Councils get in a hubble-bubble over hookahs

The Local Government Association is in a funk about shisha bars:

‘Smoke-free laws are not offering strong enough punishments to deter irresponsible shisha bar owners who are making lucrative profits, which means councils often need to carry out costly and lengthy investigations to take action against the same bar over and over again.’

Let's piggle away at this one a bit. There's a market for people who want to go to a bar and smoke shisha (hookahs, hubble-bubble pipes for those who don't know about them - interesting that the Arab word, shisha, has come to be most common even among South Asian populations). And, because there are people who want to smoke said hubble-bubble pipes, unscrupulous business owners provide them and make "lucrative" profits.

Seems to me that the problem here isn't the unscrupulousness of owners or the lack of council powers - it's the smoking ban. There is no justification at all for banning people from voluntarily going into a private space to consume a legal drug. Councils are frothing away at this because the bars have priced in the risk of a fine and therefore councils want more powers, no doubt up to and including arrest and imprisonment, to deal with all this.

When we're looking at things that Council's really shouldn't be bothering about, grown men and women smoking shisha in a comfortable bar is up there near the top of the list. What's worse is that these licensing numpties don't understand why such places end up run by ne'er do wells. It's because of that smoking ban again. Organised criminals have always walked in lockstep with the puritans - one lot gets to cash in while the others get to pretend they're stopping "rogues" and protecting the public from terrible and sinful activities.

If you relax the smoking ban - perhaps just to allow cigars clubs, shisha bars and smoking rooms - then nearly all of this dastardly criminality will go away.

.....

The triumph of fussbucketry...

So it's the AGM of the Local Government Association (LGA) and, having done the regular stuff of AGMs like electing the committee and approving the accounts we get a motion. It's about public health. And it explains why the fussbuckets are triumphant.

The content of the motion itself was pretty anodyne - along the lines that public health is a jolly good thing and we need more of it. But it's when you discover just what more public health means the the hackles rise and the blood temperature lifts. For by public health they don't mean the sort of things public health should be about - air quality, clean water, immunisation and so forth - but rather they want to spend more time telling you and me that our lifestyle is wrong. More importantly these fussbuckets - we heard from a Cambridgeshire Liberal Democrat, a Hertfordshire Tory and a Boltonian Labourite - want to tell people who eschew right behaviours, mostly ignorant people from the lower classes if I'm translating the rhetoric correctly, that this won't do.

In his summation the Liberal Democrat (in that rejection of liberalism and democracy typical of the sort) frowningly commented that telling people you didn't approve of their lifestyle choices wasn't conducive to getting their vote. But of course - for those poor deluded commoners - it was essential that the error of their ways is made clear and they are nudged, bullied and pressured into the approved and incredibly boring lifestyle our abstemious councillors commend. To my shame I didn't say anything - I probably should have done - but I would have been a solitary voice in a sea of fussbucketry, a torrent of approving hands gleefully voting to nanny the hell out of ordinary folk who want to smoke, drink, vape and eat kebabs.

This is what we are contending with. Local government has always attracted the busybody, the sort of person who doesn't just think he or she knows what's good for you and I but is absolutely convinced of the utter rightness of their superiority. Fussbucketry comes easy to too many local councillors - using planning rules to ban fast food shops, imposing meat-free Mondays on bin men or spending public funds on inaccurate infographic posters lecturing us about obesity. So, having got the public health budgets from the NHS, it's inevitable that some councillors will splash this money about imposing their boring, fun-free, new puritan worldview on the poor unsuspecting public.

And the excuse? All this will save money for the NHS. As the Liberal Democrat councillors said "there are too many sick people" and most of this sickness can be 'prevented' - I'm guessing because people eat sugar, put salt on their chips, drink more than one small glass of sherry a week, and don't spend two hours jogging every day. So we should invest in 'prevention' - and let me remind you that this is 'prevention':

...it is aggressively assertive, pursuing symptomless individuals and telling them what they must do to remain healthy. Occasionally invoking the force of law (immunizations, seat belts), it prescribes and proscribes for both individual patients and the general citizenry of every age and stage. Second, preventive medicine is presumptuous, confident that the interventions it espouses will, on average, do more good than harm to those who accept and adhere to them. Finally, preventive medicine is overbearing, attacking those who question the value of its recommendations.

Even worse prevention may be better than cure when it comes to personal health but it's the very opposite of a cure when it comes to the finances of our health system. Our success in preventing the quick, painful and relative youthful deaths of times past means that we've replaced it with gradual, less painful, and incredibly expensive slow death. Don't get me wrong, I think it's great that our average life expectancy is pushing 80 and that plenty of people are leading happy, healthy and active lives into their 90s. But this doesn't save a single farthing in NHS spending and, in truth, represents the dominant reason for the financial pressures on the health system.

Despite this fussbucketry has triumphed. We can expect a new avalanche of public health initiatives aimed at nudging us - with the policy equivalent of a baseball bat - into the approved lifestyles nannying councillors have told us we should follow. For my part I concluded a while ago that public health is not other offensive and unethical but mostly a waste of money:

The truth about public health spending is that nearly all of it is wasted, is money spent on promoting an ideology of control. No lives are saved by public health's actions. No money is saved for the wider health system by the interventions of public health. No-one's wellbeing is improve by public health. Indeed for many thousands the actions of these ideologues result in a worse life. Yet in my city of Bradford over £30 million is spend on public health programmes, money that could fix the roads, could provide care for the elderly, could smarten up parks. Instead we'll spend it on nannying the hell out of the population, on promoting an unpleasant controlling ideology founded on a myth of wellbeing that has no basis in fact or substantive value to the poor masses it is being imposed upon.

