From the Inside

Article published: Saturday, August 22nd 2009

MULE’s Andy Lockhart spoke to Vanessa Hall, Green Party councillor for Hulme between 2003 and 2008, to try and find out what really goes on inside the Town Hall.

What did you do before you were a councillor and how did you come to stand for election?

I was involved in the second runway protests in Manchester and ended up joining the Green Party. I’d done a bit of stuff with Friends of the Earth, and then became chair of Manchester Green Party and national spokesperson on women’s issues. I’d started doing bits of media stuff too. I was up for my life being based around campaigning and I was motivated to work on climate change. It was partly about being in the right place at the right time. I stood in the council elections in 2000 and again in 2002 – we went for it that year and narrowly missed out. It was 2003 when we won, by 11 votes, after three recounts!

What were your initial experiences of the council and what was it like being on your own there as a Green?

I was there for five years from 2003 to 2008. It’s terrible that Manchester Labour has no effective opposition, even though Lib Dems make up about a third of the councillors. Labour just do whatever the hell they like.

When I was first elected, some Labour councillor spoke to me and asked me if I’d like to be on the physical environment committee, which I did. How many councillors from different parties get on certain committees depends on how many seats you have on the council. I just was an extra one. But Labour control the executive just like they do all the committees and the council.

Some councillors have a full-time job as well. When I was elected my boy was five months old. Being the only Green and having a five month old baby was about one and a half times as much as I could easily manage. I also got people from other wards contacting me. People with a ‘green’ issue would get in touch from all over Manchester.

How were council meetings run and where did it seem real decisions were made?

Firstly you need to know that Manchester City Council (MCC) is run by about a dozen Labour Party members at the top. The main policies and direction the council takes are all controlled by that main group of people, and while on the surface it may look different it’s more sort of tinkering around with things at the edges.

Councillors actually get told how to vote on things. Before I went to full council meetings I had no idea what it was like. I’ve never seen anything like it – people were getting up, walking around, talking to people and going out for a cup of coffee. For a while it baffled me, I was thinking: “they’re all really rude”. But then someone told me that if people don’t want to vote a certain way on something they just leave the room, because they’d get in loads of trouble if they didn’t vote the way they’re told.

There’s a pre-scrutiny to council meetings too – not open to the public. But my experience of scrutiny committee was that there weren’t any decisions made there either. I mean, they look through and approve reports. The reports usually come from the officers – high-up non-elected staff in the Town Hall – who essentially produce reports in line with the local Labour Party leadership. Then they get their lower-down staff to write really long reports, make it really long and wordy – or at least it seems that way! The officers come to the scrutiny committee and summarise the report. The councillors probably haven’t read the report. They might have read the two-page summary. But unless you’ve read the 50-page report you’re not going to be able to scrutinise it properly.

How closely did Manchester City Council seem to stick to the central Labour Party’s line?

I noticed repeatedly actually that the council (and Richard Leese) would say things against the national government, like “we object against the war” or something like that, really separating themselves from the central Labour Party. And they seem to do alright in Manchester. It seems very separate and like Manchester is their little empire. Of course as well as MCC there’s AGMA [Association of Greater Manchester Authorities] to think about in the whole power structures of local decision-making. But I think Richard Leese is very powerful, very happy in his little empire, and isn’t interested too much in national politics. He likes to be in charge and I think he’s going to around for some time.
We tried to figure out what was going on at council meetings and how decisions got made, but found it really difficult.

What did you think of the Town Hall’s approach to public consultation?

They generally just make it really difficult! MCC’s idea of consultation is to work out what they want to do and then phrase the questions so that they restrict the options available. They say something like, ‘given these assumptions…’, but those are the important things that people want to be consulted about and want to change. They make the important decision and then ask the public something stupid. They have stakeholder group consultations. But residents’ associations would probably have to put themselves forward – but probably wouldn’t know it was even happening. That’s the other way consultation works in Manchester. We used to still have public question time in full council meetings too – that stopped in 2007 sometime I think on the grounds that no one was turning up.

What do you think motivates people to become councillors?

I think all the parties struggle to get candidates, to get people who want to be councillors. You can tell because the councillors don’t live in their wards anymore. It used to be a community activist. They lived in their ward and wanted to fight for their local people. You can tell that some are careerists by how strongly they stick to party lines, but probably not the majority. For others they just seem to know people who already are councillors and it seems like a natural progression from other things, I imagine a lot get their arms twisted. With others it’s a bit like they’re just looking for power. I imagine the current state of politics generally isn’t going to help.
from the inside

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Comments

1. Well done, Vanessa, for trying your best. We have the same problems with the exclusively LibDem Executive in Stockport. They pretend they want local people to take part in democracy and tut tut at low election turnouts and poorly attended council meetings, but if a member of the public has read the meeting documents and done the research (which the councillors themselves won’t have done the majority of the time), then they consider it an impertinence to have their decisions and actions questioned.

   It can be such a humiliating experience for a member of the public to be demeaned and ridiculed at these meetings, I am not surprised they don’t bother to return. I myself have been repeatedly called a liar in council meetings by a very senior councillor at Stockport. He has produced no evidence of any lies I have told, and to the best of my knowlege there aren’t any. Councillors are not allowed to call each other liars in meetings, so why is it all right for a member of the public to be defamed in this way? I took it to the Council’s Standards Committee, months passed, nothing happened. I have now taken the issue to the Standards Board.

   Comment by Sheila Oliver on August 23, 2009 at 1:18 pm

2. good article, Vanessa. Good work.

   See if me or Steve can improve on your efforts in the future. I’m sure you’re not holding your breath…!

   Vote Green for a CHANGE!

   Comment by Nigel Woodcock on August 24, 2009 at 11:06 pm

The comments are closed.