STAND-OFF – there is no other term to describe what unfolded over more than four-and-a-half hours at Southport Town Hall on Thursday night.
Today, Sefton Council is without a leader and with three of the nine seats on its ruling cabinet unfilled.
The number of cabinet seats was 10 before Thursday – and the authority's leader to that point, Cllr Tony Robertson, said he was only informed of a Labour move to effectively axe the performance post at 3pm previously. (The job has been suspended, pending a review of cabinet portfolios.) Conservative councillors – barring three abstentions - voted for the key Labour amendment targeted against the Lib Dems.
The rub was not over the cabinet position per se – the Lib Dem leadership made it quite clear they would be prepared to go down to a seven-member cabinet. The rub – as far as Cllrs Dowd and Parry were concerned – was not over the leadership. Both said they accepted the Lib Dems’ entitlement to the top job, as Sefton's largest party group.
The crunch came over “proportionality”. Cllr Dowd explained that Lib Dems should be booted off their scrutiny chairmanships “to get this council back to scrutinising”. By statute, the political composition of committees must reflect that of the overall council. Not so for the cabinet. Cllr Dowd told the meeting that splitting its seats on a 3-3-3 split basis is proportional “to all intents and purposes”. Cllr Robertson and co disagreed vehemently.
Opposition – a term normally de rigeur in almost all political contexts except Sefton – was suddenly all the rage. Cllr Robertson and his new deputy Cllr Iain Brodie-Browne were adamant they had stepped outside the tent to become the official opposition to a pact between the two parties tearing lumps out of each other at Westminster. And Cllr Dowd – while insisting it was the duty of the Lib Dems to step back inside the tent – had already availed himself of the language of opposition. His amendment dashing a re-run of the organisational status quo called for “a report to a future meeting of the Council on the creation of two Deputy Leader posts, who shall be the leaders of the two Opposition Groups (my emphasis).” Cllr Dowd’s strident attacks on the council’s handling of selling-off its industrial estates fits seamlessly into the discourse of opposition. It was a ‘back of a fag packet assessment’ potentially undervaluing public assets by millions, he told my colleague John Siddle on the eve of unveiling his maneuver at full council. In interview with myself, Cllr Dowd admonished the Lib Dem leadership for alleged ineptitude, widening his attack to include the amount Sefton paid to buy back Marine Park (ex-Pleasureland) in 2007.
At Southport Town Hall on Thursday Cllr Dowd and his fellow Labour cabinet members Cllrs Maher and Fairclough led the attack against Sefton’s largest party over a different set of charges. They began with election leaflets, which Cllr Dowd claimed had made attacks on a Bootle-resident Labour candidate which smacked of “apartheid”. “Leaks” to the media and even Lib Dem campaigning in Cambridge ward got a mention. On the latter point, Cllr Dowd – children’s services supremo – accused Lib Dem activists of misleading residents that Kirwan House is to be closed to curtail alleged disturbances from its adolescent female residents. Cllr Dowd and his Tory and Lib Dem shadows all agreed to shut the home as it was no longer “fit for purpose” for its vulnerable residents. Cllr Parry was aggrieved over Lib Dem leaflets she said told residents she personally wanted to see an incinerator in their midst.
Naturally, rebuttals flowed from the Lib Dem ‘front bench’. Its Southport contingent especially waved Tory leaflets they deemed guilty of hypocritical campaigning – some mileage was made out of one circulated by Anthony White, setting out his push against zoning for a 650-home estate in Kew. The great wheelie bins stink of 2007 rose up again, including the - truly infamous in Lib Dem eyes - Conservative ‘lives before money’ literature which saw the light of day in some wards.
After the meeting, Cllr Robertson said in so many words he had called the bluff of Cllrs Dowd and Parry and suspected they did not think the Lib Dems would go through with their resignations. Certainly senior Lib Dems were happy to make the point they were not ‘in it for the money’ – the cabinet posts they had walked away from see their holders earn £20k+.
Of Cllrs Dowd and Parry, the former’s stamp that was the greater on proceedings. The Labour leader’s presence was massive on Thursday – he even pranged with Mayor Richard Hands over the chairing of a very heated debate. Having taken up his position only in February, a new leader was seen striving to assert his authority in a political set-up usually tailor-made to stifle such instincts, and after a spell unfortunately marked by the ill-health of his predecessor, the late Dave Martin.
Was Thursday’s maneuver Plan A or Plan B for the red-blue partnership? Was there ever any move to hatch a Tory-Labour coalition to run Sefton without the Lib Dems - a prospect Cllr Robertson was happy to hold forth on the day before the meeting and which Lib Dems say is now what Cllrs Dowd and Parry will have to go through with? Since then, a Tory councillor has reportedly said his or her party group was warned-off such an alliance [the adjective ‘unholy’ is usually attached] by higher powers in the Conservative party nationally. Yet Cllr Parry was adamant in telling reporters this had never been on the cards and the object of the exercise had been merely to rein-in Lib Dem activities deemed out-of-order.
The political reasoning of senior councillors is bound to become clearer as the situation unfolds this week. Thursday will see both a cabinet and annual council meeting. But once a breakthrough to this impasse comes, there are bound to be winners and losers – the current positions of the Lib Dems and Labour/Conservatives are irreconcilable. One side must blink first.
At this juncture, readers, I'd be grateful for your tips on how this might develop and your thoughts on what has been dubbed the shattering of consensus politics in Sefton.
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