On the probable demise of HBC, and a possible citizens’ answer
In the first week of the New Year I said this on FB…
I was in a towering rage. Sure, the utterly destructive nature of party politics in recent years had pretty much disabled our local council and yes, a dysfunctional council is hard to defend but – that the decision to scrap our local council could just be cleared up and finished off over the Christmas period with no-one telling the town, and that when we eventually get invited to come along and ask questions, the debate is not how we hang onto local democracy, it’s in what way exactly would we like it to be dismantled…
I went along to a local assemblies organizing meeting in January, hoping to talk about it and got a bit less furious with the party currently leading the council because one of them was there, and we got to talk to her about how it had happened and what it meant.
It is hard for councillors to be an active presence for everyone, given the size of the wards they preside over, and the endless variety of problems and ideas that many thousands of people would put forward, if they got a chance to talk to them – but how is a drastic reduction of the number of councils, the scrapping of most of our local councillors and the closure of the local chamber going to help that?
MONEY
You may have noticed that our town’s been a wee bit short of funding in recent years. The government, which has reduced our local government grant by MILLIONS in the last few decades, has decided they’re going to solve this by replacing borough councils with an East Sussex unitary authority with a sort of King of Sussex ruling the roost. Will it be cheaper though, when the average wage of UK executive mayors is upwards of a hundred thousand a year – the equivalent of the combined councillors’ annual allowance for a middling town. And that’s before you start on the cost of that super-mayor’s staff, offices, expenses etcetera and so on.
But putting the cost of kinglets aside, what chance is there that this prospective county mayor, who will probably come from some leafy, well-off town 20 miles or so west and north of us, will have any knowledge of, or interest in, Hastings? It’s been bad enough having our road maintenance (ha ha) and schools (try to laugh) managed by a Tory county council based in Lewes, but how is it going to be when we don’t have a team of local councillors to try and nag some attention from county?
What if your town is only half a town?
Some years ago, I was invited to a seminar on the problems faced by coastal towns. If you’re new to the dynamics of this, just imagine a circle with a dot in the middle. Obviously no town is a perfect circle but most towns have a centre – it’s usually an administrative centre, a shopping centre and an entertainments centre. It might be many more things but, it’s there in the middle, so that most people can get there reasonably easily.
Unless it’s a coastal town.
That’s why coastal towns often have logistical and economic problems. We are only half a circle – for towns on a headland, less than half. That means the number of people who can get to the centre easily is drastically reduced, and running a local transport system is next to impossible. It’s harder to find the right range of workers, harder for shops and entertainment venues to attract enough customers, and so on.
The most likely source of entertainment is the beach and the seafront – which brings another difficulty for coastal towns because whilst most people enjoy the seaside in the summer, not many do in cold or wet weather, so a large proportion of coastal residents and small businesses are likely to be stuck with only half an annual income.
And while we’re on the subject of seaside entertainments, one of the things that was discussed at that seminar was the extraordinary proportion of those entertainment venues that turn out to be fronts for extremely undesirable ‘businesses’. Whether it’s because the shortage of winter income is a temptation, or whether there’s some other reason, many of them turn out to be bringing more problems than benefits to their host towns.
That’s why our former Labour council used to put a lot of effort in trying to extend the tourist season by peppering the calendar with festivals, to raise the tone from glorified gambling dens to carnival and cultural activities.
Nowadays of course, being a coastal town carries the added concern of creeping sea-level rise. As if it weren’t bad enough having a private water company flooding our streets by neglecting maintenance and putting storm drains in stupid places, we’re likely to have permanent inundations to deal with soon. That’s why in 2017, when our then council leader stood as our parliamentary candidate, his manifesto included aiming for zero carbon emissions. He said one of his main reasons for standing was that he wanted to take the problems of coastal towns right into Westminster, and get some action on them.
Losing our voice
There are many other reasons why coastal towns are different – not all of them negative of course. Notable amongst those calendar festivals I mentioned were the Seafood and Wine festival and the Hastings Week ‘sprat and winkle’ event, both of which were mainly there to promote and support our fishing industry, and then of course there are all the people who come here across the sea – from refugees to holiday makers to language students, and all the issues they bring along with them.
I don’t think a King of Sussex who lives in, say, Heathfield, and works in Lewes, and earns a hundred grand a year is going to bother himself much about any of those things, do you?
Even with a dysfunctional party system and a chronic shortage of funding, local borough councils can manage to remind the rest of the world we exist, and carry our wants and needs to county. With most of them gone, who is going to go to the larger, more remote replacement of ESCC and nag them about the potholes, the water leaks, the state of the schools? Who’s going to ask them why the Sam Hill the town’s litter bins were bolted shut over the holidays, who’s going to take along our housing problems, our opinions on planning applications and our shopping list of arrangements for all those festivals?
Who knows? Who cares?
Well – we all do. Who has a better up-close view of life in a seaside town than all the people who live in it? Between us, we know the realities of all those issues and more and if there were some way to put all of put our heads together, we’d be likely to come up with some pretty original solutions. That’s why the loss of our local democracy – or at least, of the borough council that was the last remnant of local democracy, makes me think it’s time to put our energy into growing the local assemblies movement.
One Hastings, many voices
That’s the name of a local initiative in St Leonards, and it makes a point very neatly. There are a million and one music, arts and culture groups in town, along with clubs, societies and campaign groups for just about everything you can imagine. As well as the fun stuff, there are people who organize food-banks, a volunteer library, visiting and car-sharing, defence against housing evictions, you name it…
There was one group of councillors who did bother to put out a Facebook post about the demise of the council before they went home for Christmas – it was the independents, those councillors who’d walked away from party politics because it had all become so dysfunctional.
There was one campaign group who took action – Divest Sussex set up a way for people to have their say, and a petition for restoration of the May elections.
There is no shortage of people in Hastings who actually care about Hastings and do take action over local issues. None of them can do everything a borough council should be doing, but all of them could come along to local assemblies and add their local knowledge and enthusiasm to the mix – then we’d be a big enough group to make ourselves heard and get things done.
Let’s get talking
We’ve made a start on local assemblies. The first meeting was held in the run-up to last May’s election…
Since then, Battle, St Leonards and Hollington have had several meetings, and other wards and groups have had smaller community or single-issue meetings. Now, there’s going to be a whole town meeting on the subject of re-creating Hastings’ voice after HBC.
Contact: HastingsAssembles@proton.me
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Kay Green 