Oh No, This Is The Road... To Preston

Never let it be said that the British don't know how to milk an anniversary to within an inch of its life. Between the local authority and the combined forces of the road lobby, much is being made of the fiftieth anniversary of Britain's first motorway; not the M1, but the Preston Bypass (now M6 J29 to M55 J1).

To add to the joy, Britain's newest motorway also opens today. Or to think of it another way, Britain's oldest motorway gets finished today.

Laugh? I nearly cried.

It's a testament to the level of chaos that passes for administration in this country that the best record of how the motorway network got to where it is comes not from government but from the enthusiasts. It's a history that every politician at every level should acquaint themselves with, if only to understand just how ludicrously ambitious politicians can get; you haven't truly understood the political animal until you've considered the possibility of the M13 Southend Southern Bypass (give it a moment, you'll work it out...) or the extent to which the M25 is, in fact, two different motorways hastily cobbled together with the civil engineering equivalent of gaffer tape...

The result, half a century on, is a classic Whitehall bodge job that spent so much of its time and political capital on London that it never managed to develop a coherent strategy for the rest of the country. There are roads that are almost motorways but not quite (A55), roads that were originally meant to be motorways but aren't (A50), roads that are motorways but don't need to be (M180) and the biggest category of the lot, motorways that give up before they get there (M4, M5, M42, M56, M62...)

Perhaps the most surprising element for those of us brought up on the idea that all new roads are evil a la Newbury and Twyford Down is that things are still progressing. With the Cumberland Gap now filled there's a continuous motorway from London to Glasgow and work is due to start soon on the last section of the motorway from London to Newcastle. As ever with these things, the Scottish Parliament is pushing on too (the M77 Kilmarnock extension is already open, soon to be followed by the M74 Central Glasgow extension and the completions of the M80 Glasgow-Stirling and M8 Glasgow-Edinburgh routes) and the Welsh Assembly, erm, well, yeah...

Still, it's not exactly the awe-inspiring future the pioneers of 1958 had in mind and neither is it likely to make much of a difference to the daily jams experienced by so many millions of people. Until the political will exists to actually tackle any mode of transport head on (third runways notwithstanding) the future of the motorways, and indeed everything else, looks increasingly congested.

The Julian Lewis List

One of the problems of having a memory like mine, and indeed a propensity for atopicality like mine, is the extent to which things will crop up long after they were said. The whole house moving process has brought one such nugget back to the surface as it has now become rather more relevant to my own experience than it was before. That nugget is the Freedom of Information (Parliament and National Assembly For Wales) Order 2008.

The John Lewis List's dominance of the nation's political discourse seems an age away now, but for a while it was the only story in town. True to form, Parliament leapt into action... to save their own skins. The result was an exemption protecting the home addresses of MPs, AMs and Lords from release under the Freedom of Information Act. The campaign to secure the exemption was spearheaded by Julian Lewis (no relation), MP for New Forest East, who spoke at length about the risk of an Al-Qaeda letter bomb-spamming campaign against MPs.

That's all very well and probably proper, although I don't share Dr Lewis's faith in the idea that his local militant cell will be unable to find the address information he and his colleagues are required to give at election time because it doesn't come up on Google. But while MPs were getting their knickers in a twist about a possible change to the status quo, it strikes me that they gave very little thought to the one area of government where disclosure of addresses already is the status quo; councillors.

It is true that councillors do not have to disclose their home addresses; indeed, of Cardiff's 75 councillors, five presently do not do so. Culturally, however, we are very much expected to do so and that cultural expectation does have a tangible effect on our work. I did not disclose my previous address as I was a lodger and did not feel it was fair to the permanent resident of the house to place their address on record; in that time, I definitely received less letters than my ward colleague whose address was and is disclosed.

Ultimately, not disclosing a home address does not make MPs or AMs appear to be less contactable; they have constituency offices and people are happy to write to the House Of Commons or the Senedd as they think of these places as the group of members. When writing to a councillor at County Hall, however, people think of it as The Council, a monolithic house of bureaucracy within which their letter will surely either be lost or “lost”. It isn't true by any means, a councillor's post is just as secure and just as sure to reach them via County Hall as it is to a home address, but the cultural perception is there.

Meanwhile, we councillors may be somewhat less subject to possible terrorist attack than our parliamentary colleagues (though in such matters it pays not to be presumptuous as to what Al-Qaeda may or may not consider getting up to) but we're no less likely to face identity fraud or physical or sexual harassment than them.

Unfortunately I don't have any clever idea for solving the problem; legislating against years of cultural expectation is rarely a fruitful task. What the whole sorry tale underlines, however, is the problem of Parliament's inflated sense of its own importance. The potential security implications for councillors weren't so much as mentioned; heck, I'm half surprised the Assembly even got a look in. As ever, until local government is considered part of the system rather than a separate adjunct to it, all of government will be the poorer for it.

Misuse Of The Journalists Prefix

I think it's safe to say that the two weeks encompassing all of the hustings for your party's leadership election are a pretty bad time for a blogger to be distinctly unwell and in the middle of moving house. At such times, what you really need to get your blogging energy flowing is for a journalist to say something pathetically, moronically insulting.

Matt Withers of The Western Mail, you are the weakest link, goodbye.

