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An Open Letter to Ian Hudspeth, Leader of Oxfordshire County Council, About Proposed Budget Cuts

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Dear Mr Hudspeth

I was the Green Party Parliamentary Candidate for Banbury in May. I’ve met you a couple of times, the most recent being after the public meeting held in Banbury Town Hall as part of Oxfordshire County Council’s consultation process on the proposed additional £50m cuts to local services.

So it was with great interest that I read your correspondence with David Cameron, splashed across national headlines last week, which painted a clear picture of a Prime Minister with only a tenuous grasp on the realities of the demands he has made on local authorities such as Oxfordshire, where he also happens to be an MP.

At the meeting we briefly touched on the magnitude of the savings being demanded in the context of our national finances. I made the case that with a national debt of £1.56 trillion – nearly half of which was added by our Conservative Chancellor during the tenure of the last government – a deficit of £83bn and annual interest payments of around £43bn, saving £50m from local authority spending was the equivalent of trying to pay your mortgage off by skipping breakfast once a year.

Whilst these cuts will have virtually zero impact on the debt left to future generations, they will have a huge effect on those who depend on the front line services being withdrawn. In particular on adult social care facilities and the children’s centres you plan to close which were amongst Mr Cameron’s principal concerns.

Your reply to me was that we all had to “do our bit”. Well it seems from your response to the PM that ‘our bit’ has already been well and truly done.

As a local politician expected to deliver on these impossible polices, I’m sure you know that they are economically illiterate. Cuts to social care will impact on the health service as a whole. Cuts to support for young people have potential effects on social order. Cuts to public transport have serious implications for the workforce and people in isolated rural communities.

I hope you’ll agree with me that there’s a point where cuts can no longer be the solution to balancing the books. Personally I think we’re already well beyond that line in the sand.

So I’m confused by your own position on government policy, given that you continue to publicly affirm that you share Mr Cameron’s blind faith in the blunt instrument of austerity as the answer to all our problems.

You’ve also made much of the statistic that 2% of the county’s population consumes 50% of the finances. I’m sure the old, the sick and infirm are a great drain on our public services, but in a modern society surely those people should expect to be looked after by those of us who are better able to do so.

Do you feel perhaps that this 2% should be prepared to support the more lavish spending plans of our government in other spheres? The wasting of hundreds of billions to allow us to play our part in a thermonuclear Armageddon maybe. Or vanity transport projects that will allow people to get from London to Birmingham 15 minutes faster, when Oxfordshire County Council has just voted to cut local bus subsidies in the county.

Should Oxfordshire pensioners be made fearful of putting their heating on this winter but be comforted as they shiver in the dark that they are ‘doing their bit’? All this while the government you support hands over £5.9bn to private oil and gas companies – a figure well over a thousand times greater than the cuts we are being asked to make – and slashes support for local renewable energy projects, meaning we will miss EU emissions reductions obligations and become the only G7 country to increase spending on fossil fuels.

I really feel that you have to come down on one side of the fence or the other here. You can’t continue to support the cuts in public whilst apparently opposing them in private. As leader of the county council, the people of Oxfordshire deserve an unequivocal statement of your aims and allegiances.

You will no doubt be aware that Mr Cameron’s intervention in Oxford has now prompted requests from over 100 other councils to have a similar direct consultation with him over budget pressures. He also faces accusations of ministerial impropriety over his intervention with you.

So perhaps now would be a good time for hard-pressed council leaders such as yourself to make a firmer stand. You could set an example and refuse to pass what you have already told the PM is an impossible budget to balance in any morally defensible way. I know such actions come with potential repercussions, but if other council leaders followed your lead, how many mutinies could Westminster really handle? This could be your place in history calling!

Alternatively you could join the drive for the abolition or raising of the now outdated 2% referendum threshold on council tax increases. As you hinted at in your letter to Mr Cameron, selling the family silver can only plug the gaps for so long. If we want well funded local services, we should all be prepared to pay ‘our bit’ for them. Polls carried out by the Oxfordshire Green Party, The Oxford Mail and at your own consultation events have shown that people would be prepared to pay more council tax if they saw the money going to essential services.

Of course this would require the government to square the circle of increasingly expensive public services without any rise in taxation. But if they truly believe in localism, councils should surely be free to set their own local levy, unhindered by ideological thresholds dictated by central doctrine.

I think the people of Oxfordshire would welcome your further engagement with the PM on their behalf and with local activists on these matters. I personally look forward to your thoughts on how best to capitalise on what has now become a national talking point, and how we can use this new focus in the best interests of Oxfordshire residents and other similarly concerned groups across the country.

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Business Doesn’t Have To Be Bad

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Untitled-1As a businessperson, a long time retailer, and now a retail commentator and journalist, one of the most difficult things for me to reconcile is my involvement in the promotion of consumerism.

That’s at odds with my more recent conviction that we can’t continue to squander the world’s finite resources on WANTS, whilst ignoring the NEEDS of most of the planet’s population.

The Green Party might be seen by some as an anti-capitalist movement. We are however a broad church with many facets. I was encouraged to become a candidate BECAUSE of my business experience rather than in spite of it, and I saw that as an encouraging aspect.

