Last week, the Western Mail carried a story in which Stephen Crabb MP, Secretary of State for Wales, is quoted as saying:
“The problem with Pembrokeshire – and I’ve been saying this for well over 10 years since I’ve been doing politics down there, is that Independent-run local authorities give you weak accountability.
“There’s a slightly old-fashioned view in some parts of Wales that Independent councils are the right thing to do – we don’t want party politics contaminating local authorities. I’d say the opposite – you need strong party political control.
“As bureaucracies have got bigger, as senior managers and particularly chief executives in local authorities have become more powerful, with huge resources at their fingertips, you need ever more stronger political control to give strategic direction to local authorities and to hold senior management to account.
“What we’ve seen in Pembrokeshire – and this isn’t a new realisation, some of us have been saying this for a long time – is that relationships were topsy-turvy down there.”
Given the current shambles in county hall, and the closeness of the General Election, it is not surprising that Mr Crabb should want to distance himself from the IPPG.
I wrote a piece about this last August, so I won’t repeat myself except to say that in the 2004 local elections the Conservatives’ contested only one of the county council’s 60 seats and in 2008 and 2012 the vast majority of their candidates were complete no-hopers whose presence on the ballot paper was nothing more than an exercise in window dressing.
And when questioned on TV shortly after the 2004 local elections about the Tory party’s poor showing in Wales, a party spokesman explained that, in rural areas, Conservatives preferred to stand as independents.
It is no coincidence that there is not a single Conservative on either Carmarthenshire or Ceredigion county councils, and only three in Pembrokeshire despite the party holding all four national seats.
So I challenge the Welsh Secretary to give us details of his public pronouncements on the subject during the last “well over ten years”.
That shouldn’t be too difficult seeing that he has been “saying this for a long time”.
I’m afraid Mr Crabb’s belated attempt to jump onto the anti-IPPG bandwagon does him no credit. In any case, he has missed the bus because Cllr Paul Miller, his main rival at next May’s election, is already in the driving seat.
And Mr Crabb might also like to explain why two card-carrying Tories (Cllrs Mark Edwards and Elwyn Morse) are allowed to remain as members of the IPPG despite there being a Tory group on the council.
In Cllr Edwards’s case, it is worth noting that he was out canvassing on behalf of the IPPG’s candidate Rob Summons in the Burton bye-election, even though there was an official Tory candidate in the race.
Cllr Morse presents an even more interesting case because he actually ran against an official Conservative Party candidate at the 2012 elections. So, if Mr Crabb is so set against these fake independents, why haven’t these two been booted out for breaching party rules.
One possible, and credible, explanation is that, until recent events catapulted the issue up the political agenda, the Conservatives were quite comfortable with their supporters seizing power through the back door by pretending to be independents.
No doubt they are hearing on the doorstep that Cllr Miller’s campaign to have the county council run on democratic lines is going down well with the voters and they are now playing a belated, and hopefully futile, game of catch-up.
Another thing that Mr Crabb might care to explain to the electorate is his support for the former Leader of the IPPG Cllr John Davies’ campaign to become the party’s candidate for the post of Police Commissioner.
It is difficult to understand why he was happy to have the man, who, for eight of “the well over ten years”, had presided over this “weak accountability”, in an important position which is supposed to give “strategic direction to local [Police] authorities and to hold senior management [Chief Constables] to account.”
I’m afraid the Tory party is largely responsible for the corrupt political culture that holds sway in PCC and no amount of last-minute fence-mending by Mr Crabb can hide the fact.
He was also asked whether Mr Parry-Jones was the sort of local authority boss who was good for Wales.
According to Western Mail the Welsh Secretary replied: “No – and it’s exactly the kind of thing that people on the ground, given everything that we’ve been through as a country in the last seven years, since [the MPs’ expenses scandal of] 2008 made people feel very, very angry.
“There is no place left for those kind of practices in the world that we need to create to secure quality public services on a sound financial footing.”
Given his own record, I would have thought the last subject Mr Crabb should be talking about is the MPs’ expenses scandal.
For readers with short memories, his own part in that affair is recorded at Flipping Hell, Flippocrite, Hard-liner and Changing places.