This week, a citizen who happened to be a councillor happened to be at an assemblies planning meeting I went to. She informed me that our borough council is doomed.

‘It’s done and dusted,’ she said.

The last couple of years have been a rollercoaster of first-priority issues for anyone even remotely involved in politics. If you’re campaigning for Palestine, you’re worried that you’re neglecting the NHS campaign. If you’re on the NHS campaign, there’s no time left for your trade union activism and if you’re doing any of that whilst trying to earn a living, care for a family or deal with your own health problems, there’s no way you’re going to keep up with local issues in your own ward. Thank goodness we have ward councillors overseeing all that, eh?

….. oh.

I have a feeling authoritarian politicians love this situation. It’s probably why control-freak types routinely create chaos around us. While we were looking the other way, our council was signed up for a ‘pilot scheme’ to get rid of local councils. It’s likely that control of the New Scheme (called ‘devolution’ by way of camouflage) will be in the hands of the Tory county council that’s routinely neglected our town for decades, and they will eventually hand over to some new, Executive Mayor without even telling us how this kinglet is to be chosen. Will there be a vote? Who gets to vote? Who gets to nominate candidates? That Tory council? Starmer’s Labour Party? How will our services be run during the two or more years it’ll take for all that to happen?

We have no idea. I started this year in a steaming rage against the local Green Party. They did so much damage, fighting for control of our council only to preside over its demise, then went home for Christmas and didn’t tell us. Nor did Labour, or the Tories. The only chink of daylight was a post on the Independent councillors’ page that looked at a brief glance (which is all the attention it got in the bustle of the week before Christmas) – well, it looked like a Christmas card.

When they woke up

The supposedly radical, supposedly there-to-save-the-planet Greens appear to have fallen very quickly indeed for the illusion most seasoned councillors have that if they’ve put something on the council website, or on their Facebook page, or said it in a meeting, then everyone knows.

Top tips for councillors No 1:

I would estimate that less than one citizen in a thousand looks out for notices on the council website, or sits through recordings of council meetings, looking for anything that matters to them. Unless you’ve thrown yourself into a public campaign, sent out community newsletters and written to the papers, most people do not know whatever it is you’re doing.

Anyway, after Christmas, the Divest Sussex people were on the case and found an email address for people to write to with opinions about the disbanding of our council. During the first week in January, as we all woke up to what was going on, I put out this blog post…

Once we’d all started making a noise, the Green Party woke up and put out a really annoying post, as usual emphasizing The Green Party this and The Green Party that, rather than focusing on councillors and citizens.

Top tips for councillors No 2:

Don’t tell us about party politics. People are sick to the back teeth of party politics. Tell us what’s happening, what you are doing about it, and what we can do.

It left us less than a week to follow up the actual councillors’ offer of how to make your feelings known, before The Green Party (that is, the leader of our council) put the issue as a motion anyone could see they’d lose to the Tory County Council. They lost that vote, naturally, said ‘oh well’ and went home.

Top tips for councillors No 3: How to lose a motion and win

Sure, losing that motion was inevitable. Sure, the corporate-focused powers-that-be are determined to put an end to local democracy and it’s very difficult to counter it but anyone who’s ever held any position in political parties or unions should know that if you know you’re going to lose a vote, you work it. You make it the launch of a campaign. What the Green Party in all its glory should have done was get to work BEFORE Christmas, to make sure the whole town knew they were going to have to put this motion, and probably lose it, and tell EVERYONE by every means available, that this was the Tories stealing our council, and that we were going to have to fight it.

So having got that clear, here’s the first big problem: who wants to save HBC?

Now they are awake, the HBC councillors are going to talk to us (soon. When?), they are going to get involved in reviews and fight-back … and here’s why we need to get behind them and push: very few people are happy with HBC. It’s been pretty dysfunctional for a long time, largely because of the utterly devastating scale of de-funding it’s suffered from successive governments but its unpopularity has been exacerbated in recent years first by the Labour Party’s willingness to destroy anything in order to push socialist activists out of the Labour Party, then by the first Green councillors’ willingness to destroy anything that remained in order to get more Green councillors. I am not imagining this. I saw the Green Party exec’s directive to their first councillors to do ANYTHING to get more Greens in, I saw the dirty tricks and smears that resulted — that’s when people active in other parties really started cursing Greens.

Whispers: Sure, it’s time to put that anger behind us, the new Greens who joined the council in 2024 probably don’t know much about all that. I didn’t shout at that councillor I met at the organizing meeting – I was far too happy that she was there, talking to people. and sure, I’m going to try – Join me, comrades?

Our task now

So, our task now is to persuade Hastings that we need to fight to save this scruffy, dysfunctional council we’ve been swearing at for years. It’s not enough to say ‘because the alternative will be worse’, we need to show the town what a functional borough council could be like. We need to show them. People would need to be over forty to remember such a thing.

We need to get together and enact real local politics, to demonstrate what it could do for us. Imagine having a real, local health authority and education authority. Imagine having councillors who were actually funded and enabled to fix things that were broken, provide appropriate housing and care services. Just imagine. All those things used to be so, back in the 20^th century, before the era of blue and red Tories ushered in the long, painful de-funding and disempowering of local government.

Hooray for HIP

Some people are aware of HBC’s fate, now. This is largely because of a very detailed front-page-and-more feature from the Hastings Independent Press, that came out on January 15th. It was there that I learned there will be a consultation at some point, and that local assemblies might be part of the solution to the loss of local government. I’ve asked several councillors to please find out when that consultation finishes, whether it has any teeth, and how people will find out about it; and I have been to a local assemblies organizers’ meeting (there’s another one coming up soon). Find out how to get involved…

Website HastingsAssembles.org

email: hastingsassembles@proton.me

Please join us. Please take action. Please find out what your local and community groups are doing, and join in where you can. Please try and unearth your local councillors and give them a push in the direction of local fightback.

See you at the next town assembly.

NB added 6th Feb: There will be a full council meeting on 26 February, when members of the public will be invited to ask questions.

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