Frank Branston - Blogging for a Better Bedford

Two or three years ago there was a three-handed play going the rounds called Art. It had quite well-known actors but, typical of me, I don’t remember their names.

The focus of the play was that one of the cast had bought a painting which was all white on a white ground. The plot centred around the three friends falling out over the question of whether it was art.

It rang a big clanging bell with me when I went to the Tate Modern on Sunday to visit the Rothko exhibition in its last days. I had seen photographs of Rothko paintings and not been able to make much of them but Lyn Barber, a writer and interviewer I much admire, raved over them.

In the show there were a number of canvases ranging from big to huge. Some had squares on them, others were black on black. Some lines had feathered edges, others were straight. There were maroon squares on red backgrounds, shapes that looked like wickets were painted on to a matt background of another colour. There were canvases in which the top two thirds were black and the bottom third grey. Some only differed in whether the separating line was sharp or fuzzy.

Buzzing round my head was the question asked in Brideshead Revisited by wise child Cordelia of Sebastian Flyte’s friend, artist Charles Ryder. “Modern art is bosh, isn’t it?”
“Very great bosh”, he replied.

My wife whispered to me: “The emperor’s new clothes come to mind”.

The exhibition was crowded but there was no way of working out what others were thinking as they passed in front of the canavases listening to the commentary players which nevertheless failed to convince me that the whole thing wasn’t a con.

I saw some canvases by another modern artist, Cy Twombley who may still be alive. It wasn’t simply that a baboon could have reproduced the squiggles; they looked as though a baboon HAD painted them.

Art is, of course, in the eye of the beholder, but I could only quietly repeat toi myself Charles Ryder’s words: “Very great bosh”.

NO doubt there was much surprise over the announcement that borough chief executive Shaun Field will not re-apply for his job.

What has been even more surprising is that all the group leaders, and I, were shocked when he first told us what was in his mind and a good deal of effort went to dissuading him. At one time he seemed to be at the point of changing it but, as he explained to me, personal circumstances caused him to take the decision he has. As today (Monday, Jan 26) is the deadline for applications, the decision must be taken as final.

I know he has been offered other jobs but has turned them down. He plans to do some consultancy work and will be available for us. No doubt he will also work on his golf handicap and his other love, trading in antiques.

Shaun has worked for the borough for 21 years and among his successes has been victory in the unitary race and making trhe DSD a cash cow for the taxpayer.

There were many who predicted that he and I would be unable to work together but when I took post we shook hands on an agreement to give it our best shot and it has worked very well. After being an initial sceptic on the subject of directly-elected mayors, he would now not have it any other way.

There is no doubt he has been a huge presence in the borough and many people will find it difficult to imagine life without his political skills which have succeeded in making a council which has been hung for 20 years or more operate as a unified whole on major issues.

The challenge will be how to continue that in the new era.

THERE’S a whole lot of backpedalling going on in this week’s Bedfordshire on Sunday with Tory leaders in Bedford and Mid-Bedfordshire protesting that the allegations of multiple splits between urban and rural Tories and borough Tories and those soon to be ex-county Tories are figments in the imagination of those convenient scapegoats, the press.

Their meeting last week to thrash things out was no more than a policy discussion and it’s all palsy-walsy between them. That’s what they say.

Believe me, they might have agreed toi bury the hatchet but it’s only after using it with a great deal of vim and vigour. I’ll be interested to see how long it stays buried.

Last year I blogged that however inefficient police forces might be they always had one very effective department, their statisticians, who could be relied upon to produce figures to support whatever the force wanted to prove.

I note that ten police forces have been named for under-reporting serious violent crime. Among them is Bedfordshire.

Isn’t it odd how life tends to come full circle?

I came to Bedford as chief reporter on the Bedfordshire Times more than 40 years ago. Soon I was writing a political column called Right, Left and Centre.

From the last Thursday in January I will be writing a monthly column in the current descendant of that same journal, the Bedfordshire Times and Citizen. In those early days it was a paid-for broadsheet monopoly; now it’s a free tabloid with opposition.

