pet projects.

While the bureaucracy gets ever more bloated, the streets are filthy, the parks are left to rot, roads are riddled with potholes or cluttered with unattended traffic cones, swimmingpools and public toilets are shut and meals on wheels are under threat. Children's playgrounds are fit only for winos and glue sniffers.

Here's a real opportunity for Call Me Dave. The shameful, wasteful record of local authorities and the extortionate rates of council tax are a running sore.

The Conservatives should promise an end to this racket. If elected, he should say that councillors will no longer receive anything, other than coffee and biscuits, and a bus pass for attending meetings.

He should then set about dismantling our grotesque super-councils and replace them with slimmed-down operations based on the old borough boundaries, so that those charged with providing services actually live among those paying for them.

If they're local, they're accountable and can be bearded when they get it wrong, which wasn't unknown all those years ago, either.

Before I met Charlie, I thought his name was That Bugger Swift.

Charlie's still there, after more than 50 years as a councillor, but the world around him has changed. He now sits as an independent.

But if councils were still run part-time by engine drivers - not self-regarding, pious Guardianistas - at the very least we'd get our dustbins emptied once a week.