Councillor Bob Piper

Off to see Christy and Declan tomorrow night in Dublin. Should be a great night.

Tomorrow marks the 10th anniversary of the first hostages detained by the United States government at their torture camp in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. On January 22, 2009, the White House announced that President Barack Obama had signed an order to say the concentration camp would be shut down within the year. As of today it remains open and 171 detainees remain at Guantanamo.

One of those still detained is Shaker Aamer, a British national with four children living in London. He has been in solitary confinement in an eight foot by six foot windowless cell for over six years after leading a hunger strike against the conditions in the camp. He is now very ill and his family and Clive Stafford-Smith from the organisation Reprieve which is campaigning for his release fear that he will now die in Guantanamo.

Foreign Office Minister Alistair Burt told BBC 5 live: “We have been making significant representations to the United States over a period of time.

“The prime minister has raised it, the foreign secretary has raised it, our officials have raised it, it’s a matter for the United States to release Shaker Aamer who is a legal UK resident, and we continue to make what representations we can.

“It is a matter for the United States authorities to take the decision to release.”

Some ‘Special Relationship’ eh? I cannot conceive of a better example of the way in which the United States government treats the UK government with complete contempt, and of British impotence in response. Does anyone imagine that if Britain was detaining a US national in the same sort of concentration camp as the US have constructed in Guantanamo that Hilary Clinton would casually shrug her shoulders, say “Well, the President tried, but at the end of the day, these decisions are down to the Brits.”

We should feel a deep sense of shame that Guantanamo was ever created in the 21st Century, and an even deeper sense of anger that it still exists ten years on.

Details of the Save Shaker Aamer campaign can be found here

The race has started (or should it be crawl) for those seeking to be an elected Mayor for the City of Birmingham. Well, to be strictly correct, the battle has started to convince the good folk of Birmingham that even if they elected a megalomanic of Mussolini proportions, they would be better served than they are under the ‘leadership’ of the Conservative-controlled coalition led by the hapless Mike Whitby.

Mike Whitby (the one on the left)

It is a good argument. To be honest, it’s about the best element of their argument. Even during the years before the bubble burst, when Gordon Brown had mysteriously defied the iron rule of capitalist boom and bust and everything in the garden was rosy… Birmingham was dragging itself deeper and deeper in to a quagmire, with Whitby leading from the front displaying all the bluster and strategic genius of George Armstrong Custer at Little Bighorn.

As I say, it is probably their strongest argument, but only because the rest are rubbish. We hear that it will give Birmingham a greater voice. A greater voice where, precisely? Around the Cabinet table? Are we seriously expected to believe that the government will quiver when faced with one of the three Labour candidates to have shown an interest so far? They may well be a passionate voice for the City, but that doesn’t mean anyone will listen.  Gisela Stuart is a fine local MP, and  Sir Albert Bore has led the City for years in the past,  and then there’s… errm, the bloke that made THAT video.

Now, that’s a voice the Government will really listen to.

We’re told they will be more responsive to popular demands because they are directly elected by the people. Which is a bit like saying, if we all elected the Prime Minister, rather than MPs voting for the Prime Minister, then the Prime Minister would listen to all of us, rather than having to be pestered with the House of Commons. The natural conclusion to which is… keep the Prime Minister, and abolish Parliament.

The other part of this argument says a Mayor would be able to act swiftly, without having to bother with the views of her/his  council colleagues… which (apparently) just wastes time. Yes, all that silly nonsense asking about how their constituents may be affected. Bloody waste of time!

One local blogger in favour of the Mayoral system pointed out that whereas the police and City Council dithered at the time of the riots last Summer, the Mayor would leap decisively into action. The good folk of Tottenham and elsewhere in London might want to mutter the words “Boris” and “Johnson” into their beer at this stage. Also, that is the Tory argument for directly elected police commissioners, whilst Labour stand on their heads and argue that commissioners would be expensive and not democratically accountable.

The reality is that Cameron, like Blair and Thatcher before him, loathes local government. They have had no experience of local government. Thatcher detested councillors from Clay Cross to the GLC, and Blair was the same, bloody Liverpool riff-raff defying him!  He even lost some interest in Mayors when Ken Livingstone showed him that the Prime Minister couldn’t just choose his own. Cameron thinks that with only a dozen people to berate covering virtually the whole country, life will be so much more simple.

