The library, like the pub, the village hall and the church is a vital community institution - even if you don't use it

...the contexts in which civil society operates have become much more hostile. In most parts of the world, communities are increasingly divided. Violence, intolerance and inequality are on the rise. Authoritarians of different stripes have gained a foothold. Restrictions on freedom of speech and association are increasingly common, with just three per cent of the world’s population now living in countries where civic space is defined as “fully open.”And public spheres seem incapable of addressing any of these concerns.

This depressing picture of civic society's polarisation comes from Michael Edwards at Open Democracy as he asks how we escape from the tribalism of modern society - we see more and more groups representing "...a particular position, identity or interest..." and fewer groups "...that attract a diversity of members in terms of class and political affiliation". In part this reflects how politics and political positioning has clustered more and more around these ideas of identity and interest especially on the left. For all the talk of inclusion and equalities, we live in an increasingly fragmented and isolating society.

A while ago I came to the conclusion that the route to community cohesion has to come through the things we share rather than the things where we differ. When I stand with some of my Muslim neighbours watching a firework display, we share the same joy and pleasure at the display - our differences in faith, culture and background are of little consequence. When I go into the local Co-op I share the same mundane experience as all the customers, our identity is not a matter at issue or concern.

We don't have a library in Cullingworth (I don't think we've ever had a library although village old-timers may correct me on this one) but it seems to me that communities taking pleasure in literacy is another of those things that break us away from this polarising emphasis on identity. Yet the way in which we conceive of a library remains caught in the past - perhaps because too few of us make regular use of libraries. My Mum and Dad went to the library once a fortnight and borrowed twelve books and whenever you visited they'd be sat there book to hand. And when you've read six books a week for 70 years, it's fair to say that the breadth of subject for conversation gets pretty broad - literacy is a wonder.

But libraries, created at a time when books were, relative to income, expensive now face a world where books are largely speaking much cheaper. Plus alternatives multiply as the digital world of film, audio, games and words explodes. But these worlds act to reinforce isolation and polarisation too - going to a library is a social act, I'm not so sure scrolling through a Kindle recommends list can be described as one. The problem is that, despite this, fewer of us are using libraries - from 2006 to 2016 users in England declined from over 48% of the population to 33%. That's still a third of the population using libraries but the trend in use is still downwards driven by the digital world and, increasingly, by decisions to close libraries (the matter of local government funding is a whole other subject - you can read some of my thoughts here).

For all the wrong reasons we are pulling funding from libraries, shuffling them into the voluntary sector (and I don't want to belittle community run libraries as they're fantastic places run by super volunteers), and closing them down. And Councils are using the excuse of declining usage and the advancing digital world to justify these decisions even though they all know its really because of the underfunding of social services. To return to where we started, the library like the village hall, the parish church and the pub is a neutral place free from that polarising focus on identity. And libraries do more than just lend you a book.

I asked Twitter whether people still used the library and can confirm that, at least in the unrepresentative world of my Twitter feed, this is the case. But what struck me most was how much, for want of better words, other stuff libraries do. Here are a few:

A quiet place to work
After-school clubs
Somewhere to read the newspapers
Audio and ebooks
Music recitals
A place to write
Children's play
A performance space
Lectures and demonstrations
Job search and advice
Health signposting and advice
Poetry and book readings
Book signings
Meetings
Printing out documents, homework

The problem - and again this might, in part, be a resource issue - is that most people haven't the first idea these things are available. This is from the USA but I'm pretty confident you'd find a similar answer in England:

The survey notes that while 62 percent of libraries offer online career and job-related resources, 38 percent of adults don’t know whether their library offers them. Likewise, 35 percent of libraries offer high school equivalency classes, and nearly half of adults don’t know whether their libraries offer them. The numbers are similar for programs on starting a new business, online programs that certify people who’ve mastered a new skill, and ebook borrowing.

The latter is an especially glaring example of the dissonance between services provided and knowledge of those services. While 90 percent of libraries offer ebook lending, 22 percent of adults say they don’t know whether their library offers ebooks, and 16 percent say their library does not offer ebooks.

If we want strong communities - and I'm a conservative so I definitely want this - we need to treasure the spaces and places that allow for exchange and interaction beyond the boundaries of our identity and interest groups, outside our tribe. But, like so much that's done by local government, the national debate is characterised by MPs thinking they know better and Whitehall trying to get a pounds worth of sweets for ten shillings. We all know these institutions matter but carry on doing things that put them under threat.