In fairness to Matt, the offending article has the whiff of sub-editorial incompetence to it. With Patrick Jones' poetry and its non-reading still a live issue, I'll forgive him for taking a press release from an insignificant “religious discrimination” (read: institutionalisation of religious hatred) campaigner and turning it into a “controversy” over an appearance by Brian Gibbons AM, Minister for Social Justice, at a conference on religious equality organised by the British Humanist Association and funded by way of a £35,000 grant from the Equality and Human Rights Commission.

Then again, the press release is clearly a classic of blinkered stupidity, as the fuller quote reported in the Torygraph demonstrates;

"It's a bit like paying the Taliban to lecture on women's rights. There's nothing wrong with the British Humanist Association organising seminars, but it's the fact that they're getting public money. There is the question of whether this is what Government money should be going for, particularly in a time of recession. If we're having a debate on religion, should we be paying one side of the argument to hold it, especially with public money?"

I'll let the National Secular Society's fairly extensive list of government handouts to faith groups for propaganda purposes do the job of rebutting the “controversy” itself. I'll even allow the casual propagating of the Dr Death moniker for our own Evan Harris slide (but way to go cribbing from the Daily Mail there!) No, what got my hackles up was the opening paragraph;

"The Assembly Government has defended the decision of a senior Minister to speak at a controversial conference organised by an anti-religious group."

Let's be absolutely clear; neither the BHA nor the many thousands of humanists across the country (myself included) have any problem with any individual practising any religion of their choice. We do however have serious concerns about the institutionalisation of religious privilege in service provision and in law. Summarising such a position as flat-out anti-religious is nothing short of insulting, both to the BHA and to humanists nationwide.

Unhappy Divergence From The Work Of Handel

See, there I was ready to break the habit of a lifetime and trumpet a party press release only to find that, in a moment of supreme irony, it failed to turn up on time...

Actually, that's a little unfair; recourse to Google finds the errant document on Cllr Steve Beasant's website and in the news section of the Institute of Transport Management. But this does not represent the sort of fanfare we need for a policy announcement we should be wrapping round a brick and hurling at Geoff Hoon's head.

Admittedly, I wish it was still Ruth Kelly's head we'd be hurling it at. I was always going to find her to be morally repugnant at the best of times, but remarkably I found her pronouncements on expansion of the rail network even more offensive than her moral CV. Question after question from local members desperate for new railway lines to relieve congestion and improve transport links in their area were batted away with, “we believe that lengthening trains and platforms is the best way to increase capacity on the network”, a statement so intensely moronic it isn't funny.

You'll imagine how much my heart was lifted to see us publishing a list of line and station reopenings, line redoublings and electrification projects . The list includes my old favourite the Varsity Line and is so comprehensive it includes schemes even I hadn't thought of. With a headline talking of rolling back Beeching, it's a fantastic announcement, a bold investment in infrastructure that the public want and the other parties are too stupid to propose.

And yet, upon the party website there's nary a mention and not even a story wedged down the back of BBC News Online. I don't for much, but when I get it, it'd be nice if we could make a song and dance about it.

Tales Of The Overexpected

I suppose one of the other reasons for my dearth of council-related posts is that it's been pretty rare so far for me to come away from a council meeting angry. No doubt that's one of the advantages of being a member of the ruling coalition, but either way it is the way of things thus far. I was particularly surprised, therefore, to find myself angry on my return home from two consecutive council meetings today. But then, in both of those meetings senior councillors attacked a service that the Liberal Democrats saved in the face of craven political incompetence, in some cases by their own parties.

The tale of 101 starts with Labour's 2005 Manifesto;

“Not all problems need a 999 response, so a single phone number staffed by police, local councils and other local services will be available across the country to deal with anti-social behaviour and other non-emergency problems”

And lo it came to pass that a year later there was a trial...

And a year later, they found that the trial was such a phenomenal success that they abandoned it...

You'd think the whole thing was being run by the Home Office under a Labour secretary of state...

As is often our wont, the Liberal Democrats jumped to the defence of an important local service and did a sterling job of retaining the existing trials (of the five trial areas, it's not exactly a coincidence that the three to retain were Cardiff, Sheffield and Hampshire...) In the Assembly, Mike German jumped into the fray, eliciting this Scunner Broon award nominee from Rhodri Morgan;

“It would set an undesirable precedent if, every time the UK Government could not afford to continue a scheme through its departmental budget, the automatic assumption was that it would be funded by the Assembly instead. You can imagine that it would start to withdraw from a range of schemes in the hope that the Assembly, the Scottish Government and the Northern Ireland Executive would start picking those up instead”

Nevertheless 101 did survive in Cardiff, a result I can but hope was assisted by the Facebook campaign run by yours truly. And yet, plenty of councillors are unhappy, although today was the first time I'd heard such criticism in such vituperative form or in a public meeting.

The primary problem, however, is a simple case of unrealistic expectations. 101 is only a phone number; it does a fantastic job of ensuring that non-emergency issues are reported to the right authority more easily and more rapidly. Its mere existence does not cause those issues to suddenly become emergencies, however; it just means that they are dealt with in good time as opposed to not being dealt with at all.

Those councillors who have a problem with 101 should remember that that in itself is a massive step forward; perhaps the most remarkable result of the 101 trial was that referrals to the noise nuisance team went up by 500%. One of my commonest refrains as a councillor is that, while the system may be a bit slow and creaky, it is infinitely better to be inside the process than outside of it. There may be legitimate concerns about feedback from 101 on case progress, but we as councillors should be able to go beyond individual cases to look at the performance data and realise what an outstanding job 101 is doing.