Do you live in a "Nuclear Free Authority"?

During the 1980s era of the "looney left" Labour councils would frequently declare themselves "Nuclear Free Zones." Cllr Iain Lindley reminds us that this practice continues. Socialists can indulge in some agitprop at their Council Taxpayer's expense by affiliating to Nuclear Free Local Authorities who promise that in return: "Your local council will be publicly demonstrating its opposition to nuclear power and nuclear weapons." The organisation is based in Manchester Town Hall.

The subs vary but for Cllr Lindley's Labour-run Salford Council the annual bill comes to £2,332. The organisation lists some Conservative as well as Labour Councils as members - there is a health warning that as recently as December they listed Hammersmith and Fulham, information I confirmed was out of date. Nottinghamshire and Staffordshire only became Conservative last year - so perhaps their membership has yet to expire. But it is always worth checking which organisations your Council is a member of.

England

Blyth Valley Borough Council
Burnley Borough Council
Bury Borough Council
Chester-le-Street District Council
Coventry City Council
Derwentside District Council
Gateshead Borough Council
Greater Manchester Fire & Civil Defence Authority
Hackney London Borough Council
Hyndburn Borough Council
Kingston upon Hull City Council

Should Irish jokes be allowed in Town Halls?

Just as it is the Jews who are the most likely to tell Jewish jokes it is the Irish who are most likely to tell Irish jokes (although they often substitute Kerryman for Irishman, except, of course, in County Kerry....) Whether such jokes are offensive or not rather depends on the individual joke.

During a break in proceedings at meeting Cllr Ken Bamber, a Conservative councillor on Medway, told the following joke:

"A man walked into a Dublin bar and saw a friend sitting with an empty glass. 'Paddy can I buy you another', he asked, to which Paddy replied - 'now what would I be wanting with another empty glass?'"

He was overheard by an Irish-born union official, Brian Kelly, employed full time by the Council as an official with Unison. Mr Kelly complained the joke was racist. Cllr Bamber apologised for any offence. But that wasn't enough. Mr Kelly made an official complaint to the Standards Board and the matter has now been settled privately with Kelly paid compensation. It is understood to amount to thousands of pounds - some from the Council and some from Cllr Bamber.

The joke strikes me as a pretty mainstream representative of the genre. Of course tone and context are important. I suppose it is good manners with jokes to be sensitive as to who you tell them to in case they might cause upset. Certainly Cllr Bamber's comic timing by taking the opportunity of an intermission in a race discrimination case was unfortunate. But I don't think telling this joke would constitute evidence to a reasonable person that Cllr Bamber genuinely believes the Irish are stupid or that he was seeking to stir up ill feeling against them. I wonder how much money Mr Kelly got? Criminal injury compensation claims typically offer £1,500 for a broken nose, £3,500 for a broken leg. How does hearing a joke he found offensive measure up on that scale?

The Taxpayers Alliance have complained that the Council Taxpayer shouldn't have to pay out money. Neither should Cllr Bamber. If he has behaved badly then the residents of Peninsula Ward can deliver their verdict through the ballot box. That is proper mechanism for resolving such matters.

By way of balance, here is an Irish joke that can still be safely told:

Seamus applied for a job as a labourer at a local building site. The foreman wasn't too sure about Seamus's experience, so he decided to ask him a simple test question: ‘What is the difference between a girder and joist?’

‘That's easy,’ replied Seamus, ‘Goethe wrote Faust and Joyce wrote Ulysses.’

 

Why do local councils need to know our sexual orientation?

Glyn Gaskarth notes that the EHRC wants councils to survey their staff and residents over their sexual orientation. He believes this policy should be rejected and the EHRC closed down.

In its report Beyond Tolerance: Making sexual orientation a public matter, the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) recommends that local authorities (and other public agencies) survey their staff and users of public services to ascertain respondents sexual orientation. This policy is expensive and wrong. It is symptomatic of the problems with the EHRC. I believe the Conservatives should object to this proposal and the existence of the EHRC for the following reasons.