Back in 1968 I was paid a modest salary, today I’m doing it for nothing. Not much difference there. Back then I used to enjoy tweaking the nose of the more pompous local politicians. One of the few survivors is Brian Dillingham. How’s the old hooter, Brian?

The new unitary borough has failed.

Failed in our target to produce a net decrease in your council tax. Against all our wishes we have had to go for a 0.9 per cent increase in your unitary borough council tax.

To any other local authority, particularly the new unitaries, that would spell success. And if you had had a unitary Bedfordshire county council the increase would have been at least four times as much.

But we failed to reach our target this year, partly because of the credit crunch and partly because the way the county accounted for its spending left lots of questions in case there was a black hole we had not discovered.

Next year - 2010/11 - we hope tro reach that elusive goal of an actual tax reduction. This year I leave you with the thought that the actual increase on a band D property will be about £12 a year or £1 a month. Sorry about that.

The fourth State of the Borough debate went well on Saturday morning. Each year we change the format a little and I think this one was the most satisfactory so far.

The usual complaint is that there isn’t enough time to cross-question the panel, which consisted of representatives of the police, the Primary Care Tust, the press and me, so this year question time was the first event on the programme and I was the first speaker after John Cross from BPHA introduced the event.

After having pounded away at my gypsies and travellers report for Wednesday’s council meeting (see below) I was feeling a bit written-out by the time I had to prepare for this keynote speech on unitary progress but I dragged my fingers across the keyboard one more time. I got a decent round of applause before and after the speech so perhaps the recent description of me as ‘the most hated man in Bedford’ was a bit wide of the mark (mind you, so was the statement that I was the best-known Bedfordian since John Bunyan).

Naturally, I was also the target for most of the questions from the floor duringt the two hour session. After a coffee break we repaired to the Corn Exchange where I and the portfolio holders were available on a one-to-one basis but in fact probably two-thirds of the audience had left.

There had been some suggestions that the event was too short and that it should go on into the afternoon but from this evidence three hours is about all anybody can take of me and my colleagues, and who can blame them?

Certainly the intensity of the event left me feeling tired and ready for lunch at Eat Fish and a post prandial nap.

IMMEDIATELY after Wednesday’s council meeting I headed off to London to be there in time early next morning for a meeting at City Hall of directly-elected mayors from round the country with London mayor Boris Johnson.

Leaving aside the politics, one thing I can say about Boris is that he was willing to meet and talk to us which Ken Livingstone wasn’t.

Boris was in good form, but less bumbling than his ‘Have I got News for You’ act. He talked about the evolution of mayors from significant figures in the past to figures of… he searched for a word and I said ‘fun?’ He snorted with amusement but chose his words more carefully before praising directly-elected mayors as a Michael Heseltine invention. Yes, Boris, but introduced by a Labour government.

The mayors present were invited to talk about the situation in their own authorities and their particular concerns. I was about to speak when Tony Egginton of Mansfield jumped in before me. When he had finished Boris stood up and said he had to go to another meeting so he never got to exercise that mighty brain on Bedford’s problems. That single word ‘fun’ was the only one I got in before he disappeared.

It was not my first visit to City Hall and again I reflected that it was hardly a convincing example of modern architecture and planning. It sits between a group of higher-rise glass-fronted buildings like a football about to be kicked across the river into the Tower of London. Its exterior is grey and looks grubby. Perhaps exterior cleaning facilities were deleted from the spec to save money but now it’s in need of a jolly good wash.

Inside, the walls are painted a startling yellow. I have heard that yellow is the colour of lunacy. No comment.

The other striking thing is the enormous amount of space wasted with offices and walkways round a large void. I understand the GLA is already running out of space after only nine years of existence. This is a Norman Foster building and I don’t think he did justice to his reputation although I remember hearing he had complained of the restrictions imposed on him.

Former councillor Shan Hunt, who used to be my deputy mayor - and very good she was - re-emerged to ask a couple of questions at Wednesday’s council meeting, one of which was about damaged pavements and rats at a couple of Kempston shopping parades. Why hadn’t I used the ‘clean neighbourhoods legislation? she wanted to know.

