Brighton and Hove Council - a way forward?

As ever on this blog, these are my personal opinions.

 

Over the past few weeks disciplinary action has been initiated by the Labour Party against three members of the Labour Group on Brighton and Hove City Council, in two cases this involved (or would have involved) suspension from the Group.

 

Two of the Councillors concerned have resigned the Labour Whip.

 

I am not writing this post to comment upon these cases as such. I believe in the principle that people are innocent until they are proven guilty – and that this applies regardless of what it is that they are accused of having said or done. Party members (or anyone else) rushing to judgement about cases which have yet to be properly investigated are adopting a course of action which I won’t adopt.

 

What I do intend to comment about now – in a strictly personal capacity – is the way in which these developments have brought to a head issues about how progressive Councillors in Brighton and Hove can and should try to achieve the implementation of progressive policies by the Council.

 

The May 2019 local election results were disappointing for Labour. Although we made some progress against the Conservatives and – in a couple of cases came tantalisingly close to making further progress – we lost ground to the Greens in Brighton Pavilion in particular.

 

There are many reasons for these disappointing results, and commentators tend to focus on those reasons which best support whatever case it is that they want to make.

 

My view, for what it’s worth, is that the Greens had a very good local election (prefiguring the further increase which the popular incumbent MP would see in her majority in December’s General Election). Their position of opposition to Brexit (as much as it was technically irrelevant to a local election) played well in strongly Remain-supporting parts of our City and they did not face the problem of well publicised internal division, from which our Party unfortunately suffered.

 

In any event, the outcome of the election was what it was and – at that point – we had a Labour Group of 20 and a Green Group of 19 on the Council. Neither Party could govern with a majority alone, either could govern with a majority if they made an arrangement with the Conservatives, or they could talk to each other.

 

As an aside it is worth noting that as disappointing as the elections were for Labour, they were catastrophic for the Tories – reduced to the status of the third Party on the Council across Brighton and Hove, two towns (as they then were) which, when I was growing up here, had always been Conservative controlled.

 

Labour and Green Councillors compared their manifesto commitments and found a great deal of overlap in the policies for which their voters had voted. Therefore, they came to an agreement about joint working between the Labour administration and the Green Opposition to try to achieve their shared objectives.

 

It is worth saying that some of these objectives – like reaching a carbon neutral City by 2030, tackling the Housing crisis and refocusing the Council on community wealth building – were radical objectives which required – and still require - the Council to find different ways of doing what it has done before.

 

The history of the past two decades of Brighton and Hove City Council has been of minority administrations negotiating their way through each decision more or less vote by vote – and one of the lasting consequences of this history was plainly a culture in which Council officers were used to being in effective control of the Council.

 

Having spent a working lifetime in local government, most of it as a senior union official, I don’t necessarily have a problem with Council officers having the power they should have (sometimes it is easier, as a union representative, to negotiate with officers than Members!) However, my observation of Brighton and Hove City Council is that the lengthy period of shifting minority administrations had created a culture in which senior officials were inappropriately empowered and Councillors had come to lack confidence and ambition.

 

I was very struck last year (before the local elections) to be told by a sitting Councillor that their experience was generally that they needed to write to officers at least twice to get a response. That is not the appropriate respect which should be shown to elected Members by local government employees. It was a product of an authority in which, for a long time, when the Council Leader told the Chief Executive what they wanted, the Chief Executive could turn round and say “but do you have the political support?”

 

In May last year the people of Brighton and Hove voted in approximately equal numbers for Labour candidates and for Green candidates – and approximately equal numbers of Labour and Green Councillors were elected. What was clear was that the Conservatives, who once seemed set to rule this part of the south coast for ever, had been comprehensively rejected.

 

Since central political objectives of each of the Labour and Green parties – as set out in their manifestos – were highly similar, the two Groups – sensibly in my view – came to arrangements to work together constructively to try to achieve their goals.

 

Whatever views one takes about the circumstances surrounding the resignation of two Labour Councillors and the suspension of another from the Labour Group, none of those developments change the content of the manifestos on which Councillors were elected to the Council. The question remains, how do our elected Councillors work to achieve the objectives which their Parties set for them – in their manifestos – and for which their voters voted?

 

The Labour Party now needs to find a way, in spite of the current moratorium on physical meetings, to consult our membership on the way forward for Labour Councillors to try to achieve the implementation of the objectives set out in our manifesto in the recently changed circumstances.

 

Labour Party members will, of course, want to ensure that we, as a Party, chart a course which enables us to campaign for the election of the maximum number of Labour representatives at future elections, whenever they come. Any working arrangement with another Party challenges a simplistic partisan approach to identifying and acting upon the best interests of the Party.

 

There are other local authorities where Labour works with other Parties in the administration of the Council whilst campaigning vigorously and independently for the election of Labour representatives when elections come round. It would be a great failure of imagination to believe that we could not achieve this in Brighton and Hove.

 

Of course, any joint working arrangements depend upon both parties (and indeed, both Parties) and we cannot control events unilaterally. We can, however, (if we wish) set out a positive approach to achieving effective democratic oversight of the authority and to mobilising a majority on the Council to implement key policies for which a majority in the City have voted.

 

This is what the Labour administration and Green opposition have been trying to achieve through their “Memorandum of Understanding” over recent months – and I would suggest that the circumstances of recovery from covid-19 only increase the case for such cooperation.

 

These are my views. Others have different views about what is best for our Party and our City. I hope that we will be able, as a Party to construct a means of consulting our membership in which all views can find expression, and a democratic decision can be taken so that the Party can guide the Labour Group in the challenging circumstances in which our Councillors now find themselves.

 

I am sure that the Labour Group leadership will continue to act upon the Group’s decision to seek to discuss a formal power sharing agreement with the Green Group – and very much hope that the Green Group will be open to having such discussion – so that the members of both Parties will know what it is that they are being consulted upon.

 

Reading what passes for local media these days (or, which is worse, paying too much attention to social media) one could end up obsessively focusing upon the urgency of individual cases and the subsequent impact upon who sits where in the Town Hall.

 

When politics seems to be about individuals, about what they have said or done, and what is to be done about that, and about numbers of Members of political groups on a local authority it is worth raising one’s eyes and looking at the ambitious goals which our Party set for our Councillors in our Manifesto.