Following the recent local elections Mayor McGuiness has had to change her Cabinet, given the election of Andrew Husband of Reform as Leader of Durham County Council and Karen Clark of Labour (only just beat Reform) as Mayor (in effect Leader) of North Tyneside Council. The Cabinet is made up of the leaders of all the constituent local authorities within the Combined Authority Area. I will repeat that this is daft. Council Leaders have enough to do running their own authorities and cannot and should not be devoting time and energy to Combined Authority functions. Better to nominate a Councillor from each authority who makes it their main job and far better if we actually had elected regional councillors but the rejection of Prescott’s devolution deal in the 90s with a campaign run by the delightful Dominic Cummings and supported by a UK offshoot of the vile US Heritage Foundation scuppered that prospect. Existing council leaders did not like the idea and Labour did not really campaign for elected regional government. So here we are and this is the shower we have.
Here is what McGuiness has done:
New leader of Durham County Council Cllr Andrew Husband was appointed cabinet member for A North East We Are Proud To Call Home, overseeing Housing Policy and Delivery, Social Housing and the North East CA Rural Growth Fund.
New Mayor of North Tyneside Mayor Karen Clark was appointed cabinet member for Home to the Green Energy Revolution, overseeing Energy, Net Zero, and Environment and Coast.
Leader of Sunderland City Council Michael Mordey was appointed cabinet member for Finance and Investment, Gateshead Council leader Martin Gannon was appointed cabinet member for Transport, South Tyneside Council Leader Tracey Dixon was appointed cabinet member for Home of Real Opportunity, Newcastle City Council Leader Karen Kilgour was appointed cabinet member for Home to A Growing And Vibrant Economy, and Leader of Northumberland County Council Glen Sanderson was appointed cabinet member for A Welcoming Home To Global Trade.
Chief Executive of the North East Chamber of Commerce and Chair of the North East Business and Economy Board John McCabe will continue as a non-voting cabinet member representing the business community, and Chief Executive of Voluntary Organisations Network North East (VONNE) Martin Brookes will continue as a non-voting cabinet member representing the CVS (Community and Voluntary Sector). (From the Combined Authority Website News.)
Martin Brookes is a Banker who formerly worked for Goldmann Sachs – truly a representative of the people of the North East – and yet again no sign of the Trade Unions to represent organized labour despite some of them lending political support to get nitwit Kim elected but with nothing that looks like a real democratic mandate.
Well Reform are in the door with a seat at the decision making table. Husband, a Plawsworth Publican, (could be worse – running a pub is an honest trade – could be a city speculator like the Lizard who leads his party nationally) has responsibility for Housing Policy. Lloyd George described the post First World War allocation of industrial Silesia to Poland as like giving a clock to a monkey (he was wrong) but I think that describes my view on giving Husband direction of North East housing policy to a T. Housing intersects with planning and given that the Cabinet still has a commitment to net zero given the role of Karen Clark in that portfolio it should be a major commitment.
Clark looks like a grown up with children and grandchildren, long experience in voluntary work, youth work and teaching, and I hope she is able to see off Husband who will want no Net Zero interference with housebuilding or planning in general.
She claims to have been brought up in poverty but I wonder. Bridget Philipson says she was in poverty until her mother was able to go back to full time work – hard up OK but real poverty? Starmer whose father was a toolmaker – every engineering worker in the UK took the Coventry toolroom rate as the standard to aim for – makes similar claims. I am older but until the age of seven I lived in a downstairs Tyneside flat with no inside loo, bathroom or heating other than coal fires – a council house with merely no upstairs heating is not poverty Bridget – with my mother supporting me, her sister and her mother on a primary teacher’s salary and we were not poor. Ordinary working class living standards in the post war era were not poverty.
Net Zero should be a crucial point of difference in the Combined Authority but if the loony Greens – no nuclear, no genetically modified crops (even by CRISPR) and biological males being able to play women’s sports – are the only ones arguing for it from outside then we are indeed in a mess.
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