Why Councillor Taggart does anything
At his victory election speech New Labour Councillor and Chair of West Yorkshire Police Authority Neil Taggart stressed his radical credentials within the Blairite Party. However, in practice he does nothing.
He doesn't go on the May Day Marches, anti-war protests etc. He is essentially lazy and appears to do things that only directly benefit himself.
His old friend and my new one, Garth Frankland, recalls Councillor Taggart's opposition to the resurrection of Leeds City Council's Accounts Subcommittee. This was an attempt to strengthen Councillors' powers to protect the interests of the local taxpayers. Councillor Taggart fought to leave the system in the hands of the officers.
Councillor Taggart's West Yorkshire's Police have finally announced the reduction in number of police stations in Leeds from six to four. There has been no consultation with the public about this reduction, which will drastically decrease their ability to meet the police. The poodles of Leeds City Council have gone along with this after secret meetings where meaningless promises about expanding the police presence at one-stop shops were made. The so-called one-stop shops are never open at times when people who work can get to them.
Of course Councillor Taggart is uncritically following national trends, his normal behaviour. There have been over 1000 police stations closed over the last decade and many of those left are only open during office hours. But more thoughtful police chiefs are beginning to buck the New Labour-directed trend. The Chief Constable of Sussex said about criminals: "They are the opposition. They don't want to see a police station open."
Of course Councillor Taggart is not a villain. He is a politician currying favour with his New Labour masters. They are not concerned with rising crime in working-class areas, but they are concerned with clamping down on dissent hence the new laws on email and phone tapping. They actually want a police force that is separated from the people, to enforce repression. This is the direction blurted out by Mandelson in his pro-Le Pen article in a recent edition of Murdoch's Times calling for a tougher line against crime and asylum seekers. This is the conception of the police that Councillor Taggart is now pushing.
You only have to look at these examples:
- his attacks on the former Harehills councillor Javid Akhtar, which played directly into the hands of the British National Party;
- his failure to consult the public over the police station closures;
- his repeated cancellations of the police consultations in the Chapel Allerton area.
Taggart's reactionary and opportunist politics are directly reflected in his actions. Each time he takes the officers' way out with no intellectual input from himself. A material explanation is that his years of working in Wakefield have mad him go native. There is nothing sadder than an officer pretending to be a councillor.
The Private Finance Initiative (PFI) in Leeds
Leeds City Council has decided to mortgage our children's future rather than tackle Gordon Brown's reactionary Treasury. They plan to improve school buildings by going down the Private Finance Initiative road. So our children will not just have to pay for further education, they will now have to pay for their schooling. No independent investigations into PFI schemes have proved their value for money.
However, the parents should independently monitor the real costs to Leeds. At Leopold Primary School parents are planning to monitor the money that is supposed to be spent on surrounding schools as result of the closure.
Leeds' Labour Council has no real intention of being anything other than the administrative arm of London's New Labour. After being defeated in a referendum over moving over to Council House privatisation through the route of "arm's length" companies, the Council carefully examined where the votes had come from. They redid the referendum in a week in the area where they thought they could get a majority ... which they succeeded in doing, very narrowly.
I will repeat this: New Labour went through the votes looking where they had come from, identifying who had voted which way, and then held a quick referendum before any one could oppose them. This is a fundamental attack on democracy.
However, not satisfied with underhand and probably illegal tactics the Council has announced it intends to spread the "arm's length" companies across Leeds. Councillor Tina Davey was in the Evening Post announcing that this would bring millions of pounds of investment from the Government.
This displays enormous ignorance. All Brown's Treasury is doing is to allow the companies to borrow money to carry out work to tackle the years of neglect of council housing. The tenants will pay for this debt. The cheapest way for the money to be made available is for Leeds City Council to borrow it; "arms length" companies and hence the tenants will pay more. And further, not having the bargaining power of a single housing organisation for the city the tenants will end up paying for repairs and other essential services.
And of course being broken into smaller units it enables privatisation to proceed in the future.
Brown's Treasury is deliberately increasing the burden on tenants because of the Euro. PFI money does not appear on the national debt figures and this enables Britain to fulfil the conditions for joining the Euro. It is also part of New Labour's plan to shrink the public sector along the lines of their heroine Margaret Thatcher.
Bush
The Tories have met with Bush's allies world-wide to discuss how they can learn to win an election. Of course it helped that Brush's brother was the Governor of Florida, the state that that gave him victory.
However not everyone in the US is taking Bush as seriously as our own beloved Tory leader, as can be seen below (from SatireWire):
In Speech, Bush Calls Iraq, Iran and North Korea 'Axis of Evil' -- N.Y. Times, 1/30/02 Beijing
Bitter after being snubbed for membership in the "Axis of Evil," Libya, China, and Syria today announced they had formed the "Axis of Just as Evil," which they said would be way eviller than that stupid Iran-Iraq-North Korea axis President Bush warned of in his State of the Union address.
Axis of Evil members, however, immediately dismissed the new axis as having, for starters, a really dumb name. "Right. They are Just as Evil... in their dreams!" declared North Korean leader Kim Jong-il. "Everybody knows we're the best evils... best at being evil... we're the best."
Diplomats from Syria denied they were jealous over being excluded, although they conceded they did ask if they could join the Axis of Evil. "They told us it was full," said Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. "An Axis can't have more than three countries," explained Iraqi President Saddam Hussein. "This is not my rule, it's tradition. In World War II you had Germany, Italy, and Japan in the evil Axis. So you can only have three. And a secret handshake. Ours is wicked cool.
