There was an outbreak of sweetness and light at last Thursday’s meeting of full council when the Independent Political Group and the Cabinet agreed to raise your council tax by more than 9%.
True there was a bit of give and take because the Cabinet member for finance Cllr Josh Beynon’s original idea was to stick you for 9.85%, while the IPG was pushing for 9.35% + the retention of a couple of toilets and three-weekly black bag collections. In the end they settled on the IPG’s suggestion and the cabinet remained in power.
The cabinet’s original suggestion would have raised a Band D council tax by £2.85 a week – often compared to the price of a cup of coffee.
The IPG’s 9.35% will reduce the weekly increase to £2.71, so using the coffee exchange rate, a Band D council tax payer will be able to enjoy an extra trip to Costa every 20 weeks.
Bad news for the Band A resident – not only do they have to live in more cramped accommodation but they have to wait for more than 30 weeks for their extra cuppa.
Leader Cllr Jon Harvey was proud to announce that he was taking “a pragmatic not an adversarial stance”.His objective was “to improve people’s lives”. And he went on: “I’m not driven by any political doctrine on council tax levels and I’m not interested in getting a few column inches in the local papers or social media. I quietly get on with the job.”
No platitude left unturned!
Being a fan of the UK’s adversarial political and judicial system, I find myself at odds, not for the first time, with Cllr Harvey.
And it hasn’t passed my notice that, only this week, his new “bestie”, Cllr Alan Dennison, the IPG’s financial guru, and architect of his party’s council tax proposal, has taken up a whole pageful of column inches in the Pembrokeshire Herald to damn the Tories with the use of the contrived acronym ‘FIB’ (don’t ask) to describe their proposals for a 7.5% increase in council tax.
And, of course, Old Grumpy is one of those reprobates who have resorted to the diabolical social media to criticise the cabinet’s budget proposals.
At least my scribblings forced the Cabinet to abandon its false claim of £110 million of “cumulative” spending cuts over the past decade.
But while we may have a marriage of convenience over the increase in council tax, there are signs of tension elsewhere, with Cllr Dennison keen to have a go at Deputy Leader Cllr Paul Miller’s “Instagrammable bridge” and Huw Murphy taking a pop at Joshua Beynon’s second job as bag-carrier for Henry Tufnell MP.
But, for a bit of gratuitous nastiness, Cllr Jamie Adams’ Notice of Motion calling for the abolition of the post of presiding member takes some beating.
This was a post created four or five years ago to separate the chairing of council meetings from the chairman’s civic duties – what is often referred to as the rubber-chicken-dinner circuit.
Council meetings can be long and complex and some of us felt it would be better to have a specialist in the chair rather than whoever was the latest member to fancy a year hawking the chain round the county, cutting ribbons and expanding their waistline by tucking into an unlimited supply of the aforementioned rubber chickens.
For one thing, whoever presides over these meetings should have a sound grasp of the constitution, because there are certain members who will seek to confuse matters with all manner of amendments, motions without notice, points of order and other procedural trickery, and not all chairmen in the past can be said to have demonstrated a mastery of this aspect of the job.
There are only six council meetings a year – not enough for a chairman to play themselves in – and the thinking was that having an experienced multi-year practitioner in charge would promote the efficient conduct of the council’s business.
My own view would be that this experiment has been a success with first Cllr Pat Davies and, more recently, Cllr Simon Hancock ensuring that meetings are chaired in an even-handed manner in keeping with the best democratic principles.
Not that Cllr Hancock is entirely free of error because last week he took advantage of a hiatus in the proceedings to launch into an off-piste diatribe about biodiversity that was well outside the scope of his office.
“In 2019 this chamber declared a climate emergency”, he exclaimed, “and there is a very strong argument that it should call a biodiversity emergency. Our natural world is under such immense and unprecedented pressure so we need to absolutely focus on our precious ecosystems and biodiversity, which is really struggling at the moment.”
Old Grumpy has a jaundiced view of this sort of virtue-signalling and something stirred in the back of the ancient memory, and, sure enough, when I checked through the minutes of previous meetings, I discovered that, at its meeting in October 2021, the council had signed up for a biodiversity emergency by adopting something called “The Edinburgh Declaration” which committed it to all sorts of good works in protecting the natural world.
And, joy of joys, I discovered that the proposal was seconded by the “presiding member”, who, as you’ve already guessed, was none other than the saintly Cllr Simon Hancock; protector-of-species supreme.
This virtue signalling spectacular can be witnessed on the council’s webcast website at 3 hrs 22 mins into the meeting.
To my everlasting shame, I see in the minutes that I voted for this piece of nonsense. I assume I must have had a good reason for doing so, but I’m at a loss to think of what it might have been.
If you do bother to watch, you will notice that there is talk of allocating more resources to this biodiversity caper, though I have a feeling in my water that my constituents would prefer that their council tax is spent on mending potholes, educating their children, caring for the elderly and other enterprises less glamorous than facilitating the mating behaviour of the lesser-known spotted newt.
People spout a lot of sentimental rubbish about biodiversity. There are two branches to this subject: ecology, which is a science, and environmentalism which is a quasi-religious cult. At bottom, this is a clash between Darwinian evolution and Intelligent Design.
If Cllr Hancock and his fellow environmentalists really wanted to foster biodiversity they would be campaigning to close down the council’s pest control department. After all, rats, mice and cockroaches are just as much a part of God’s creation as dormice and goldfinches.
And it might allow us to enjoy more trips to the coffee shops by shaving a few pence off our council tax.
Ecology is sometimes characterised as “the study of energy flows through biological systems” and often concentrates on the degree to which organisms depend on each other. Romantics tend to dress is up as some great cooperative enterprise, but what it really means is that all living things are something else’s lunch.
We clever humans – at least those of us in developed countries – have arranged things so that, as a rule, we only become part of the food chain after we’re dead. And we have also designed systems of pest control whereby we don’t have to share our cabbages with the caterpillars. That way we avoid such catastrophes as the Irish famine, where the blight – a perfectly ordinary fungal member of the web of life – wiped out the potato crop on which the population depended for its sustenance.
Unfortunately, these modern methods of farming require fossil fuels to power machinery and chemicals to control pests. While these practices have their drawbacks, mature reflection might convince you that they are preferable to nature red in tooth and claw and a pre-modern life expectancy of about two score years and nil.