Libraries are more than just places filled with books, they're a community institution that helps bridge divides in society, promotes cohesion and provides a neutral space for that community. Government is failing us if it doesn't see its role as making sure that these sort of institutions are cherished. And funding for such vital places is probably more important than free broadband, bidding for the world cup finals or building superfast trains systems.


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Do we need to invest more time, thought and money on making communities work?

 The American Enterprise Institute (AEI) has a survey on community and society - "Social capital, civic health, and quality of life in the United States". One of the researchers Samuel Abrams comments on some of their findings:

...when Americans live near a variety of public places and spaces – from cafes and bars to shopping areas and parks, playgrounds, or beaches – trust in others and sense of community increases, feelings of loneliness and isolation decline, and faith is local government is higher than in areas with fewer communal amenities. The data also reveals that these amenities can be regularly found throughout most residential spatial forms to varying degrees around the country from inner cities to small towns and suburbs; only rural areas tend to lack close proximity to these amenities en masse.

This is not simply about public sector provision but a wide variety of places where people meet and interact - "...grocery stores; restaurants, bars, or coffee shops; gyms or fitness centers; movie theaters, bowling alleys, or other entertainment venues; parks or recreation centers; and community centers or libraries."

Abrams focuses on voter turnout in local elections (and how dog owners are more community minded - I guess we'd better not mention the poo though) but at the core of this concern is the idea of trust with the research finding that people "...derive a sense of community from their friends, neighborhoods, and hometowns more than their ideology or ethnic identity. Regular interaction with friends and neighbors produces a strong sense of community."

Put simply, community matters. And this, a discovery that shouldn't surprise anyone, is something that too often takes a secondary place in public policy around crime, economy, health and welfare. All these policy areas run along separate lines with separate groups of experts many of whom see the issue as being about the actions of individuals or small groups of individuals.

What this research suggests is that having people living in identifiable, safe neighbourhoods should be a primary aim of public policy. And, while this chimes with some aspects of city-oriented 'New Urbanism', it also suggests that we should focus a little less on the economics of agglomeration and a little more on the sociology of neighbourhoods. We can agree about 'walkability', about the value of main street, and about how private amenities are as significant - perhaps more so - as public amenities, but not about the impact of city living on transience, loss of community and social isolation. It maybe shouldn't matter that in Manhattan and Inner West London the most common 'family structure' is the single person but perhaps this is an indicator of that social atomisation.

There is, in much of today's urban planning, not merely a disdain for suburbs (despite AEI's research showing suburbia is where there are the most high amenity neighbourhoods) but a somewhat inhuman utilitarianism focused on cramming the highest numbers of 'worker units' in the smallest space. There is a kick-back on all this with the idea that we can develop much more densely without losing the idea of houses or streets - the inner urban world doesn't have to crowded anonymity - but we still see suburban development dismissed sneeringly as sprawl.

At the same time the legacy of Ebeneezer Howard continues with the idea that the answer is new communities - 'garden cities' - are the answer rather than the modest extension of exiting suburbs, towns and villages that are already high amenity places. It's also why we should worry about the decline in our high streets, should stress the value of community centres and village halls, and should consider - for all their sometimes pettiness and nosy-parkering - things like Parish Councils and community associations as vital to a strong neighbourhood. And perhaps, when we're considering splashing public money on railways or huge new hospitals, we should ask whether putting some of that money into community amenities might just be better for society and people's well-being?
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Councillors and MPs objecting to housing developments? Don't be the Grand Old Duke of York

Oh, the grand old Duke of York,
He had ten thousand men;
He marched them up to the top of the hill,
And he marched them down again.

The Duke of York in question is most commonly said to be Prince Frederick, Duke of York and Albany who wasn't a very successful military commander:

When war broke out between Britain and France in 1793, York was put in charge of a military expedition to Flanders. He took control of the port of Dunkirk but was then pushed back in a battle at Hondschoote on 6 September. His troops – a mixture of British and Hanoverian forces – performed well but were outnumbered three to one, losing their siege guns during the retreat.

Over the following months, he marched his army back and forth between ineffective minor actions, inspiring the nursery rhyme. Meanwhile, Britain and her allies lost control of Flanders, and in July 1794 York and his troops were evacuated.

