Iron Angle: Mayoral poll – eventually
Oh, to have been a fly on the wall in the office of city council leader Mike Whitby when it finally dawned on his two youthful assistants, the Andrews Sisters (cabinet officers Andrew Dunbar and Andrew Holdsworth), that the Government is indeed serious about requiring Birmingham to have an elected mayor in 2012.
You’d have thought, what with Whitby being the second most important Conservative local government figure in the country after Boris Johnson, that the party machine might have kept him in the loop.
The way things turned out, just as Whitby was packing his bags to return from a three-week sojourn in the West Indies, spin doctors close to David Cameron were making it clear that the Prime Minister has a cunning plan to make sure that Birmingham and other major English cities replace the council leader and cabinet system with a directly elected mayor.
Before the General Election the accepted Tory line was that Birmingham would only get a mayor if that was the wish of the people as expressed in a referendum. That turned out to be a matter of not frightening the horses.
The timing for such a poll was never explicitly explained. Most politicians, including Whitby, naturally thought that the referendum would come before the first mayoral election. Otherwise, how on earth could you know whether a majority of electors wanted to dump the leader and cabinet system?
The mood music from Westminster has changed dramatically in the past few days. All that Ministers will say now is that Birmingham WILL have an election for a mayor in May 2012 and there will be a “confirmatory referendum”. No one is prepared to speculate on when this referendum will be held, although the nods and winks coming from Downing Street do nothing to shoot down a suggestion that Birmingham’s 750,000 electors will be asked to give their backing to continuing with a mayoral system at some stage after 2012 when the first mayor can be judged on his or her record.
And who ever accused Cameron of lacking the necessary steel to deliver radical change? Having a confirmatory vote after you have put something in place rather smacks of the sort of jiggery-pokery employed by former Iron Curtain countries to give the impression of a groundswell of popular support for some government measure.
And yet, the signs were there last year when the Conservative leader made clear his passionate belief in big-city mayors to newspapers up and down the country. But he always successfully dodged an obvious question from journalists: how on earth will you be able to convince enough people to take part in a referendum and vote for switching to a mayoral system?
Where, then, does this leave Whitby, whose opposition to elected mayors is well documented?