I’ve run large companies, and I now run a small one. I’m probably something of a gamekeeper turned poacher. But I’ve seen both sides of this debate and come to realise that the idea of continual economic growth is indeed a myth. And one we have to stop believing before we run out of road.

I was at the launch of a new book by Naomi Klein a few months ago.  She makes some interesting points about the connections between environmental issues and the global economy.  The basic tenet is that when resources and commodities are monetised on the kinds of scale they are now, the result is economic and environmental catastrophe. And we’re just getting a taste of that.

The direct impacts are of course climate change, which if you ascribe to that view, is starting to bring with it the kinds of drastic changes in weather patterns that we’ve seen in recent years.

These are all things we’re having to come to terms with now and they’re all traceable to global economic activity. They affect all our lives, not just personally, but in broader human and economic terms.

I’m a vocal advocate of social enterprise, and believe that there are many big businesses out there that can be made to take a more ethical and responsible stance if we create the right conditions to encourage it.  And happily for me there is already a growing movement within the more enlightened areas of the business world towards ethical business and sustainable capitalism.

That might sound like some thing of an oxymoron, but in many sectors of business now there’s a realisation dawning that if we continue to squeeze the pips of the economy, we’ll eventually run out of juice.

Amidst calls from some people for a revolution against rampant capitalism, I see the future as more of an evolution towards a business ethos that views social justice and connection with local and national communities as an asset, rather than an inconvenience.  I’m certainly not anti-capitalist, but I am anti-unfettered capitalism. I agree that the market should be allowed to decide some things. But I believe the state has the job of holding us all to account for our actions and tempering the excesses of marketisation to prevent it working against the common good.

And it’s not just us greeny types taking up this mantra. Many key economists and business commentators are now having similar epiphanies about how business and consumption needs to be managed in a sustainable, responsible and accountable way, if we’re all going to avoid a backlash against the kinds of excesses and irresponsible business practices that became prevalent over the past 20 or 30 years.

Essentially businesses need to grow up and take responsibility for the societies we’ve helped to create.

I’ve recently become very interested in something now being called the circular economy, where consumption itself is fed back into the creation of new resources and products.  This doesn’t just encompass recycling, but also upcycling and renewable energy as part of the manufacturing process, along with emergent technologies, social media, and the fourth economy, comprising enterprises that not only make a profit for business owners, but also put something back into the social economy.

That might all sound a bit hippy and tree-huggy, but it’s something that’s being taken very seriously now by many key figures in the business world. Most notably Bill Gates and Richard Branson. And with good reason.

If you can make money with clean conscience, look after your employees, business partners, suppliers, and most importantly the planet AND enjoy what you’re doing, what’s not to like?

You also get to sleep pretty well at night too

So I hope I can convince you that there is scope within a Green World for enterprise and innovation. Without the need for a constantly growing economy and an ever greater consumption of the worlds finite resources.

With the potential for over a million green jobs out there, and an ethical economy that has only scratched the surface of an emerging market, there are plenty of opportunities for business leaders and entrepreneurs in a future Green and pleasant land.

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Nick Clegg Announces Bicester to Become a New £100m 13,000-home ‘Garden City’

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nick-clegg-flowersThe government announced plans today for a new ‘Garden City’ to be built on ex-MOD land on the outskirts of Bicester in Oxfordshire.  The proposals will be backed by £100M of government funds and will include ‘sustainable’ transport infrastructure, green spaces and new local amenities.

On the face of it this could be a boost for Bicester, but I suspect the devil will be in the details.

Much of the announcement seems to cover projects that are already in planning or underway. The new railway station for example. There’s also some confusion over if this is to be a re-imagining of the much vaunted eco-village or an entirely new project.

It is encouraging however to see that the project is to be built on a brown field site.

Confusingly, the definition of a ‘garden city’ is being left to the developer’s imaginations with the government saying it doesn’t want to “impose any definition of what garden cities are”.  This could likely mean we’ll end up with another estate full of either ‘luxury homes’ that ordinary people can’t afford, or shoe-boxes crammed together to generate maximum profit. That would probably mean any aspirations to provide gardens and green space will go right out the window.

If Nick Clegg really wants this to be development different from all the other clone estates thrown up around the country, I’m afraid he’s going to have to nail his colours to some sort of mast and properly define his intentions. But that might prove more difficult than a glib press release full of utopian imagery.

There would also need to be a clear vision that the people living in this new ‘city’ will be contributing to the local economy and society as well as working in it. With a train station on the doorstep, such a development could easily become a dormitory for London commuters or a sink hole of buy-to-let properties.

Affordability will be the key. If these homes are intended for people on middle and lower incomes, then I’d support the idea. But I suspect such values won’t be compatible with what Nick Clegg sees as a ‘garden city’.

Personally I’d like to see more genuine thinking along these lines, subject to the above caveats. But ultimately this may all just come to nothing.

So many of these big legacy projects either evaporate into the ether once they’ve generated enough headlines, or turn into something very different once the realities of cost, demand and political will begin to bite.

There’s a veritable tsunami of these grandiose announcements coming out from government at the moment though. Like the spurious claims for new spending on road infrastructures announced earlier this week, many of them are just old or existing projects being re-launched as new spend to give the impression of a go-ahead administration full of exciting possibilities for the future.

Anyone would think there was an election round the corner!