The futility of the action is what we remember hence the nursery rhyme. And, for me, the lesson for us all is not to offer a community great victories then march them up and down, backwards and forwards before admitting defeat. In this spirit, I'm offering some advice - based on 24 years experience - on responding to unpopular housing development proposals.

What happens in too many cases is that local politicians (and MPs - often the worst offenders), faced with opposition to a development from residents, do precisely what the Grand Old Duke did and march randomly from one possible objection to the next. And its wrong to march a community, banners waving, up to the top of the hill when you know you'll just march them back down, banners furled and defeated, in a week or so. Too many politicians, having got the votes nicely parcelled away, fall back on "well I tried but the planners and developers you know..."

So lets look at what you should do.

The first question you should ask is whether the site for the proposed housing is allocated for this purpose in the development plan (there are various iterations of these but these days we're mostly talking about the local plan). If the planning authority has allocated the site for housing, they have already accepted the principle that new houses will be built on the site. Trying to overturn this principle is futile and local politicians should be honest enough to tell concerned residents the truth - 'you're going to get houses built here and we can't stop this - so our job is minimise the harm from the development and maximise the community benefit'.

If it's not an allocated housing site, you need to look at whether it has some other designation - green belt*, employment land, flood plain or a variety of environmental, ecological and heritage protections. If it doesn't have any other designation and protection, it's just a piece of 'white land' on the local plan map, then, again, you tell the community - 'you're going to get houses built here and we can't stop this - so our job is minimise the harm from the development and maximise the community benefit'.

Where it does have protections or other designations then the principle of building housing isn't established allowing you to say that the designation or protection in the plan outweighs the need for housing. It's worth remembering that the only sustainable basis for a refusal is to demonstrate that the principle of housing is not established, any other basis for refusal can be mitigated by a developer (whether they want to afford this is a different issue).

Residents will raise a consistent set of objections to housing development, the more common being:

1. It will negatively affect house prices (or 'we already have too many houses')

2. The schools are full

3. You can't get an appointment at the doctors

4. It will remove our views of something

5. Bats or badgers or rare orchids or unusual amphibia inhabit the site

6. There are too many cars and this will make it worse - children will be killed

7. The site is crossed by ancient footpaths or bridleways

8. Seasonal flooding affects the site

9. There's all sorts of significant historical or archaeological stuff on the site

10. Trees

It's worth noting that some of these will never be used for a refusal. This includes school places, doctors, house prices or numbers, views and footpaths. We have a long established system through s106 agreements and Community Infrastructure Levy to mitigate impact on things like education, heath and community facilities, and house prices or your view are not the concern of the planning system. For flora and fauna there are very few circumstances under which, on a large site, these can't be mitigated, either through relocation or specific protections. It's great that you can get bats, trees and rare blue butterflies protected through the planning system but you're not going to get the housing stopped on this basis. The same goes for archaeology since, if the site is known to be important it will already be protected (see designations and protections above), and most developers are content to allow archaeological work given that they're going to dig up the site anyhow.

This leaves us with highways and flooding. And yes, you'll be pleased to know, developments on designated housing sites do get refused because of how they impact on road safety, congestion, drainage or flooding. But this only happens when the developer ignores highways advice and the expectations of water and environment authorities (whose responses to consultations will, in most cases, carry greater weight than what local residents say).

For highways the system as a whole has the capacity to accommodate the traffic generated by your development (I know you don't believe this but it is what the planning system assumes so you're stuck with it) so you have to focus on specific pinch points, junctions and stretches of road. Highways planners have standard measures for assessing junctions, the need for crossings and whether parking restrictions or other traffic controls are required. Remember that, if you're stood by the side of the road with traffic passing, 30mph is very fast meaning that, when residents tell you about the awful speeding, the chances are there's a lot less of it than you think. In the end, if a highways development control officer says a junction has the capacity and is safe, then the planning committee is likely to take this assessment as true even if your residents think it's a joke. In these circumstances you are better looking for mitigation - yellow lines, warning signs, pedestrian crossings - than trying to stop the development.

