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

In 2019, Britain ranked sixth in the world in its incidence of obesity, with the proportion of us “struggling with our weight” growing faster than anywhere in the world.  And even before the emotional trauma imposed by lockdown, 1 in 4 of us experienced some form of mental ill health.  It’s for that reason that I believe the first principle for any governing body, be they national, regional (North Yorkshire County Council) or local (Harrogate Borough Council), is now to provide for the physical, mental and economic wellbeing of all the people it serves.  Without such holistic and inclusive thinking we will continue to see the wider determinants of ill health – low income, inadequate housing, poor diet and loneliness, to name a few - impact those of us that can least afford it, at a time when household budgets are going to be stretched to their limits.

In this context, the hiving-off of the borough’s leisure facilities by Harrogate Council (into what is known as a Local Authority Controlled Company) is not in the public interest.

On Friday, these pages quoted the wonderfully named Councillor Stan Lumley, Harrogate Borough Council Cabinet Member for Culture, Tourism and Sport, who justified his creation thus:

“This is like a partial privatisation. It allows us to benefit from some things that a private company would, but by keeping control of the business. It’s the best of both worlds.”

I am a conservative, so, as you might expect, I believe in the market economy, but only in terms.  The provision of leisure services is, I believe, an essential public good, especially at a time when we must surely nurture the health and wellbeing of our bruised and tender population.

Harrogate Borough Council, in the name of cost savings and efficiencies, is attempting to ‘marketise’ our leisure at precisely the moment it is needed most, by most.  Unsurprisingly, no long term assurances can be given about the future of Starbeck Baths, a monument to place and community, serving one of the less affluent areas of the borough, yet great plans await for the Hydro, a gentle walk down the hill from tree-lined avenues of The Duchy.  Setting aside the fact that, in the Harrogate Convention Centre, the council has not previously covered itself in glory with its similar arms-length operations (the centre has not been profitable for years), nobody has asked what seems to me to be the only important question: “Whatever the original decision, is it still the right thing to do?”

In my view, given the circumstances we now face, it is wrong to take a course of action that will likely make leisure more expensive and less geographically accessible, and, in so doing, negatively impact the wellbeing of the people of the borough.  The council seems set, as ever, to pursue blindly the ideology of privatisation.  To do this in the face of compelling new arguments is negligent.

As a former Parliamentary Private Secretary to Jeremy Hunt when he was Secretary of State for Health, Andrew Jones MP knows the negative impact that wider determinants can have on wellbeing, he knows too how important wellbeing is to economic success, both individual and collective, let alone to social stability and cohesion. That’s why I’d like to see Mr. Jones take this on as a cause celebre: I’d like him to call for a rethink from the council on leisure privatisation.  Sadly, I predict he won’t, because the campaigns he tends to favour, think “save” Stray FM and Nidd Gorge, allow him to avoid coming into conflict with his friends and constituency office employees at Harrogate Borough Council.

The very first class I walked into at university was taught by Professor, now Sir Simon Schama.  The class, “Britain Since 1945,” was co-taught with another ex-pat Brit, Professor John Brewer.  Thirty-four years later, what stands out in my memory is that these two undoubtedly brilliant academic friends and colleagues attempted to out-Popinjay one another with Flock of Seagull fashions and multi-coloured spectacle frames.  The class was brilliant.  It made me feel that, on the whole, we, the Brits, were the good guys, and could be proud of our heritage, history, culture and tolerance.

Sir Simon was in the news this week to comment on the protests against memorials across the land, these built or named to celebrate “Great” British historical figures from Baden-Powell (a Nazi sympathiser), to Colston (a slave owner), to Gladstone (supporter of the pro-slavery Confederacy) and to Robert Peel Jr (son of an anti-abolitionist) et al.  I’m with Schama when he says that if it was good enough for the Romans to melt down the statues of their fallen emperors for coinage, it’s certainly fine to dispose of the statue of a man, namely Edward Colston, whose riches came, at least in large part, from the blood, sweat and toil of slave labour.

If a protest captures the imagination, wins hearts and gains mass support, as Black Lives Matter has undoubtedly done, then progressive changes happen and we should celebrate them.  This especially if we are challenged to think critically about our existing assumptions.  But the right to protest is a gift, a gift actually achieved through our complicated and murky history, built by men and women who can never be judged unimpeachable by contemporary norms and contexts, given to us by an imperfect democracy which we abuse at our peril.

That’s my Strayside Sunday.

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