And if people have deluded themselves into thinking that central government is introducing powerful City Mayors because it wants to create an alternative political focus and challenge to central government… then sadly, they are simple too! The truth is, since the arrival of the universal franchise, the establishment has slowly worked its way around the inconvenience of the ballot box. So on a national level we see whole chunks of our sovereignty are taken away, and in return we are given meaningless MEPs to vote for, and we are never even asked! Now at local government level we can elect a single person to make executive decisions, and in real Orwellian 1984 ‘newspeak’ we are told it is in the name of democracy.

At least the citizens of Birmingham will be given an opportunity to vote to emasculate their locally elected councillors (even further) – so perhaps they should be grateful for the crumbs from the masters’ table.  Those of us in what the arrogance of Birmingham like to describe as ‘Greater Birmingham’ are not even being given the opportunity to say ‘bugger off!’

Finally, it is amazing how often those folk who argue for elected Mayors are the very same democrats who favoured PR and the EU and – although they are a tad shy about it these days – a single European currency.

Well, I note that the ‘Yes2Brum Mayor’ people have all the flashing lights with knobs on.  A shiny website, and no doubt tons of glossy brochures, and the backing of a local democratic allies in the media.

But then again, so did Yes 2 AV! Their problem wasn’t the medium, it was that their message was crap!

One aspect of the Stephen Lawrence judgement that raised a question with me is whether issues of crime and anti-social behaviour have actually changed in the intervening years since Stephen was murdered. The callous murder of Anuj Bidve in the early hours of boxing day, together with a number of other murders in the street which still make the news with a monotonous regularity, would indicate that street violence and knife and gun crime are still serious issues.  Although there is an argument to say that these incidents are much more frequently drug and gang related, rather than the sort of hideous random racist  attacks carried out on Stephen and Anuj.

I do think there has been progress, certainly in these parts, in dealing with the more low level anti-social behaviour incidents. I think both the police and the local authorities are more responsive and treat complaints of ASB much more seriously than had previously been the case. I’m not talking about anti-social behaviour orders, because they are only the tip of an iceberg, but about intervention on behalf of people whose neighbours only want to make other people’s lives a misery. What we have seen in recent years has been a willingness by the authorities to deal swiftly with low level ASB. The hideous case of Fiona Pilkington who killed herself and her daughter five years ago after a decade of harassment has helped to focus minds.

I was struck reading a passage from Chris Mullin’s latest diaries when he was returning home late one night in 1995…

About a quarter to midnight I came across two separate parties of villains at work on cars in the terrace. Outside number 3, a group of youths were attempting to batter their way into a car. I walked past and they ignored me. Outside number 8 I came across a pasty-faced yob attempting to chisel his way into our neighbour’s car. When challenged he claimed to be looking for coins which he had dropped. Whereupon he emerged, beer bottle in hand, screaming that he was going to ‘snap my fucking jaw off’. I scuttled quickly indoors and he made off down the street’.

A pasty-faced yob

That sort of behaviour, it seems to me, was much more prevalent when I was elected 13 years ago than it is now. In my Ward, and on a Town level as well as at Borough level there are ‘tasking’ meetings where the police, councillors, officers, police community support officers, wardens and other partner organisations, share information about hot spots for minor crime and ASB incidents, with action plans, timescales and measurable outcomes. It was a difficult concept for the police to deal with at first – they are suspicious of external communication – but with some good leadership it has worked fine. Blair’s pledge to deal with “crime and the causes of crime” wasn’t just a fancy soundbite.

My fear is that the cutbacks to local government and frontline police services – no matter how much the coalition try to was their hands of it, it is happening - will set the whole process back. Together with mass unemployment, particularly amongst young people (although in my experience ASB isn’t just young people) the danger is the whole thing spirals downwards and the ‘pasty-faced yobs’ will once again rule the neighbourhoods.

I have just received some stern advice from our Labour Group Executive pointing out that councillors using blogs and other social media should refrain from personal abuse about other people, particularly their political opponents.

As I am always careful to observe the warnings from my senior colleagues, I will obviously avoid reproducing the protest placard at the bottom of those on this page in today’s Guardian.

Oh what a good boy I am.

Good Christian folk. What would we do without them, eh? Armenian clergymen scuffle and Greek Orthodox clergymen during the annual cleaning of the Church of Nativity, the traditionally accepted birthplace of Jesus Christ, in the West Bank town of Bethlehem decided to whack it out between themselves with broom handles. 

Could I take this opportunity to wish my regular band of readers a Happy Christmas. Yes, all of you, even Gary Elsby and the Curmudgeonly old Duffers.

