Surrey County Conservatives

Union support for Brown’s left-hand man overrides views of Labour Party Members (29th September)

Labour’s new Leader has a credibility gap

Andrew Povey, Leader of Surrey County Council, has commented on the installation of Ed Miliband as Leader of the Labour Party.

“Whilst I congratulate Ed Miliband on his election as Leader of the Labour Party it must feel slightly odd for him knowing that the majority of Labour members and Labour MPs voted for someone else. It is also a source of some considerable surprise to me that Labour’s new Leader is someone who was very close to Gordon Brown and who has yet to properly acknowledge Labour’s disastrous economic legacy. As Sayeeda Warsi has said;

‘From advising Gordon Brown in the Treasury in the 90s, to serving in his Cabinet in the 2000s, he must recognise his central role in creating the financial mess we’re all paying for’.

More than that, however, he has yet to apologise for the role that he and his colleagues played in the appalling treatment of local government, and particularly local government in Surrey. Labour transformed the Audit Commission into a body that assessed local authorities on their ability to implement Labour policies, ring-fenced grants in an attempt to ensure that councils not following Labour policies suffered further and skewed the funding settlement such that residents represented by those authorities that have traditionally enjoyed a strong majority of non-Labour councillors suffered greatly.

It is surely no coincidence that Surrey, with its strong record of voting for Conservative councillors, is currently the worst funded shire county”.

Tim Hall, Cabinet Member for Change & Efficiency, added, “Labour in government didn’t understand that local government is at its best when it is local, and as Ed Miliband himself has recognised, over the previous 13 years Labour exhibited ‘an attitude which has looked down its nose at local government’. It will take more than a throw-away line in one speech to convince local authorities that Labour’s guiding principles no longer remain those of centralisation and standardisation”.

Denise Saliagopoulos, Cabinet Member for Community Services and the 2012 Games contrasted Labour’s approach with the new attitude to local government displayed by Eric Pickles, “In just a few short months we have seen, amongst other things, a dramatic scaling back of ring-fenced grants, the announcement that local Standards Committees and the Standards Board will be abolished and the announcement that local authorities will no longer be prevented from selling energy to the national grid – all of which Labour could have done over the previous 13 years, and none of which they delivered.

Labour’s record on local government remains a very bad one and stands in stark contrast to Eric Pickles’ continual freeing up of local government from interference from the centre ”.