The answer was simple enough, until her question came in on January 9, and a letter from Kempston council arrived on January 12 I was entirely unaware of the problem. I know many of the public expect omnisicence of the mayor but as a long-serving councillor one would have thought she would know better.

She wasn’t satisfied with that so I had to repeat that if I didn’t know I couldn’t have taken the action she demanded. In any case, as it was private property the taxpayer was not responsible for the state of the service roads. She said something would have been done if it was in Bedford.

Councillors from Kempston affect a certain chippiness implying - particularly at election time - that it is Bedford’s poor relation when in fact relative to its population more gets money spent on it than the rest of the borough. Including, I may say, cleaning graffiti off the Addison centre at the request of residents even though it was not the borough’s responsibility.

A phone call to my office would have seen action on the rat problem without waiting for questions at the council meeting but then you couldn’t pose as the defender of ‘poor old Kempston’ in a pre-election leaflet.

It has been a hectic and exhausting week with little time to bring the blog up-to-date. The speed at which the unitary train is eating up the track is exhilarating and frightening at the same time.

I wonder if it is taking its toll of people’s health? Chief Exefcutive Shaun Field was sick all over the Christmas holidays and for a few days afterwards. When he got back to work he was still suffering from the effects of what is contemptuously known as ‘man ‘flu’, implying, I suppose, that it is a product of the male imagination and that women would battle through it.

It didn’t sound like imagination when I rang him at home immediately after Christmas. Shortly afterwards we had the fatal heart attack of chief education officer Graham Last.

There were various meetings to do with finance before a full council meeting on Wednesday evening in which the setpiece was my report on how I proposed to deal with the problems of illegal encampments in the borough this year.

The difference in perception is astonishing. The public’s - and mine - was that 2008 was the worst year for illegal camps ever. The perception of one of the officers was that it was no worse than normal. I didn’t agree with him.

In the event the council accepted my report with one or two minor comments, one of which was that it had been produced only the day before. As it was a long and detailed report, I appreciated the point but there had been constant up-dates including comments from the legal department the night before; the changes were minor but all led to delay. In the event only two members spoke and it was unanimously approved a good deal more quickly than an entirely pointless motion from Andrew McConnell against hospital parking charges for which we have no responsibility.

This sort of thing always happens into the run-up to an election and the one on June 4 will be extra important because the number of seats has been reduced in the unitary council, saving more than £141,000.

I wonder how many of the people wont to complain that the people at the Town Hall are an idle lot would last the pace.

Poor Graham Last died on Thursday, almost exactly a week after the serious heart attack that caused him to be rushed to hospital.

Graham had been appointed chief education officer for the unitary authority and had started work on November 24. I have never been an agist, being no spring chicken myself, so the fact that he was 61 was a good deal less important to me than his fizzing enthusiasm for his subject.

In repose, which he scarcely ever was, he may have looked like a miniature Colonel Blimp but in fact he was a roly-poly bundle of energy. Apparently an attack of asthma in the Town Hall brought on his coronary and he never regained consciousness. We have lost a very good and important officer at a crucial point in the run-up to unitary and my sympathy goes out to his wife Rosemary.

More ‘legacy’ news from County Hall. On February 8 there will be an invitation only concert at the Corn Exchange. Invitees will include members of staff who have suffered, I mean served, for 25 years or more and their spouses and councillors past and present. Outsiders and sceptics will not be welcome.

The programme will include music interspersed with a narration of the triumphs of the county council (this latter part should be very short).

Whether it will include the £7 million fiasco of the outsourcing company which the county had to buy off because it (the company) wasn’t up to the job is unclear but probably not. It might provoke people to ask why, if the company was so incompetent, the county had to pay it compensation rather than the other way round.

CDs of the evening’s jollity will be available. They are expected to be in much demand by masochists and insomniacs.

Just as our plans on dealing with traveller incursions start coming together, the Government bowls us a bouncer.