Fields (especially here in the glorious South Pennines with our topography and copious amount of boulder clay) suffer from seasonal floods. If you drive around during the winter months you'll see low lying parts of fields filled with water, often with ducks, too! It's standard for residents to point at a proposed development site and say; 'look it floods, you can't build on it'. Again it doesn't really work like this because, if it really is flood plain, then it's unlikely the principle of housing would be sustained (see designations and protections above). Your site probably isn't flood plan so the principle, in very simple terms, is that the development should not have a negative impact on drainage. This pretty much means that the flow of water through the site has to be the same (or better) after development as it was before development. There are a lot of rules about sustainable urban drainage (delightfully shortened to SUDS) and the developer will want to resolve the issues with areas subject to seasonal flooding but if the overall drainage through the site is unaffected then you've not really any grounds for refusal.


There are other things that might result in objections (from loss of agricultural land or lack of affordable homes through to arcane discussions of who owns the land) but these describe the majority of reasons local people will raise in objecting to new housing.

It's easy politics to oppose housing development and it's easy to whip up opposition, to march the community up to the top of the hill. But the honourable course is to look the community in the eye, as I did when we had an application for 250 new houses in Cullingworth, and say "these houses will get built, we should screw as much benefit for the village as we can from the development". We got a new village hall and pre-school.

*Following a suggestion on Twitter here's a note setting out the difference between 'green belt' and 'greenfield'. Green Belt is a planning designation designed to prevent what is perjoratively called 'urban sprawl' it doesn't mean that the land with this designation is actually green. Greenfield simply describes a site that has not been developed previously. A site being greenfield doesn't provide any protection at all. For completeness, 'brownfield' simply refers to a site that has been previously developed. There are lots of brownfield sites that are Green Belt.

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Does our attitude to work change how employers see the workplace?

 This may or may not be true (there is a deal of rose-colouring going on in some looks back at old time blue collar work) but it is still an important question posed by sociologist, Tim Strangleman:

But we also ask critical questions as to why, not so long ago, ordinary working-class people could enjoy conditions at work that gave them dignity, confidence, and hope that their lives were getting better, decade by decade, and that the children’s lives would be better still. It poses questions for all of us as workers, as voters, stock holders, and citizens: why is treating workers well seen as a cost on the balance sheet to be controlled rather than the right thing to do?

Some will point to the declining influence of trade unions (and their accompanying descent into political muck-raking rather than serving their members), others will say that we no longer have any 'jobs for life' and are obsessed with the idea of career as an endless progression rather than work as a noble, uplifting means to sustain ourselves and our communities.

"I've never done one job for three years. This is the first time I've done this and I feel it's time for me to move on to different challenges,"

I guess it's easy for a rich and successful actor like Peter Capaldi to say this but it signals that staying in a job - not a progression, not a career, just a job - for any length of time represents some sort of failure. There's also a sort of assumption that the only route to fulfilment is through a career. Having a great allotment, breeding champion racing pigeons or playing club cricket let alone raising a decent, caring family no longer rank up there with being, as the reluctant cannibal's dad achieved, "chief assistant to the assistant chief".

This isn't to belittle ambition or to push aside the importance of that dignity, confidence and hope but to ask about the order of carts and horses: does the decline of 'treating workers well' result from the sense of disloyalty and the view that work is a means of a career end not a purposeful thing in and of itself? Or, to push into this further, is the 'human resources' department with its annual appraisals, personal development plans and centralised personnel management the reason senior managements no longer consider worker benefits and the work environment as a source of corporate pride. Here's Strangleman talking about Guinness's brewery at Park Royal in London:

Along with earning decent wages and good pensions when they were relatively rare features of blue-collar life in the UK, Park Royal workers also had access to a range of sports facilities and cultural activities onsite, subsidised by the company itself. On top of that, Guinness had hired Sir Giles Gilbert Scott, the premier architect of the day, to design the buildings. The grounds were laid out by some of the top contemporary landscape gardeners, who planted hundreds of different tree species and thousands of shrubs. All this not because the company had too, but because they felt it was the right thing to do, because they wanted to.

I'm sure there are employers with this enlightened outlook (Naked Wines have a slide) but there has been a systemisation of worker relations, the domination of rules and an HR-driven obsession with progression. The idea that we should treat a workforce like a community has gone and that managements should invest in that community, for all that not every employer was like Guinness, has long gone replaced with that stifling centralised HR bureaucracy we have all grown to love along with a wholly utilitarian relationship between the individual and their work.

