Strayside Sunday: Insipid Liberal Democrats aren't serving the public

Strayside Sunday: Insipid Liberal Democrats aren’t serving the public

Last updated Jun 21, 2020

Strayside Sunday is our weekly political column written by Paul Baverstock, former Director of Communications for the Conservative Party:

The Liberal Democrats used to be hugely effective local campaigners. Not least here in Harrogate where Phil, now Baron Willis of Knaresborough, was a formidable and highly popular Liberal Democrat MP. Willis served 13 years in parliament and retired ahead of the 2010 election. From potholes to streetlights, and from parking to dog poo – no issue that affected the daily lives of residents was too small for the Lib Dems to champion.

During these past few months of crisis, the local Lib Dems insipid contribution has largely been to criticise our MPs for returning to Westminster, suggesting the creation of Covid Recovery Response Teams, calling on Harrogate council to declare a climate emergency (something that has even proven beyond Greta Thunberg), and worrying about the council’s “abysmal communication.”

Granted, it is difficult to make any real political impression when you occupy just 7 seats on a council of 40, but an effective Lib Dem opposition should look to serve as a locus for local issues, campaigns and activism, and attempt to frame and lead local political debate. Let’s hope they can shake their somnolence in the months to come. The people of Harrogate need a functioning opposition.

In last week’s column I argued against Harrogate Council’s plan to create a Local Authority Controlled Company (LACC) to manage the area’s sport centres and deliver leisure services across the district. On Wednesday evening, the 7 Conservative members of the council’s cabinet approved unanimously plans to create the new company, called ‘Brimham Active.’ This will now be put to a full vote of the council on July 8^th. If the council rubberstamps cabinet’s recommendation, as the thumping Conservative majority will surely do, it will be a decision taken in the face of public opinion, that was sought through a ‘consultation’ exercise, bought and paid for with public, read our, money.

During my professional life in politics and communication I have written, conducted and commissioned a myriad of polls, surveys and consultations. From experience, I can tell you there is no legitimate basis upon which the leisure service consultation results can be interpreted as supportive of the council’s privatisation plan. Of 433 opinions sought, just 27% of us agreed with the council’s scheme. That’s just 117 Harrogate residents who support £300,000 in venture start-up costs and borrowings of £26m to fund the facilities upgrades on which the plan for leisure depends. In fact, the balance of public opinion was undeniably negative; 46% of us disagreed with the plan. You have to hand it to the council; it takes some kind of brass neck to ignore a poll result that is 2 to 1 against. And no, there’s no excuse for the Lib Dems ,who arrived too late in the debate, and then howled about being kept in the dark – this proposal was covered in this publication and others well ahead of the vote.

This week the district has seen the closure of Henshaw’s Arts and Crafts centre in Knaresborough. These pages also reported on their announcement that its Assisted Living Centre is to shut this coming October. It appears that Henshaw’s actually made the decision to close four long months ago but, for reasons passing understanding, delayed the news until now. What has gone so wrong financially it has left 21 families urgently needing alternative arrangements to house their disabled loved ones? Something else for the local Lib Dems to get their teeth into, perhaps?

Poor old ‘App-less’ Matt Hancock is having a bad war of late. When appointed to his post, the technophile Secretary of State for Health and Social Care set up a shiny new unit called NHSx and tasked it with the digital transformation of healthcare. It’s job is to bring the NHS’s prehistoric I.T. kit up to date, make it work well and work most of the time, link and share our patient data across care settings (between your GP surgery and hospital for example) and generally harness the power of innovation to improve care, and to make it more cost efficient for the taxpayer. I can talk this way because, when I was Director of Communication for Paperless 2020, the former name of the digital transformation programme for healthcare in England and Wales, it used to be my job to talk this way.

The thing is, building technology at pace and scale is both hard and expensive, even if you are a technology company like, say, Apple or Google, to pick but two at random… Matt Hancock actually has his own app, imaginatively called ‘Matt Hancock MP.’ You should download it. An hour or so before the Downing Street daily press conference, at which he announced that our “world beating” track and trace app was being binned before it could be launched, he posted a message of congratulations to Frankie Dettori for winning the Ascot Gold Cup. You couldn’t make it up. Could you?

That’s my Strayside Sunday.