Iron Angle: The big screen test
Following the staggering success of the General Election leaders’ debate, and the almost universal acknowledgment that live verbal fisticuffs between Brown, Cameron and Clegg is just about the most exciting thing ever to happen in British politics since John Prescott punched somebody on the nose, it can only be a matter of time before Birmingham City Council organises its own televised debate.
Think how the city elections on May 6 could be enlivened by live TV showdowns featuring Tory council leader Mike Whitby, his deputy and Liberal Democrat leader Paul Tilsley and Sir Albert Bore, leader of the Labour group.
The perfect place to show such a mouth-watering encounter would be the Big Screen in Victoria Square, a £1 million-plus monument to public sector incompetence and political showboating.
Of course, the screen has never actually been switched on other than for a few trial runs which ended when lawyers acting for companies with offices in Waterloo House secured an injunction to stop the unwarranted noise.
But it is fast coming up to the three-year anniversary of siting the screen opposite the Town Hall – it simply had to go there, you see, in order to make sure the backdrop at New Year’s and other major public events featured the Council House, presumably with Whitby and Tilsley grinning like maniacs from the balcony.
If they’d put it in Centenary Square or down by the Bullring, as common sense dictated, the screen would have been spewing out sporting events and mindless public information programmes to passers by for months and the council wouldn’t have wasted £1 million.
Yes, I know this hasn’t got much to do with the Great Debate but every time I walk through the square, which is about three or four times a week, I get to thinking about the really important things a million pounds could have been spent on, like recruiting and training social workers for instance.
Naturally, we all know the Birmingham leaders’ debate is never going to take place, at least not live and not without easy, patsy questions being submitted in advance by a friendly journalist.
If it did go ahead, though, our council leaders would have to sharpen their acts if the media microscope focused on the efforts of Brown, Cameron and Clegg is anything to go by.
Mike Whitby, prone to mix up his words and metaphors, wouldn’t get away with the type of patronising comment he delivered at this week’s cabinet meeting. Asked about loss-making council golf courses, Whitby said it was important that “poor people” using our courses should enjoy the same experience as golfers at private clubs.
Sir Albert Bore, meanwhile, would have to stop repeating every sentence three times and forget about an unusual fascination with “process”, lest anyone watching gets the impression that he is a bit of a, well, bore.
Surely the most fun could be had with Liberal Democrat leader Paul Tilsley, whose unreconstructed 1980s macho hardman image does indeed paint him as Brum’s answer to Prescott, although a rather more thin-skinned version.
Tilsley is fond of dishing it out, recently comparing Labour councillor Marj Bridle to a jet engine – “what’s the difference? When you turn the engine off it stops whining”.
He regularly claims to be inviting under-performing cabinet members and council officers to his room for “a little chat”, although his face at cabinet was a picture when Lib Dem scrutiny chief Alistair Dow laid into the failure of Tilsley’s pet business transformation project to deliver promised savings. Coun Dow, I imagine, will soon be invited to join Tilsley for a frank exchange of views.
Then there was the famed Biztv interview with Tilsley four years ago which was pulled and never screened after the deputy council leader suggested the people of the Elan Valley in Wales should have been grateful to Birmingham for flooding hundreds of acres of pasture land to build the city’s reservoirs.
Let’s not worry about all that, though, since the Lib Dems appear to be on a bit of a roll at the moment thanks to the Clegg effect. Come May 7 we can expect to be blasted with hot air by Tilsley and his colleagues when support nationally for the Lib Dems is not reflected in the number of parliamentary seats won thanks to the unfair first past the post voting system.
They have a valid point, the system is unfair and only worked reasonably effectively when Labour and the Conservatives dominated politics.
Strangely though, Coun Tilsley’s commitment to proportional representation went missing when a majority of Brummies taking part in a consultative ballot voted in favour of one of two forms of elected mayor.
He and Whitby simply ignored the result, claiming that we don’t organise elections that way in this country. We don’t have debates, either.
