Salford politics

The television cameras and journalists who crowded around Hazel Blears at the recent council bye-election in north Salford were after a juicy quote about her expenses on various London homes. They got little but smiles and bland words from the ever-smiling Blears and missed the real political story around them.

Irwell Riverside is a typical bit of the Greater Manchester Labour heartland; large council estates, closed factories and mills, few shops and a sense of not quite being anywhere. People here mostly vote Labour and have done for many years, since 1917 to be precise when Salford North elected Ben Tillett, a prominent union organiser in the docks. In 1945, there were three Salford seats and each turned in Labour MPs. Salford North gave Labour 60% of the votes on a turnout of 72%. In 1997, when Ms. Blears got her chance, Salford was down to one seat and gave her 69% of the vote on a turnout of 56%. In 2005, when Salford had been merged with Eccles, Hazel Blears still got 57% of the ballots though on a turnout of only 42%. On May 21 this year, young Matt Bold was elected to Salford Council with just 606 votes ─ a turnout of 17.6%.

The fear running around the count was that the BNP would make big gains here, possibly even win the seat. A bye-election in February in a north Manchester ward had seen them jump to second place and that before the Parliamentary expenses scandals had begun to bite. What happened was less spectacular but still wounding to English democracy; the voters just stayed at home.

North Salford is a place where the council ought to matter. Housing waiting lists are long and growing. The recession is biting hard here in an area where unemployment is high. But the fact is that people have long given up on the local council as a source of support or turned to local councillors for advice on housing or social problems. In the ward in north Manchester where I stand, vainly, for the council they also weigh the Labour votes rather than counting them. Taking leaflets round a tower-block, a couple of residents said they would vote Green just because it was the first time they could remember anyone bothering to distribute election material. I hope they did but it is more likely that they stayed at home like 75% of other local voters.

The electorate are not stupid. Councils in Britain have ceased to have much in the way of a democratic function. They have, apparently, large budgets but almost no say in how they are spent. A detailed survey of council expenditure in Burnley showed that only 8% of its budget was actually discretionary, the rest was dictated by the rules of a central government which in any case supplied most of the funds. The councillors who are elected to govern communities actually do very little apart from rubber-stamping decisions taken by officers based upon central diktats. Even their role in looking after the interests of their electorate has been largely taken over by MPs who, in the words of a retiring MP, Tony Banks, act mainly as second-rate social workers employing their family to reply to the hundreds of letters they receive. We have slipped into a degenerate political system in which the majority of elected representatives, locally and nationally, are useless or perhaps, more accurately, pointless. It is little wonder that many devote such time to concocting their expenses. For me, a low point of all the political interviews which have cluttered the news recently was with a Labour backbencher who doubted that there would be a leadership contest as MPs would soon be off on their two and a half month summer break. Two and a half months with, officially, nothing to do. Words really cannot do it justice.

Hazel Blears is now ready to square things with her constituency executive and make ready for life in opposition. One doubts that she will gracefully stand down in acknowledgement of any mistakes even though she has jumped from the Cabinet. And when the time comes, Salford will re-elect her unless there is a political earthquake. The only question is whether the turnout drops below 40%. They value loyalty and solidarity there, virtues which Ben Tillett would have understood and which once saw Labour supporters through hard times. Not any more. In Salford, Labour wins. And everybody loses.