If Parliament approves, it is proposed to increase the number of gypsy and traveller pitches in the borough by 66% from 15 to 25. We would also have to take our share of a further ten transit pitches and make provision for over-wintering travelling show people. Bear in mind that a pitch does not mean one vehicle; it could be any number.

Is there any other business which is entitled demand that the local authority makes provision for them not to work? Possibly, but not one that comes to mind immediately.

Never mind. It will allow Patrick Hall MP to show how influential he is by pointing out that the borough already has a major problem with travellers and would the Government care to think again.

Our friends at County Hall spend lots of money on things that members of the public might wish they didn’t, including a ‘legacy’ costing £250,000, and an expensive rug with the county’s coat of arms completed just in time for the announcement of its abolition. It is claimed to have cost £2,000 but I know nobody who has seen it who believes that.

Large sums were also spent in refurbishing the reception, the management floor and the members areas.

Behind the scenes, where the work is done, it’s a different story. Carpets in the corrodors are in such a bad state that they are criss-crossed with tape in an attempt to stop heels catching where holes have worn through. The £250,000 for its ‘legacy’ would go a long way to replacing this, but no, it’s so much more ‘appropriate’ to spend the money on its own funeral than to make the place look less like a Dickensian workhouse, as I am sure you agree.

The Standards Board for England and Wales can lay claim to being the most farcical regulatory body in the country - and it has got some stiff competition.

The board is supposed to make people in local government behave themselves. Its highest profile case was against Ken Livingstone after he called a reporter from the Evening Standard (who happened to be Jewish) a concentration camp guard. The board found against him and sentenced him to a period of suspension. Livingstone went to court which backed his claim that the board could not prevent him from carrying out the role to which he had been elected by the public.

This same body is now engaged in a protracted investigation in Bedford which is costing thousands of pounds. The crime? Cllr Margaret Davey is alleged to have made an offensive remark about Cllr Carole Ellis, her former Tory colleague who sits for Great Barford. Offensive, maybe, but it would not have stood up in a defamation case because it amounted to nothing more than a bit of abuse which no listener would have taken literally. And no, I am not going to repeat it.

Margaret Davey, it has to be admitted, sometimes speaks without thinking, especially when she is het up. I have had a few run-ins with her myself even though she is a member of my cabinet. The alleged remark - which she denies having made - was reported to the standards board which has an investigator and a lawyer probing it. Lawyers don’t come cheap and you can guarantee that by the time it is done and dusted, it will have cost taxpayers several thousands of pounds.

And what if there is a finding against Cllr Davey? The board can’t suspend her - see the Livingstone case above. Apparently it can tell her to go on a day’s training course which she says she will refuse to do, as would I.

If she had made an insulting remark, so what? Politics is a rough old game in which yesterday’s friend is today’s enemy and tomorrow’s friend once again. If I were Cllr Ellis’s position I might store up the remark and await an opportunity to reply in kind but most probably I would shrug my shoulders and call Davey something equally opprobrious (if I could be bothered). Certainly adding to the contempt in which the Standards Board for England and Wales is justifiably held would be the last thing on my mind.

If the Standards Board of England and Wales was minded to do anything useful (see next blog) it might turn its attentionn to Bedfordshire County Council which seems determined to die in disgrace.

It is currently attempting to gag its own elected members by instructing them not to speak to the press without first going through the press office. It is the kind of diktat that Peter Mandelson tried to introduce before and after the 1997 General Election.

In this country, members of elected bodies are constitutionally there to represent their constituents, not to act as delegates. The difference is that a representative uses his own judgement; a delegate does what somebody else tells him to do.

Not all county councillors take any notice of this, but some do because it is an easy way to avoid answering questions. The press officer sniffily says that the question is ‘not appropriate’ or something similarly meaningless and the reporter is supposed to slink away baffled. Except, of course, he publishes his story and says the person concerned refused to comment.

One wonders what sort of local politician takes notice of such an edict. Somebody who should never have been elected in the first place and hopefully will not be in office after the elections for the unitary councils on June 4.