[Continued at http://satirewire.com/news/jan02/axis.shtml]
No wonder one joke going round my many friends in San Francisco says that Bush thought the Taliban were a Bavarian brass band before September 11.
Cash Injection
Ten years ago in the United States 11,000 children were hospitalised and 123 died due to a measles epidemic.
Due to a massive shortage of vaccines in the USA this is likely to happen again. In Bush's home state of Texas they are deferring diphtheria/tetanus booster shots. Because most vaccines are supplied as a result of a national contract and therefore there is little profit in them the pharmaceutical industry is no longer making them. The vaccines are short supply and children become at risk. This is the market in practice. The market Bush wants to impose on the world.
The crisis in the Public and Commercial Services Union (PCSU)
Many of us from Leeds had a wonderful time at the recent PCS conference in Brighton. After a rainy start the weather improved, the socials were fantastic and there were huge left-wing fringe meetings on every conceivable subject. The smallest was for that famous former Leeds and NUM activist Dave Feickert, who works for the European Trade Unions in Brussels. He explained the importance of the Trade Unions lobbying to ensure that the European Union took account of their concerns.
Liz Davies addressed a huge Socialist Alliance rally at which there was a growing acceptance that the trade union movement needed an alternative to Blairism.
Inside the conference the left won practically all their resolutions. The president Peter Donnellan introduced the Secretary Elect, Mark Serwotka, to the conference as "a breath of fresh air". Mark received massive applause.
Unfortunately, away from the democratic spotlight of the conference the right wing plotted to remove Mark as can be seen from an article in the Independent by Mark Steel.
Snippets
Some further thoughts from the election
In Leeds's City and Holbeck ward the Tory candidate hoped to woo the new city-centre yuppie vote with a massive election campaign. They stayed in their wine bars and didn't vote, so proving a very expensive failure.
At the end of the Chapel Allerton count there was a sharp exchange between the New Labour agent and one of his colleagues, leading to name-calling and nearly a fight. This shows all is still not well inside the reconstituted Chapel Allerton New Labour Party. One of their main election expenses seemed to be buying petrol from ESSO garages. Something made more difficult for them by ESSO closing their garage on Harrogate Road after the Chapel Allerton Left Alliance branch geared itself up to launch a campaign in support of boycotting the chain for its support of warmonger Bush and its failure to protect the environment.
Strange events in Pudsey
Jolly Leeds Councillor Mick Coulson has been forced out of his position as Chair of the Pudsey Community Involvement Team. After a 14-month investigation the Council's Standards Committee seems to say he has been found guilty of inappropriate behaviour towards Council staff. He denies the allegation but the lengthy campaign against him seems to have warned down his will to fight.
The Yorkshire Post contains some expanded allegations from an unnamed "council insider". These allege him making some sexist remarks and "taking upon himself to order staff around -acting as though he was their line manager instead of just a councillor." [My emphasis - Half-Celestial].
The whole process leaves rather a nasty taste. If allegations were made so long ago why did it take so long to investigate? And what happened to the staff in the meantime, and was a full-scale investigation needed instead of corrective action from the Council leadership? One can't help but wonder if this is part of Leeds City Council's slavish following of Blairite fashion by removing older and/or more interesting Councillors from positions of influence.
Hoon and his Afghan hounds
Poor old Buffoon's troops. After many late night trips in the mountains they have still failed to find any enemy. As the report in Umbrella 41 said:
"Geoff Hoon's young men have been scouring the mountains looking for bin Laden with out a single sighting. They have succeeded in blowing up the munitions supplies of one of the allies, had a shoot out with a wedding party and imported a deadly airborne virus back into the UK. However no actual sighting."
Some of the soldiers were in an observation post, which was fired upon. They abandoned it. Another group was withdrawing from an area and was shot at. They continued retreating. There is now talk of withdrawing the marines from Afghanistan so they rest up for the assault on Iraq after Christmas.
Call Centre Stress
New Labour has shamelessly encouraged the growth of the low-pay call centre industry in Leeds. Over 8,000 mainly young people are now trapped in stressful no-future jobs in the city. 75% of call centre workers were found to be stressed in a recent survey by Unison in Scotland.
They of course face their jobs being replaced by voice recognition technology. Luckily the latest systems cannot cope with the Yorkshire accent, as one young lady from Huddersfield found when she tried to obtain some rugby results through Virgin Mobile. She was then reduced to trying to find a human operative which took nearly 45 minutes. This gives the Council a window of opportunity to retrain the operators in more productive and less stressful jobs over the next few months.
One of my younger comrades in Amsterdam said after a shift on the phones practically all of her colleagues retired to a brown pub for heavy drinking session. This was the only way they felt they could unwind. It reminds me of a story my good friend the Semi-New Labour MP John Trickett tells of meeting a former Leeds Labour Party member sleeping rough under the Embankment in London. This unfortunate person had a job working at the Labour Party HQ. Like our call centre friends they could only cope by retiring to the pub on finishing work. He kept a detailed diary of the incompetence and hatred for ordinary Labour party members that became the norm. Let's hope this victim of New Labour recovers and he gets to publish his dairy. It would be an important document to support Liz Davies's Through the Looking Glass exposure of New Labour National Executive.
-- Half-Celestial Khan