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Some questions to get conservatives thinking

 I've repeatedly warned conservatives that, if defining who is or isn't a conservative and what is or isn't conservatism is left to socialists, liberals and reactionaries, we will become irrelevant to politics and policy-making. Historian Robert Saunders, in criticising Roger Scruton's call for defunding of university departments lacking in intellectual diversity, set this out in a Twitter thread:

In its early years, Thatcherism teemed with ideas. The party became a magnet for historians, philosophers and economists - some converts from the radical Left - who hammered out their ideas in think tanks, discussion groups and Scruton's own journal, The Salisbury Review

Saunders asks whether the current reaction from conservatives to left-wing dominance of academia - ban it, stop it, take its money away - simply covers over the paucity of conservative thinking, especially in or near to the Conservative Party itself. Saunders isn't a conservative so my warning is relevant but his (admitted a tad jaundiced) analysis of David Cameron is very telling:

From this perspective, Cameron seems guilty not of ‘scepticism’ but of what his biographers call a ‘heroic incuriosity’. He takes no interest in the arts; has only the haziest grasp of history; and cheerfully admits that he ‘doesn’t really read novels’. Far from liberating himself from ‘ideology’, he has simply ceased to ask meaningful questions of it.

This is, without question, the defining characteristic of many modern politicians - Cameron is not unique in being spectacularly bright but incredibly shallow, just look at Justin Trudeau, Emmanuel Macron, Leo Varadkar and, of course, the godfather of 'image is everything' political positioning, Tony Blair.

A while ago - when slightly angry voices on the right of politics were saying that Cameron was a 'conservative in name only' or similar, I wrote that this was far from the truth, he is absolutely a conservative:

But for Cameron – and we see this in his enthusiasm for “social action” – such an obligation to act nobly is essential to conservatism. We are defined by what we do rather than what we support. Passing laws to help the poor in Africa or to care for communities in England is not sufficient; we must act ourselves to help society. A central tenet of Cameron’s conservatism is the idea of “giving back” – we are fortunate so it behoves us to put some of that fortune back into society.

The second concept is the idea of administration. Some people see the purpose of securing political power as the way to effect change, to direct the forces of government so as to improve mankind. In Cameron’s conservatism this is not the case; the purpose of power is administration – the running of good government.

The problem is that this outlook - action and managerialism - doesn't leave a great deal of space for thought and rather focuses our preference on doers rather than thinkers - Rory Stewart rather than Jesse Norman. As Blair once put it "what matters is what works" and, in most cases, "what works" is defined as what wins us elections rather than a genuinely technocratic evidence-based polity. Our modern government looks technocratic but is far more concerned with what might be called "feels" than with substantive thinking about policy.

An illustration of this came from Will Tanner (who runs the brand new Tory think tank, Onward) in response to Liz Truss MP's suggestion that we need to reform planning and build a million new homes on what is now 'green belt' around London:

You've got to admire @trussliz' chutzpah, but our 10,000 sample megapoll last month suggested allowing development on the Green Belt would be the most unpopular housing pledge the Conservatives could take into an election, even with young people

Truss responds with a very telling comment:

We've got to move away from focus-group paralysis and deliver what will improve people's opportunities and life chances. We have to start making arguments again and not just follow.

Tanner's comment is in line with the Conservative Party of Cameron - no thinking ("how do we craft a planning system that protects, enhances even, the beauty, heritage and environment of England while allowing the housing development we need") just 'we can't do that, it isn't popular'. You don't have to agree with Truss's argument about housing development to see that setting policy by opinion poll denies the requirement to think seriously about the sort of places we want in our society. It is also a little ironic to see a politician slapping down a think-tank chief for not doing any actual thinking.

As to that conservative thinking, it is out there but not quite where you'd expect to find it. Firstly, the sort of issues that really bother people are now far less about economics than they are about sociology:

As conservatives, however, we can take advantage of not being tied to a canon to dip into a wider range of sources, to use fiction - Austen, Trollope, Tolkien and even Disraeli - as well as philosophy. Above all though, conservatives should pay more attention to sociology than economics. Most of our problems are because we haven't done this, we've allowed ourselves to be captured by the dry logic of what Deidre McCloskey calls "Max U" - maximising utility, utilitarianism, metrics, technocracy, Plato's Philosopher Kings.

