Secrecy and corruption
Richard West
When I worked as a reporter in Yorkshire more than 20 years ago, it was customary, if one was doing a local government story, to call on the Clerk to the Council or any other official to ask for his guidance and information. This was generally forthcoming. Nowadays if one calls at a local government Office, one is obliged to address oneself to somebody in a team of public relations officers whose job is to suppress information. It is difficult to learn even the number and the salaries of the council employees. Even the number of PROs themselves is a mystery. In Whitehall, 60 years ago, there was but one; and there are now about 1,700.1n local government, the increase has been still more spectacular, since PROs were still uncommon only 15 or 20 years ago. In Holborn, in 1962, there was a part-time public relations consultant earning about £1,000 p.a. In present-day Camden, which has engorged the unfortunate Holborn, there are said to be 14 staff public relations people, earning about £9,000 each. If I write about PROs, it is not just because, as a journalist, I find them misleading, secretive and a nuisance. I think that the employment of people to stop imformation, and shield the council officials from the public, is the expression of something Profoundly wrong in local government, which also has much to do with the Heath-Walker reforms. As local government has grown into bigger, clumsier units, often in two 'tiers' (to use the bureaucratic jargon,) so there has been increasing secrecy and corruption. I use the word corruption advisedly; some of the new 'metropolitan' areas, and some of the other councils — especially in northern England and south Wales — are or were run by a self-serving alliance of Labour Party politicians and trade union officials.
The secrecy was created by public rela tions people, the most notorious of whom was T. Dan Smith, the one-time boss of Newcastle, He was at one time director of dozens of oddly-named public relations companies whose purpose, it appeared, was to funnel bribes to council employees over the county, in order to get work for architects and construction companies. Smith also did public relations work for the Labour Party in north-east England. He and his colleagues in Tyneside also conducted a very successful press and television campaign to attract money and factories to what they called a 'problem' part of England. No matter that Newcastle's problems largely consisted of workers going on strike. Lord Hailsham was made a Cabinet Minisfor the North-East, and turned up in Newcastle wearing a cloth cap.
Because of the Poulson bankruptcy hearings, the press, the public and the police were given a rare opportunity to examine the modern style of local government. First, Smith went to prison, followed by Alderman Andrew Cunningham, the leader of the Labour Party in County Durham thanks to his post in the powerful General and Municipal Workers' Union. But most of the big industrial conurbations or 'metropolitan' areas were, and are, equally secretive and corrupt — although not always criminally so. The most shameful examples of this have been those cities in which promiz nent Labour politicians have been involved in property businesses which deal with those parts of the city knocked down for 'development'. This strange alliance of Labour politicians and businessmen, especially property dealers, may not be illegal but it is undesirable. But thanks to the security that protects our new local authorities, little or nothing of such plans ever gets into the papers. It is scarcely even discussed in open Council. And so it comes to pass that a proud city like Manchester has been defiled by the Arndale complex, the largest, most hideous and most useless building in Europe. But some people grew rich from it.
There is another form of corruption in local government that may also be perfectly legal. This is union over-manning. Thanks Partly to Heath and Walker, ten or even 100 people do jobs that used to be done by one man or woman. You can observe this at its most flagrant in Manchester. While the population of Manchester has declined over the last two years, the staff of the old Town Hall has spilled over to fill a neighbouring building. Meanwhile, a high-rise block has been put up in the vicinity to house the hundreds of staff of the Greater Manchester Council. All these _people have guaranteed jobs, with index-linked pensions; and wellpaid they are, too.
In spite of recent demands for cuts, the local government staffs have risen consistently over the last three years, including a 11 per cent rise since the Tories came to power. The two local government unions, NUPE and NALGO, have fought successfully to increase their 'perks', such as official cars. A recent report on the operations of Cheshire Council, commissioned by the CBI, received `no help' from either union.
In these local authorities, the unions and the Labour Party support each other. The unions get their jobs, and the Labour Party in turn is given the votes. Labour councils, especially in the inner cities, perpetuate themselves in office by exacting very high rates from house-owners (and possibly driving them out of the borough) in order to finance cheap housing or jobs for the rest. One London Labour gouncil, which feared that it might lose the borough at the next election, was hiring dozens of new members of staff — not for their work, but for their votes. This was told to me by a man who was offered a higher salary if he would transfer to this council. He declined, guessing quite correctly that Labour would lose the borough in any case.
In their struggle for secrecy, the Labour Party-trade union gang have found a useful ally in the National Union of Journalists. Already council officials in certain parts of the country refuse to talk to journalists who are not members of the NUJ. And it is precisely the journalists in the union who might feel afraid to write anything against the local establishment. A free-lance reporter in County Durham once told me that it would have cost him his livelihood to write the truth (which he knew) about Alderman 'Andy' Cunningham.
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