A long time ago (between 1988 and 1992) I was a Labour councillor in Newcastle upon Tyne. Labour controlled the Council, whose leader was Jeremy Beecham from 1977 to 1994. He died earlier this year, and Peter Morris remembered him in an article in North East Bylines. From a Labour point of view, it was a difficult time. After all, the Conservatives were in power nationally throughout the last 15 of Jeremy’s 17 years as Leader.
Our view at the time was that the Conservatives were intent both upon greater centralisation, and undermining local government. This was the decade in which Greater London Council (GLC) came to an end alongside regional bodies like Tyne and Wear County Council, founded in 1973 by a Conservative government and ended in 1986 under another Conservative government.
When Tyne and Wear County Council was disbanded its powers devolved upon five city councils, including Newcastle, but the government didn’t like city councils any more than it liked county councils. The ‘loony left’ tag was attributed not only to GLC Leader Ken Livingstone but also to leaders of city councils, like Liverpool’s Derek Hatton (who was strictly speaking the deputy leader) and even Sheffield’s David Blunkett, later a minister in the Blair government.
Newcastle: the difficult local choices
Newcastle’s Labour council wasn’t attacked in that way, not least because it set itself against ‘Poplarism,’ a rates rebellion in the London borough of Poplar in 1921, now given a wider meaning in terms of a refusal to set an illegal budget. This meant that every year was spent deciding what services should be cut, rather than refusing to set a budget. Yes, there was also talk of ‘efficiency savings,’ but these would never be able to cover the difference between income and expenditure. Some services would have to be rationed or removed.
Politically, this was bound to produce divisions within the Labour group. Perhaps a swimming pool or a library had to go. Which area should lose out? Perhaps one area had councillors who protected ‘their patch’ more effectively – was that fair? Perhaps a report said one area made more use of its library than another. But then it was argued that the other area was poorer and reading there needed to be given more encouragement. Similar arguments were used to challenge the area with the most pool usage. Another area that had more health problems should come first. Soon battle was joined and it was almost as if the class war re-surfaced within the ranks of Labour: ‘In your area they can all go to posh hotels and use the pools there when they want.’
Central government diversionary tactics
From the government’s point of view, this was all to the good. Keep the salami tactics up year after year, and like rats in a sack the socialists will fight each other over how to divide the ever-reducing cake. And if they complained about under-funding, it was always possible to talk about waste. Waste, after all, happens in all organisations including those that everyone agrees are vitally important, like defence. And it was always possible to dig up a small grant of money to an organisation that might be controversial, perhaps a lesbian theatre group (this was the 1980s) and then say that the Council was clearly prepared to throw money at anything. How can it possibly complain about not having enough funding?
The other strategy was to have some pocket of government money and make the different councils bid for it. Since this was money out of their control, councils would have to tailor their bids to whatever the government considered important. Sometimes the money went to perfectly worthwhile projects that did have a lasting impact, but this couldn’t make up for the lack of provision for basic services.
One I remember well (though it happened on the other side of the Tyne) was the Gateshead Garden Festival of 1990. Built on severely polluted former industrial land, it received three million visitors and was a huge success. A generation later, Council leaders in Gateshead still saw it as paving the way for later developments like the iconic Angel of the North sculpture, and regeneration of that side of the river through Sage Gateshead, BALTIC, and the Millennium Bridge.
Yet the 37 million pounds ploughed into the project by the government and private businesses had to be set against regular budget cuts restricting spending on essential services. A year later Gateshead Council found itself forced to restrict its overall budget for 1990-1991 by 12 million pounds or face a withdrawal of central grants. Headline-grabbing glamour projects were OK, but the salami slicer went on slicing, reducing basic service provision year after year.
What of the future for councils in the North East?
There will be arguments about Andy Burnham’s plans for devolution. But at least his Manchester experience has given him a confidence in the abilities of local government that was completely absent forty years ago. Conservative MPs sat on the terrace at Westminster looking across the Thames at the huge banner unfurled from what was then the headquarters of the Greater London Council, giving the latest unemployment figures. They stared at it as if it was an enemy flag flown in their homeland. They wouldn’t be happy until it was torn down (as it was in 1986). Local government was their enemy.
Almost the whole of Jeremy Beecham’s time as a council leader was under a Conservative government which saw local authorities in these terms. He was wise enough not to provoke the government unnecessarily and instinctively keener to maintain basic services than to hanker after grand projects. He was not T Dan Smith. He did not want to create the Brasilia of the North or build some equivalent of the Eiffel Tower alongside Grey’s Monument. He kept things going for better days when local government would be accepted centrally as an asset rather than a threat. For this reason alone, he would have appreciated the recent speeches of Andy Burnham, much as he would have wanted to turn his lawyer’s eye to the details when they finally become clear.
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