So if you want to get some substance about family, community, identity and the loss of institutions, you're better off reading US sociologist Robert Putnam's "Our Kids" or Dutch geographer Harm de Blij's "The Power of Place" than dabbing your eyes at reactionary paeans to a lost bucolic England or thudding your way through "The Road to Serfdom". And taking a look at non-conservative voices at the fringes of what's usually called 'populism' like Ben Cobley, David Goodhart and Matthew Goodwin.

The questions - challenges we could call them - that emerge include:

1. How do we restore trust to society - in things like marriage, education, justice, business and finance as well as government?

2. How, in an age of individualism, LGBT rights, gay marriage and identity wars, do we rebuild families as the central building block of society?

3. How do we balance the undoubted power of free markets and new technology in promoting betterment with the human desire to sustain community?

4. How do we promote local autonomy in a world filled with outcries about 'postcode lotteries'?

5. How does personal responsibility square with the popular idea that our agency is compromised by modern marketing methods?

6. Is there still a concept of duty - to family, friends, neighbourhood and nation?

7. Can we meet the aspiration for security without compromising civil liberties, and where is the boundary beyond which acceptable social control become autocracy?

8. What are the institutions we need to meet the aspirations for secure families and strong communities?

Too much of our thinking is, as Lizz Truss noted, dominated by opinion polling and focus groups resulting in policy-making that, to use an ad man's term, "just films the brief" - we get lists of initiatives each crafted so as to ping a positive in polling or research but these lists are, taken as a whole, unsatisfying. From tweaks, up or down, to taxes through grants or incentives to tinkering bits of regulatory change, what we have doesn't present any sort of picture of what we want tomorrow's families, communities and neighbourhoods to look like - they are bereft of a vision and wholly without the sort of mission Disraeli set us, 'improve the condition of the working man'.

You don't need university departments, think tanks or learned societies to consider what a 21st century conservatism might look like and there's no point in (given the left wing bias of academia) trying to push water uphill - so feel free to take those eight questions above, add to them if you like, and start thinking about what kind of place you want to live in and how we get there.


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Built by the community - at the opening of Cullingworth's new village hall

Yesterday I made my final appearance on a pubic platform (which I quite literally managed to fall off - but that's a different story). It was the opening party for the brand new Cullingworth Village Hall. Here are my words...

"Who’d have thought that, when Bryan Hobson said we needed £500,000 to build a new hall, that nearly six years – and best part of a million pounds – later we’d be standing in a place this magnificent.

And the best thing about this brilliant new hall is written on the artwork you all saw as you walked in…

BUILT BY THE COMMUNITY

It wasn’t built by the council, by some agency of government or some benevolent billionaire – it was built by you. And it will stand as a reminder that, if you set out to do something as a community, you can succeed.

Standing here talking to you today is, pretty much, the last thing I’ll do as your local councillor. And it is great, for me if not for you, that my last speech is in the village where I live congratulating the people of that place – my neighbours – on what they’ve achieved.

There is a huge long list of thank yous – many captured on the artwork in what will be the café area – and I’m not going to attempt that list. Instead I want to single out 4 women without whom this hall wouldn’t have happened: Jill Logan, Kathryn Toledano, Jill Smith and Janet Toner. I’ve seen how many hundreds of hours have been put into raising the funds, getting planning permission, negotiating with the council and getting the hall actually built. I’ve witnessed the highs and lows, the tearing of hair and the jumping with joy. I know many others played a part but without those four women, we wouldn’t have got to where we are today.

I’ve often said that, if we want a better world, we need to start by making our little world better. With the things we can see from our doorstep. It’s easy to point at distant governments, at local councils, at us politicians – ‘they can do it, it’s their job’ – but isn’t it our village, our community, our place, shouldn’t we start with asking what we can do not wait for someone else far away to maybe notice us?

I hope this new hall allows for a host of new projects, new ideas – anything from a bunch of people learning Spanish – the new hall's first paying customers - to events and support for old and young.

I promised to be brief and so will stop at this point. I’ll leave you – before handing over to Jill Logan who’ll talk a little more about how we got here – with a thought:

A village is about the people who live there. What makes such a place work is that these people care – about each other, about the village itself and about making it a better place. We don’t always agree about what’s important but, saying that, we all have what Gandhi called an ‘imagined village’ in our heads. And, you know, most of our imagined villages look pretty much the same.

So well done. Give yourselves a round of applause. Shake your neighbour’s hand. Give them a hug.

And enjoy your hall."

