Dear Councillor, if you’re reading this – I know you’re busy people. There’s a letter to you in the second half of the text. Feel free to scroll straight on down to the bit headed “Can we please re-discover that word “no”?

Long-gone local authorities

I remember when “the authorities” were in Wellington Square. If you hit a problem, you could walk in to the appropriate office – the Health Authority, the Education Authority, the Rent Office, Social Services, whatever it was, and you’d find humans there, who had time to talk to you, to tell you what was happening, what you might do about whatever it was.

Every change since then has taken local authority, local funding and human accountability further and further out of our sight. It has made our council increasingly dysfunctional and now, in the final swipe, it threatens to take “local government” out of Hastings altogether.

It’s been very difficult for someone who doesn’t have the brain of a civil servant to work out what’s going on, and what to think about it. Me, I’ve been trotting around about a mile behind, picking up scraps….

A couple of weeks ago, the independent councillors put out a plan, headed “we want a FEAST”. I managed to work out that FEAST was an acronym, and spent about a week finding out what it meant. In between work and other stuff I went around asking the kinds of people who tend to know things like that, and mostly got answers like “oh, is the council being re-structured? Where did you hear that?”

Only last night did I discover there are two separate issues going on here – one is “Mayor of Sussex, ‘yes’ or ‘no’” and the other is “unitary council, how shall we structure it?”

… and no-one is inviting us to vote on either, let alone on the demise of our council – and I know that when politicians do anything they think is actually good for us, they trumpet it months in advance, they pay for ads everywhere, to make sure everyone knows they’re doing it and what it means, but this restructuring plan’s been sprung on us and until HIP got hold of it, barely explained at all, publicly.

I’ve heard more than a few people say it’s just the latest ruse by Labour to avoid losing elections – just cancel them and give the Tory councils the jobs of deciding what’s what.

This is not looking good.

I’m sitting looking at the ream of notes I made on that HIP article about the looming dissolution of our council, and the various documents that have come out of HBC about it, and I’m looking at the thick black line I drew through all those notes when  I got to the end of the HIP article and read the bit that said (I paraphrase) that when we’d spent the next six months or so  running around engaging in consultations and goodness knows what else, it all goes back to the worst government we’ve ever had, and they will decide what to do regardless of us.

Can anyone do anything about this?

Lots of people have tried to do something. One small group of councillors put out a sort of SOS on Facebook before Christmas, Divest East Sussex tried to save the May elections by putting out an open letter to sign and some info just after Christmas. Somewhere in the middle of January, I managed to be at a meeting that had a councillor in it, and she said “oh, it’s done and dusted.”

A councillor at a Hastings Assembles meeting in town on Saturday, when asked if any councillors’d be running a campaign over this, didn’t seem to be sure.

In the paper, the council leader, who’s apparently in favour of the unitary plan, says “we’ll have to self-fund, selling public assets if necessary.”

We discussed this, among other things, at an activists’ meeting this week. We discussed all the things we’d managed to do with no funds at all – usually, one or two of us are holding maybe £50, donated at a previous action, that’ll be spent on the next one – that’s it. But our Council Leader is going to obediently sell public assets ‘if necessary’ to fund the destruction of local democracy.

One activist I know has been asking county councillors if they’d be willing to stand down to force at least some elections in the spring.

 Another posted in a Facebook group, asking councillors to please stop acting as though “they were employees and council officers were their line-managers,” and do something.

I hear a couple of members of the House of Lords tried to save us last week, but got voted down.

Where is the leverage?

I did a bit of an appeal at the mic on Saturday, thinking that surely, even if it wasn’t us, someone somewhere would eventually get to vote on the three options HBC have put together. I said look, everyone’s saying they don’t want to lose local representation, and we can see that one option is entirely centralised, and two retain an element of local administration and representation.

Surely, that means when it comes to a vote, people will either be seduced by that magic word ‘unitary’ or else they’ll split between the one or other of the local options. In other words, the main popular opinion is going to split, and the unitary option is bound to win the vote. So, I said, whoever is lucky enough to get to vote on this, could they please use STV, so those who want to can put centralisation at the bottom of an option sheet.

But that’s by the by, now I’ve seen that fatal last line in the HIP article. Whatever we do, this is going to be decided by the worst government we’ve ever had, regardless of us.

Can we please re-discover that word “no”?

Dear Councillors,

A Mayor of Sussex is bad news – the area is far too big for there to be any hope of Hastings getting any attention or funds, and this Mayor will almost certainly make Brighton the seat of his/her Magnificence, and rural Sussex will be his/her garden, and we’ll be forgotten, just like those once-deprived, now derelict forgotten areas on the outskirts of those much-lauded (by big business) city unitaries around the country.

They say it’s all to save money, and yet the Unitary Mayors the UK already has rake in upwards of £100k a year in salaries, before you start on the costs of staffing and running their Magnificences and, if the Mayorality is the whole of Sussex, and the cost of even standing for Mayor way above the pockets of local people here, we need to say “no” to our cash-strapped town paying for this change so…

Quite a few councillors have muttered to the effect of hoping local activists will run some sort of campaign. Really? Well, let me tell you why it’s taken me since Christmas to find out half enough about this.

It’s because local activists have been all-out to try and save our NHS, to try and save those vulnerable people this government keeps taking money from, to try and save people being driven to destitution by high rents and insecure housing, to try and save the children of Palestine, and to try and do all that whilst earning a living in a climate of astronomically rising council, household and food bills, whilst trying to care for elderly relatives, because the council can’t do that any more.

We’d kind of like you to design and lead a campaign. You get an allowance for doing politics. We’ll back you, we’ll put up your posters, we’ll people your events, if you’re sincerely carrying a torch for the people of Hastings.

Here are the ideas I’ve heard from the people of Hastings, that you might give some thought to:

Could your county councillors please stand down to force at least some spring elections? You could use the resulting campaign to flag up what’s happening, what the dangers are, and what you think about it.

Could you all please look your officers in the eye and say “no, Hastings will not be funding this unnecessary change”? (Yes I do know exactly the kinds of trouble that’d cause but that’s the point, isn’t it. It’ll make noise, and you might just find you’ve inspired some other Sussex councils to stand up with you and do something.)

Could you please run a coherent, local campaign, culminating in a ‘yes/no’ vote for the Mayor of Sussex, and an STV vote, with the unitary and the two other plans, plus a ‘none of the above, make us a better offer’ as option 4.

Could you please discuss with the Mayor the fact that Mayors have the right to make everything stop if they think their town is in danger.

And I’m sure you know a lot more possibilities than I do. If you’re Green, please think back to those far off days when you joined the radical, activist party that believed in localism, community and resisting big money to save people and planet. If you’re Red, think back to the days when you were socialists, and aimed to run Hastings for Hastings people. If you’re not a socialist – well heck, wouldn’t it just be good to do something that might make you popular? If you’re independent, think back to the day you left your parties because you felt they were being unfair, undemocratic and abusive to their own people.

Please stand up and do something.

Yours sincerely, a very tired and overworked activist.

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