Farewell to the County Council

A year ago the borough elections we so bad for Labour that we knew our control of the county council was doomed, and that half of us were bound to lose our seats this year. An atmosphere of gloom descended upon us all. And so it transpired last Thursday. Twenty seven of the thirty Labour councillors were roundly trounced. I lost my Perrycrofts seat to Ben Adams by 703 votes to 1358.

The consolation for me was that Ben Adams is a worthy victor. I was on the partnership scrutiny committee with him for a year or so and he produced an excellent report for us on procurements. He conducted a friendly campaign, accepted the result with dignity and grace. I often feel that elections are won by winds of change, that a semi trained chimpanzee would have won with the breeze behind him and would have campaigned as zealously.

I was sad for my hard working team, Ian and Adam, Neil and Alex, Roger Smith and Garry, Karen and Gaynor, and especially for Carol Dean who organised the whole of Tamworth's campaign as well as her own battle. She did not deserve to lose Bolebridge. Her philosophical equanimity at the end of the night was heroic.

One does not exactly make friends on the county council, but I got to know some remarkabe people on both sides of the chamber. Janos Toth, Sue Woodward, two deeply different specimens of the ingrained Labour family. Ian Parry and Matthew Ellis, prototypical and opposite Conservative characters. And lots of decent people whom it was a pleasure to work with. Only one unpleasant and bumtious little man who probably thought I was a prize twit, so that doesn't matter.

My abiding memory of being on the county council was that our policies were tightly imposed by the ODPM and monitored by the CPA, who yet ensured that we didn't have enough money to carry out those policies. Their constant braying about efficiency savings were idiotic, and talk about taking tough decisions was a euphemistic way of telling us we had to do as we were told and if it meant we were kicked out at the next election then that's tough.

The alternative would be to raise the council tax, and we all know what the public would think of that.

Never mind. In four years time Carol will get back onto the county council, and Sue Woodward and Matthew Ellis will be in Parliament, and maybe Janos as well. And as Roger Smith would put it, the world won't have come to an end. I'm grateful to the voters who allowed me these past four years of privilege.