Margaret Eaton is a great local councillor an deserves being made a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire (DBE). Not just because she has argued long and hard at every level for the interests of local government - for which she has been awarded this thoroughly deserved honour - but above all because she never forgets the basics of the job. The people in Bingley Rural who she is elected to serve.
Margaret will emerge from some high level pow-wow with ministers and top civil servants and do I hear what they discuss? No, because the first thing on Margaret's mind is the traffic problem outside Nab Wood School, the landfill in Cullingworth or the problem with some resident or other's bin collection, council tax benefit or housing repairs.
A while ago I wrote this about the job of the local councillor:
"What villagers here desire is a little bit of response from the council, the health service, the police, the Environment Agency and, for that matter, all the myriad other bureaucratic institutions that blight the lives of ordinary folk. And because they don't get that attention most of the time, the councillor's job is to argue, insist, cajole, badger, shout and generally get up the noses of local officialdom in the hope that they will actually listen to local people and act on what they hear."
That is what Margaret does best.
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Update: In the Dissolution Honours, Margaret has been made a peer - this makes her the only proper Baroness I know and is a fantastic achievement entirely deserved. And the words above still stand.
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