Practical:
This proposal is a huge undertaking. Millions of citizens could be surveyed. This data would need to be managed. You would expect the EHRC to provide some clarification on the following but they do not;

• The scope: The public agencies which would be subject to this policy are not listed. The EHRC merely state that they want the non collection of such data to be the exception.
• The cost: There is no attempt to provide an estimate of the cost of this policy to each public agency and taxpayers as a whole.
• The funding: There is no attempt to specify how we will pay for this policy – which taxes will be raised or spending in other areas cut?
• The management of the data: The paper does not show in detail how the data will be collected and managed (I assume that the data would be held as an aggregate rather than be associated with named individuals).

Councils spend £20 million translating documents

Mark Wallace of the Taxpayers Alliance says councils are perpetuating the problem of people not speaking English.

It is a standard PR tactic in local government to blame everything on Whitehall. To be fair to councils, often many things are the fault of central government. Sometimes, though, there are clear issues where waste occurs purely due to flawed local decision making.

One such issue is the absurd practice of translating council documents into dozens of languages at huge cost. A new report released this week revealed that the total cost is now almost £20m a year for translating a wide variety of documents in 75 different languages.

This is a ridiculous situation. Of course, with a large number of business visitors, tourists and temporary migrants, there will always be some need for translation in the public sector. But that should clearly be focused in the kind of services that are required in emergencies rather than across the whole gamut of council services.

By all means the police, ambulance service, fire brigade and social services should have access to translators, but is it really necessary for Manchester City Council to translate advice booklets on how to feed pigeons into Urdu or for Warwickshire County Council to produce “Weight Busters” leaflets in Gujerati?

Given the remarkably low readership of even those council documents which are produced in English, it is hard to imagine that most of the translated copies produced are ever even used. This is clearly a tremendous waste of money.

Labour councillor apologises for sexist remark

A Labour councillor in Haringey, Cllr Brian Haley, has apologised to a Lib Dem colleague, Cllr Laura Edge.

Cllr Haley had told her:

"I do have to say, Cllr Edge, you're a bit like a trifle, very sweet and very lightweight." 

Cllr Edge said afterwards:

"I thought it was a sexist remark. It wasn't the comment about him likening me to a trifle which angered me, it was all the sniggering and innuendo that followed. It was like being in a school playground. It's unacceptable in this day and age for someone who is a member of a party which espouses equality to take such an attitude to women."

Afterwards Cllr Haley declared: "You could equate a trifle with men and women." That seemed to amount to him withdrawing his apology. His comment does sound sexist to me. It is possible the same words could have been directed to a fellow male councillor ...but they would have sounded a bit odd.

Green councillors propose meat ban at Hackney Town Hall

Ed West has spotted the following story from the Hackney Gazette. Hackney Green councillors are demanding that only vegan food be available at Hackney Town Hall.

It says:

Cllr Matthew Coggins, the leader of the council’s Conservative group, rubbished the proposal by Cllr Mischa Borris, calling it “preposterous”, and questioned the logic behind it. “I was not at the
meeting, but I would have voted against the proposal,” he said.

“I think people should be able to be free to eat what they want. It’s a preposterous suggestion.” Cllr Borris proposed that the council should provide only animal-free food at meetings and other events as part of its pledge to the 10:10 campaign. The suggestion was voted out. The 10:10 initiative aims to cut carbon emissions by 10 per cent by the end of 2010.

What an insight it gives to the mentality of the Green Party and their contempt for personal choice. The proposal doesn't extend to banning meat from being served in the borough's schools but I don't want to start giving them ideas.

Northumberland Council wastes £700,000 on Migration Matters posts

An email arrives from Cllr Steven Bridgett, a Lib Dem councillor on Northumberland Council which has a minority Lib Dem. He says:

"Whilst we may sit on different sides of the political fence, I tend to agree with many of the issues your raise regarding local government. My favourite was obviously 100 ways to cut council tax."

"As a result I have attached some documents to this e-mail regarding what my authority (Northumberland) is up to by creating two Migration Matters posts, naturally I have a million other things the £700,000 budget could be spent on."

