Birmingham Labour's talent for talking rubbish

Jul 11 2008 by Paul Dale

Unfortunately, I could not attend last week’s Birmingham City Council meeting. Well, you can only have so much of a good thing.

I am indebted, therefore, to my colleague Rhona Ganguly for reporting details of a debate in which Labour councillors Kath Hartley and Marj Bridle attempted to pour scorn on the council’s record for recycling.

In some ways it was just as well I was not there – for it is always viewed as bad form when members of the press collapse with hysterical laughter – but if Labour is now relying on its own version of Laurel and Hardy to attack the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition, it is time to pack up and go home.

There are many things that Labour could criticise the coalition for, if party hacks could be bothered to do their homework, but recycling is most definitely not one of the areas where those that now control the council could be said to have failed to deliver.

Indeed, as Hartley and Bridle blundered merrily along, it must have become clear to the deeper-thinking Labour backbenchers – those not trusted by Sir Albert Bore to speak in the chamber – that their own party’s dismal failure to get to grips with recycling might be used as a stick with which to beat them.

Labour’s record between 1999 and 2004, when the coalition took over, was worse than woeful. It was non-existent.

A target to recycle 25 per cent of household rubbish was reduced by Labour in 1997 – to 17 per cent by 2004. Before 1999 the recycling target had been a mere five per cent, reflecting both Labour’s lack of ambition for Birmingham and failure to realise the growing importance of environmental issues.

When the coalition took control in June 2004, there were no kerbside recycling collections even though the council had been under Government pressure for many months to introduce a service. One of the first decisions taken by Len Gregory, the Conservative cabinet member for transportation, was to invest £500,000 on a pilot project to collect green waste – the precursor of what was to become a highly successful city-wide service.

The council is now close to meeting a Government target to recycle 30 per cent of household waste by 2010 and is already one of only six local authorities in the country recycling more than it sends to landfill sites.

Hartley and Bridle may know very little about recycling. But they are experts on rubbish.

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Have the brutalists had their day?

Margaret Hodge, the Culture Minister, who must decide whether Birmingham Central Library and the NatWest Tower in Colmore Row are architectural masterpieces worth saving, has decided against preserving the run-down Robin Hood Gardens housing estate in London.

Luminaries of the design world, including Lord Rogers and Lord Foster, wanted the brutalist concrete monstrosity saved for the nation, but Mrs Hodge said no.

Rogers, whose Partnership designed the Brum library-that-never-was at Eastside, even compared Robin Hood Gardens to Bath’s “great Georgian crescents” and said it was as good as if not better than any other modern British building. Better, even, than the NatWest Tower, one assumes?

English Heritage, meanwhile, which has recommended listing the Central Library and is considering its position on the NatWest Tower, is letting it be known privately that it expects Mrs Hodge to decide that neither building is worthy of special recognition.

Iron Angle confidently expects Mrs Hodge to do likewise, and pretty pronto too.

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If, as seems likely, Deirdre Alden is successful at the next General Election and becomes Edgbaston’s first Conservative MP since the legendary Dame Jill Knight, the moral well-being of her constituents will be in good hands.

Deirdre, who is a city councillor, felt moved to write to Birmingham planning committee commenting on a proposal to build 50 flats for student nurses and junior doctors on the site of the former Golden Cross pub in Harborne.

What was she worried about? Could it have been over-development, or increased traffic on local roads?

No, Deirdre wished to express her concern about young doctors and nurses living together in close proximity.

Ohhhh, Matron!