Last year a brown envelope landed on my doormat I had a letter from our friends at HMRC. Due to the fact that over the last few years I have had several streams of income, I had apparently underpaid the Inland Revenue by several thousand pounds. “Not your fault, sir” they respectfully told me, “but your earnings have been covered by a variety of tax offices” none of which appeared to talk to each other, nor to Her Majesty’s Revenues and Customs.

I wasn’t particularly happy about having to pay them. If your employer overpays you, and it is the employer’s fault and you have acted in good faith and have spent the money, you’re entitled to tell them to sod off. But sadly, I hadn’t spent the money, and they knew that, and as a dutiful citizen, I sullenly coughed up the money to enable our government to be able to continue fighting futile wars in distant lands.

So it is particularly galling this morning to hear from the Commons Public Accounts Committee that had I been a large corporation, employing a small army of smarmy accountants, and therefore either knowingly (or because my accountants were not only smarmy but also stupid) defrauded the exchequer of anything up to 25 billion smackers, my chums at HMRC would have rolled over and said, “Don’t worry about it Bob, give us a couple of quid and we’ll call it quits.”

Of course, it’s not as easy as that. It may have cost me a bit in order to establish the sort of cosy arrangement granted to Goldman Sachs. They didn’t just employ a bunch of smarmy accountants to help them avoid paying their taxes to our hard pressed Majesty. ‘Call me Dave’ Harnett, the country’s leading tax official admitted to the Public Accounts Committee that he had been forced to suffer 107 dinners and lunches over a two year period with companies, tax lawyers, and advisers. Now we discover from whistleblowers that Harnett personally intervened in settling outstanding cases and agreed to “sweetheart deals” without even consulting with HMRC lawyers.

I realise now wasted my opportunity. A couple of pints of Mild in the Abbey pub, and a fish, chips and mushy pea supper from the Abbey Fish Bar over the road, and Davey-boy may have had a word with the lads back at the shop, and everyone would have looked the other way whilst I made a quick getaway.

Damned good job we’re all in this together.

There is much to despair about in the coverage in the media this morning in relation to last Friday’s European summit. On the right we have the Mail, Telegraph and the Express with all of their British bulldog bluster, amongst the liberal tendency the Guardian are gung ho for Clegg (again, don’t they ever learn) and we are served up some hand-wringing tripe by Mandelson and Jackie Ashley about ‘anti-Europeans’.
 
It may seem strange to some, but as someone on the left I find I have more in common with this piece by Norman Tebbit than with much of the stuff served up by the media today. Firstly, because Tebbit quite rightly identifies the absurdity of an economic union with a variety of different chief finance ministers with conflicting priorities, and no common fiscal policy, and secondly because as someone who believes in democracy the EU response to the financial crisis is fraught with peril at every turn.
 
Some of the countries busying themselves with cooking up a solution to the problems of the euro zone are not particularly familiar with democratic principles in any event.  Greece may be the ‘birthplace of democracy’ but it is not so long ago it was ruled by a brutal military dictatorship, and Spain and Portugal can readily identify with that, not to mention Latvia, Lithuania, Poland and all the other eastern European states recently emerged from under Soviet hegemony. The way in which democratically elected governments in Greece and Italy were casually disposed of by the EU bureaucrats should have sent shivers down the spine of every democrat in Europe,but it passed with barely a murmur. Not a single Italian Minister has any democratic mandate or legitimacy.
 
I am not ‘anti-Europe’ in Jackie Ashley’s crude shorthand. We are European, by geography and culture. We are trading partners, and in that sense we both need access to each other’s markets. But this new Eurozone superstate is not just about trading relationships, but about controlling a continental European state without the markets having to worry about the vagaries of democracy. It is truly frightening. The economy drives the politics, as any basic reading of Marx will tell you. And when your economy is controlled as tightly as these latest proposals for fiscal and monetary union envisage, by people you never elected and you can not replace, the spiral downwards into a bureaucratic fascism does not seem to be a serious exaggeration. 
 
And who is going to save us? Not Ed Miliband, undecided about whether he is appealing to eurosceptic populism or opposing Cameron for being… errm, eurosceptic . Certainly not Clegg who is welded to this wretched Conservative government because without it he and his party face wipe-out in a general election. And most definitely our Prime Minister, talking tough whilst pandering to xenephobes on his back benches, whilst inwardly wanting to sit at the European diplomatic beanfeast.
 
I fear it is already too late, we havealready gone too far in to this mess without asking for a democratic mandate, but eventually a British Prime Minister is going to have to grow a pair, and put their fate and their faith in the electorate.
 
Only then will they have the confidence to say… ‘Well, this is what you wanted!”