I email back checking he is willing to be disclosed as the source which he is - also suggesting that perhaps he should defect to the Conservatives. He already seems to be a semi detached Lib Dem having resigned the Group whip and has criticised their spending of £210,000 a year on a Council magazine.

Islamic extremists funded to start schools

Disturbing Telegraph article by Andrew Gilligan about Islamic extremists being given funding by the taxpayer to run schools. £113,411 was paid by the Government last year to a foundation run by senior members and activists of Hizb ut-Tahrir.

This is a group that regards integration as “dangerous” It instructs followers to boycott “corrupt” British elections and its website used to display a message urging Muslims to “kill [Jews] wherever you find them.” 

After the London bombings in July 2005, Tony Blair promised to ban Hizb, describing it as “fanatical”. The pledge was not carried out although the Tories have promised to do so. But for the Government to be funding the indoctrination of the next generation of fanatics is extraordinary.

Shadow Home Secretary Chris Grayling says it shows the Government were "asleep on the job." It seems to show, at best, the same about some Labour councillors.

The grants, from the Government's Pathfinder and Free Entitlement programmes were administered by Labour- run Haringey Council. (One of the schools is in Tottenham.)

The Centre for Social Cohesion published a report in 2007 entitled Hate on the State which examined the choice of extremist rather than moderate Islamic texts in public libraries in Tower Hamlets also mentioning the libraries of another Labour Council, Waltham Forest. Not that Conservative Councils are immune from these problems. The report also mentioned Blackburn and Birmingham which are both Conservative-led coalitions.

The Taxpayers Alliance detailed substantial funding going from central Government to extremist groups, via local councils. Ironically these were Preventing Violent Extremism grants. The CSC offered more background on some of them.

Gilligan also highlights a new organisation called MCRCIA, Muslim Community Representatives in Camden and Islington Association, which has an endorsement from a local Labour councillor and uses the logo for a Hizb ut-Tahrir campaign.

Doncaster Mayor says his CEO's salary is a "joke"

The Mayor of Doncaster Peter Davies is gradually getting more attention from the London media. This morning's Daily Mail carries an interview with him by Robert Hardman. Davies is certainly blunt speaking (which seems to go down well in Yorkshire.) For instance he says he gets on well with his Chief Executive Paul Hart but adds that Hart's salary of £175,000 is a "joke" and any successor could expect half that.

Davies also represents a fringe party, the English Democrats. But the Left have yet to catch him out making a racist or homophobic comment. Which is probably because he isn't a racist or a homophobe.

Davies has a gay member of his cabinet. While Davies believes in getting rid of diversity officers and feels spending money on translations would be better spent teaching English he is not hostile to other cultures. As an RE teacher he took his pupils to mosques, synagogues and temples so that they could learn about other faiths. When he scrapped the Council's support for Black History Month he was sent a supposedly friendly email expressing racist sentiments hoping to attract a supportive reply from him. It failed and turned out to be a set up.

Hardman points out that with a quarter of a million people Doncaster is by far the largest authority with a directly-elected mayor - apart from London where Boris Johnson does not have the equivalent level of power. He also adds that someone implementing such a staunchly Conservative programme in a south Yorkshire Labour stronghold ("Arthur Scargill's doorstep) is extraordinary. It is equivalent to Socialists running Surrey, says Hardman. (Quite so.)

Davies has told Departments to cut budgets by between 10% and 15%. He wants to cut Council Tax by 3% this year. I suspect we will be hearing more him.

Liverpool Council could be sued for flying gay rights flag

Liverpool resident Stephan Gash is threatening to sue Liverpool City Council for flying a rainbow flag on the International Day Against Homophobia and Transphobia.

Gash has put in a Freedom of Information request to find out if Liverpool had given itself the required planning permission.

"I wish it to be known that I have no problem with flags being flown from public buildings provided the required planning permission has previously been granted and paid for," says Gash

"What I do object to is people being harrassed for flying national flags perfectly legally from their dwellings or places of work, for which planning permission is not required, and being ordered to take them down."