Iron Angle: And the city council band band plays on
Rather in the manner of the band playing on almost until the moment the Titanic slipped under the icy waves, Birmingham City Council’s cabinet is doing its best to pretend that everything is as normal.
The council has issued potential redundancy notices to 26,000 employees, may be planning to hive off services left right and centre to the private sector, but you would never realise anything was remotely amiss if you attended a cabinet meeting.
This week’s session was particularly jovial, enlivened by deputy Labour leader Ian Ward’s astonishing revelation that he had enjoyed “considerable dealings” with the Birmingham City Women’s Football Team, although that would of course have been in the dim and distant past when Labour ran the city.
Not to be outdone in the hilarity stakes, Tory cabinet member for equalities and human resources, Alan Rudge, confessed that he had a liking for women’s rugby teams. This was the first laugh achieved by Rudge, not renowned for light-hearted patter, in six years spent sitting around the cabinet table.
Judging by the paucity of the agenda, the meeting ought to have been over within 30 minutes. It actually went on for 90 minutes because members had so much good news to impart.
Most of the good news, however, turned out to be pretty routine stuff that all councils do. Only here in Birmingham could it be spun and dressed up as extraordinary progress.
Some schools are to be given new classrooms so that they can teach A-level students. Quite simply a marvellous boost for the local community, intoned children, young people and families cabinet member Les Lawrence.
This led to an emotional anecdote from local services cabinet member Ayoub Khan, a Liberal Democrat councillor for Aston, who told his colleagues how as a boy he had to get up at about four o’clock in the morning to walk half way across Birmingham to go to school because it was impossible to sit A-levels in Aston.
Even under these trying circumstances, the young Khan had an impressive 99 per cent attendance record, only once failing to get to school when he was “quite seriously ill”.
Cabinet housing member John Lines doesn’t really do funny, or self-promotion, so he risked bringing the meeting back to normality by drawing attention to Birmingham’s fast-growing homelessness scandal.
With applications for emergency accommodation running at more than 700 a month, the council is finding it difficult to cope.
