On the setting of council budgets...

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Bradford Council is about to set its budget for 2014-2016. I can hear your excitement at the prospect, the sounds of cynical snorts echo through the grand rooms of City Hall, even the odd snigger is heard. "Budget! Useless shower, what do they know about budget!"

All eighty-nine of us Councillors will troop into the Council Chamber at 16:00 tomorrow clutching our agenda and our copies of the budget. Few will have read the budget.

Your cynicism has turned to rage as you splutter - "what d'you mean, haven't read the budget?".

Absolutely most won't have read the budget because the Labour-controlled executive only published said budget yesterday - 48 hours before we get to vote on it. This was the last possible moment at which they could publish - leaving the rest of us with little or no time to read, absorb and propose amendments in time for the deadline for submission of those amendments (10:00 on the morning of the full council meeting). Bearing in mind that the Finance Director has to sign off any amendments.

I shan't bore you with the details of the Labour budget. Suffice it to say that they've done what we expect them to do - make cuts they don't need to make for maximum political impact and charged local residents as much as they possibly can for the pleasure of not receiving services they used to receive.

What bothers me is that, for all the council leader's protestations about the 'budget process', this is how we've always gone about the task of setting a budget in excess of £1 billion. A flurry of activity as we argue the toss over a few million quid. As my grandfather once said about the budget for Penge Urban Distrct Council (of which he was Chairman): "the amount of time spent on an item is in inverse proportion to that item's cost".

So Bradford Council's gross budget is around £1.2 billion. And we are scrabbling around down the back of the sofa looking for about £1.5m so we don't have to withdraw youth services from any community where the youth aren't actually running riot. And £65,000 to keep the public loos open in Haworth (a place that gets several million visitors every year).

At the end of the meeting we will have fulfilled our responsibility - setting a Council Tax for 2014/15 (and, yes, Labour propose an increase) and agreeing the associated budget. The problem is that none of the Councillors and few, if any, Council Officers will have read the whole of this budget. I know that, having done my best to wade through the budget, I will have missed something. And, at some point in the year something will come up and the response will be: "oh, it was in the budget" accompanied by a finger pointed at the offending line.

I could say that this is no way to run anything but, given the scale of Bradford Council, I can't see any way in which setting the budget can be anything other than 'top line'. And this means that, rather than the 'budget management' approach most councils adopt, we should use a priority-setting approach. At the planning stage, regardless of statutory duties and the exercise of statutory powers, we should ask what it is we think the council must do, what we think is nice to have and what is essentially a waste of time or money (or both).

There will be some things the council sees as a waste that have to be done because some numpty down in London says so ('equalities impact assessments' spring to mind here) but, by deprioritising them, we reduce the cost to the minimum needed to meet the duty. In contrast, there will be things we consider absolutely essential but which aren't a duty (providing public lavatories, for example).

The hard part of this approach to budget setting is that your decisions - I'd close down the essentially useless smoking cessation services, for example - will result in criticism from those associated with the service. A climate change department (Bradford has one of these) would be down near the bottom of my list of essential council services but the greens and 'save the planet' obsessives may take a different view - very loudly.

Most of the time the result of this process is that no-one is satisfied but equally there isn't enough dissatisfaction to result in big protests or (much more concerning for councillors) people voting you out of office. The result is that essential services are run on the same rickety basis as 'nice to have' services and bureaucracy we can do without. A sort of shared pain.

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Conservative things...

I’m a Conservative – a bit like Iggy Pop’s a conservative. I don’t see the need to change things that don’t need changing, I think that most of the time people can get on with each other and with their lives without the need for the state’s guiding hand and I believe that the place we’re from and the place we choose to settle shapes who we are and encapsulates our values, our culture if you will.

I look across Yorkshire’s green hills, listen to the birds singing and look at those things seeming timeless – the beer, the food, the walls and trees, the rounded vowels and, above all, that view that this land is ours to cherish. To understand what it means to be conservative, you have to grasp that this is everyone’s.

James Delingpole – who probably isn’t a conservative – writes today in his usual polemical manner about the Conservative Party’s predicament:

...the Conservative party in Britain is in dire, dire trouble. And the root of this malaise is precisely this mix of snooty remoteness, intellectual woolliness and odious wetness exhibited by senior party figures like Oliver Wetwin.

And it’s true – Oliver Letwin, for all his Etonian grandeur, his haughty braininess and his riches, isn’t a conservative.  But the party’s predicament isn’t down to the Letwins of this world – it’s down to us losing touch with the core of our vote. People who are not the scions of fine families, have at best a tenuous connection to the world of merchant banking or the city and whose connection with fine houses comes from trips to visit them using our National Trust membership.

Last May, my party won seats because ordinary working people started to vote Tory again – among the snobbish elite voting Tory was only acceptable if one knew the candidate or their views were suitably “liberal”. Knocking on two-thirds of professional and managerial voters used to plump for Tory candidates back in the 1970s and 1980s – last year we struggled to 39% of such folk.

By contrast, 37% of the skilled working class – all those men in white vans, those plumbers, chippies and lathe turners – voted Conservative in 2010. Men and women looking for that idea of aspiration, self-reliance and independence that conservatives offer. People for whom the simple sense of place – of village, town or city, county and nation – helps define who they are and who care little for the obsessions of those with the cash to indulge in fine thoughts.

In Bingley Rural – five villages in the South Pennines – there aren’t many millionaires. The roads aren’t cluttered with flash cars, we don’t have fancy wine bars or posh boutiques, the merchant banker is most definitely a foreign beast – but we are pretty conservative. We like the place as it is, we like the features of the villages, the pubs, the farm shops, the butcher, we enjoy the company of neighbours and friends and we want to work. We love the setting and the country around us.

What we ask of our government is pretty simple – protection from crime, good schools and skilled doctors, helping keep the place clean, maintaining the roads, pavements and parks, providing support – when needed – to those in need and preserving the good things about the places. We don’t ask for lectures about “climate change”, about drinking and smoking, what kind of car we drive or holiday we take.

When I knock on doors and talk to local folk, they don’t ask me about the carbon footprint of Easyjet or the need to ban booze advertising. People don’t mention ‘gross national happiness’ or the equalities agenda. What they ask is why the pubs are going bust, how expensive basic staples – food and fuel - have got, how they never see a copper and why their son can’t afford a house in the village.

Simple, easy-to-understand things concerned with the place we live, with keeping it nice, with making it better – conservative things.

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What were they thinking? Of course prisoners shouldn't get the vote.

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My decidedly liberal attitude to criminal justice faced a challenge as the great "should prisoners get the vote" debate raged. And yes, the quite hideous John Hirst did a pretty good hatchet job on my willingness to support liberalisation but that wasn't the clincher. The clincher is this blogpost from SadButMadlad on Anna Raccoon's site where he suggests we treat prisoners in the same manner as many of our elderly, nursing home 'customers':

The criminals would get cold food, be left all alone and unsupervised. Lights off at 8pm, and showers once a week.  Live in a tiny room and pay £600.00 per week and have no hope of ever getting out.

Now I know not all old folks homes are like this - especially the creative, modern ones in the private sector - but it's a strong point. And bear in mind that plenty of those old people are effectively denied the vote too since no-one bothers to make it possible for them.

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For heaven's sake Gordon, foxes are not the country's priority...really!

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Here we are with an economy mired deeply in recession, public finances in crisis, our troops dying in Afghanistan, folk losing their houses, jobs and savings and the highest levels of violent crime for decades.

And what does the Labour Party want to talk about - what is the most important thing for our country's leaders?

Oh yes...foxhunting!

These pathetic people should go and go now before they do any more damage.

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