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That's all folks (my last speech to Bradford Council)

Strictly not my last as I used my right to reply to thank the hundreds of Council officers who helped make my job as a councillor possible - but here's the prepared speech.

"On my bedside table there’s a copy of The Little World of Don Camillo, Giovanni Guereschi’s whimsical evocation of life in a little Italian town back in the 1940s. More than any other book, this one has shaped how I think about politics. Let me share a bit from its opening:

…I want you to understand that, in the Little World between the river and the mountains, many things can happen that cannot happen anywhere else. Here, the deep, eternal breathing of the river freshens the air, for both the living and the dead, and even the dogs have souls. If you keep this in mind, you will easily come to know the village priest, Don Camillo, and his adversary, Peppone, the Communist Mayor. You will not be surprised that Christ watches the goings on…and that one man beats the other over the head, but fairly – that is without hatred – and that in the end the two enemies find they agree about essentials.

Those ‘essentials’ are in the simplest terms community, neighbourhood and pride in the place we live.

In this grand room we talk about Bradford in sweeping terms but outside, our attention is, as us pompous urbanists put it, more granular. Most of our work as councillors – and probably the thing that gives us most pleasure – is done in the communities we represent.

I was sat on top of Denholme Edge the other day eating a ham and tomato sandwich, admiring the view. Much of what I see from there is Bingley Rural. And it is beautiful.

Anyway I was sat there and I got to thinking. Each way I looked, into every nook of the places in that view there was a story – something that had been done to make the place a little better. Some of those stories were about stopping something – the ten year campaign, ending in the High Court, to stop a landfill blighting Denholme – but most were about improvement, little acts of betterment. A new kids playground, some traffic lights, a crossing – small things that matter to people far more than the big things we usually talk about in these Council meetings.

Bradford is a place of a thousand little worlds, each one different and each one precious to the people who live it them. It is those little worlds that my motion is about. First that we should celebrate the ordinary folk who, every day, do something to make those places better or the people in them stronger. And second that, even in these financially constrained times, us councillors – individually and collectively – can do something to help those good people with their betterment.

The idea for a loan product starts with a meeting I had with the then Corporate Services Director, Stuart McKinnon-Evans. I happened to mention the efforts to raise the cash to build a new village hall in Cullingworth and that they were looking at a soft loan from Unity Bank or Charity Bank. Stuart’s response was “why not ask the Council?”.

We did, and tomorrow £50,000 will be loaned to the hall by the Council – the final bit of funding for a £900,000 project.

The new hall is built and, with a fair wind, will open after Easter this year – nearly six years after former Heaton councillor, Bryan Hobson – then chair of the hall committee – announced the need for a new hall because the old one, a 50 year old wooden hut, was falling down.

My motion simply asks officers to look into how we might make this approach more widely available – Cullingworth was lucky because I was leader of the Conservative Group and sat in a meeting with the Council’s most senior finance officer.

There is a lot of criticism – not always justified – directed at the council for giving too much attention to the city centre. This motion, at pretty much zero cost to the council, allows us to provide another way to support local communities – those little worlds we each represent - do those little acts of betterment.

If you want to be flash, you could call it social venture capital – investing in social enterprises like community centres, sports clubs and pre-schools. Add to this the consideration of planning gain, some advice and support around planning and licensing, and we have a little package that can perhaps get a few more local initiatives out of the ground.

It’s not a panacea and can’t replace the loss of grant funding or the reduction in neighbourhood support or community development but it would help and, I feel, show that the Council is thinking about those thousands of little worlds than make up our city as well as the grand projects that might make the centre of that city great again.

Lord Mayor, I’ve sat through – and made the occasional contribution to – over 200 council meetings. A lot of what we do features much sound and fury but little real purpose beyond political campaigning. But in and amongst this are little ideas – often quiet – that we soon forget about but which make a real difference to some of those little worlds.

In the end we’re not measured by the titles we had, the power we wielded or the things we said, we’re tested on whether we did good and if, at the end of our time, we made the places we represent just a little bit better.

In Rudyard Kipling’s paean to his home county of Sussex he starts like this:

God gave all men all earth to love
But, since our hearts are small
Ordained for each one spot should prove
Beloved over all…

We are vessels for the love that people have for their communities, their neighbourhoods – you all know this – and I hope that, in our small way, we can help those people make their little worlds just that little better."

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