Sitting in that hall and looking at those hands raising to endorse fussbucketry and the New Puritan agenda, I realised why millions of ordinary people voted to leave the EU and told pollsters that they didn't trust the experts and elites. I saw a comment (I forget where) about the referendum debate where, when some economist talked about GDP, someone cried out "that's your GDP not ours". The tale of fussbucketry is just another face of the passive aggressive oppression that is modern government - everything from trite lectures about chocolates on countlines through the confused debates about weight and body image to ignorant nonsense about why we get fat (and struggle to get thin again).

None of this will change much any time soon but it is time people affected by the moralising of professional fussbuckets started kicking back, telling the nannies that it really is absolutely none of their bloody business what we eat, drink or smoke. And that perhaps the fussbuckets might like to try having a little more fun in their life as maybe that would make them less inclined to ruin the pleasures of the rest of us. I hope so but suspect that the triumph of fussbucketry will run for a while yet.

....

Sorry LGA, controlling stuff on social media really isn't the purpose of local government

****

The LGA is a lobby and support organisation for local government. Some of us have long harboured doubts about its value and on occasion its purpose. However, it is wandering into areas that really are nothing to do with local government, I'm guessing to get a headline:

"We believe social media operators have a responsibility to provide health warnings to user groups and individuals. The LGA is looking for these corporations to show leadership and not ignore what is happening on their sites. We are urging Facebook and Twitter executives to sit down with us and discuss a way forward which tackles this issue head on.”

In quick order:

1. Social media owners have no such responsibility
2. Even if they do it really is nothing to do with English local government

Mission creep pure and simple.

....

Local Councils increase reserves (what was that about cuts?)

****

The LGA is weeping crocodile tears about Council's using reserves to manage the process of budget reductions (we should really call it 'rebasing' but that is rather too much of a jargon term for little old me). Apparently prudent local councils (who have stashed away £17 billion for a range of rainy days) will run out of money if the "cuts" continue:

...the LGA has said that the £17bn saved in cash reserves by the most prudent authorities will be used up in five years time if employed for the management of Government austerity measures. 

Of course a council may choose to use some of its reserves to extend the period over which the budget is reduced from its current base to a new base. This allows for fewer redundancies, gives space for effective service redesign and allows for the impact of any service reductions to be ameliorated. It is - in a period of savings - good budget management. Which explains of course why Bradford's Labour leadership has chosen to keep the reserves and cut the services. I call it the machismo of cuts.

But the LGA then comes up with a whining little reason why Council's shouldn't spend reserves:

This will leave councils without funds to invest in growth promoting infrastructure projects or support any further financial risks...

Pretty scary! Especially when we see the actual situation - what has really happened to reserves during this period of massive budget cuts:

Over last year, town halls outside of the capital were found to have added £2bn to their reserves, while authorities within the Greater London Authority furthered their reserves by £0.6bn. 

So it seems that, during a period of severe budget cuts, local councils have managed to squirrel away yet more cash for ill-defined and often unspecified future purposes - "strategic revenue reserves" and "change programme funds" abound providing senior officers and politicians with handy little slush funds to bung at preferred schemes and vote-buying campaigns. 

But the boss of the LGA - a Tory for heaven's sake - still bleats on about how this is all terrible:

'Councils are working extremely hard to shield frontline services from the 28% cut to the money they receive from Government. But cash reserves can only dampen the impact, not fill the gap. If councils plundered their reserves to cover the cuts, the cupboard would be bare within five years and there would be nothing left to invest in the growth promoting projects Britain desperately needs.’

So tell me Cllr Cockell, why aren't councils investing in these 'growth promoting projects' now? Why are councils continuing to hoard cash - Bradford has over £170 million, Manchester getting on for £250 million - against some proverbial rainy day? What are revenue reserves for if it's not to allow effective restructuring and the proper management of a reducing budget?

This is just special pleading - I would say ignorance but I simply don't believe that the leadership of the LGA are ignorant. This is deliberate wibble, an attempt to wangle a little more cash out of the government this autumn. That is all.

....

Eric returns to his reforming mission - thoughts on the Pickles Agenda

****

Since Eric Pickles is a working-class lad from Keighley rather too many people underestimate both his intelligence and his sense of mission. Perhaps, in the latter case, they’ll wake up following his speech to the Local Government Association Conference:

“Is it really right, in this day and age, to have separate planning departments? Lawyers? Communications teams? Wouldn’t it be better if people were working together?

That’s especially important for the highest levels and the most expensive people. It’s obviously a bad week to raise things that Germany does better than us, but they’ve really got the idea in local government. Where they’ve ended up with chief executives and executive leaders doing more or less the same thing; they’ve flat out stopped it.

Couldn’t chief execs bring more to the table by working across boundaries, rather than replicating what the leader should be doing?”

Those who remember 1988 in Bradford will recognise the objective – streamlining the council, fewer senior officers, outsourced services and an all-together blunter approach. Eric’s is very much that of what we once called the ‘soft loo paper’ Tory – what matters are the ordinary, everyday services delivered to local residents. None of this “change”, no social engineering and the barest smattering of political correctness. Give people what they want from their council at a fair price and they’ll love you for it.

To do this we don’t need libraries full of strategies, floors crammed with policy officers or whole phalanxes of people employed to count black people. We need what we had in that rose-tinted past – solid folk, doing a steady job, in the local neighbourhood trying to make it a comfortable, pleasant and tolerant place to live, work and play.

And helping Eric deliver this will be my ward colleague and Chair of the LGA, Margaret Eaton – who was Chairman of Housing & Social Services in Eric’s Bradford administration. A formidable and successful team then and, I’ve no doubt, a great team today. I shall enjoy the fun!


....