I try to keep my role as a local councillor fairly limited by way of comment on the national Government - despite extremely frequent temptation. We generally have more positive stories to tell from local government instead!
But as the first session of the 59th Parliament of the United Kingdom draws to a close, I am given to observe the record of a Labour Government so irreparably detached from the reality of my residents in East Cambridgeshire as to be genuinely heartbreaking.
I got my first employed job at 16 (5 years ago). If employer NI or business rates had been higher, I surely wouldn’t have got the job. That business didn’t need me, a schoolboy washing pots and clumsily butchering cakes on £4.75 an hour. I wouldn’t have saved money at a time in my life with low expenses. I wouldn’t have bought a car, contributed to the economy, paid tax or been in a position to help my community. I’d still be desperately rewriting a CV.
Yes, party of working people, the most vulnerable workers are the first to carry the can for your reckless, short-term decisions. Conservative Mayor Paul Bristow and his team are scrabbling to create opportunities to mitigate against this failing of our youngest people, trying to give them an opportunity they deserve.
Hearing the Prime Minister say they’ve made it better simply makes me sad - they genuinely don’t know what they’ve done. They don’t know what inheritance, what debt, what difficulty and struggle they’ve left the most vulnerable in, when all they need is an opportunity to thrive.
With the closing of this Session comes the casual dismissal of 92 hereditary peers. They were the final guaranteed mediation against the wave of new, sycophantic Labour politicians, many of whom have never felt that sense of obligation to serve. (We have all felt the irrepressible cringe when listening to sickeningly out-of-touch PMQs about the proud record of ‘This Labour Government’… hear hear.)
As with all decisions taken by the Prime Minister, this action only does the first step of the thought process. Perhaps being born into a life of compulsory, lifelong, thankless and meticulous service in the heart of government might give one a better sense of duty? (God Save The King!)
That is, after all, why dependable tradition deserves our attention and respect. When it moves with us, it anchors us in the scary, changing modern world. Without it we have a little more freedom but much less direction - and then, are we really free at all?
In referring to the stopping short of the government’s thought process, I am also reminded of the imposition of inheritance tax on family farms, with selling being the only way out of the quagmire for most. On the now-sold farmland, perhaps they might build a Battery Energy Storage System, with the Government’s new presumption in favour so strong I doubt they’d refuse one in Green Park.
In watching one in my patch begrudgingly approved, I was still one of the lucky ones; soon the national scheme of delegation will strip me of my power to require a planning application to be publicly heard and decided by elected officials, not officers. Now the government will decide what matters - not local people.
And even local people will be local no more, with the imposition of a botched and centralising scheme of Local Government Reorganisation. ‘We shall empower communities’, said Labour, ‘by telling them how they will be governed!’.
Little East Cambridgeshire, where I am proud to serve in the Conservative administration, is a lesson to the country. Frozen Council Tax for 13 years, no debt at all, free parking, funding for Neighbourhood Plans to replace Labour’s cuts, millions in infrastructure investments and affordable homes. The only Council in Cambridgeshire where a majority of residents feel their Council Tax represents value for money. Over 80% fearful of being overlooked under a Reorganisation they never voted for.
Labour MPs think their decisions alter lines in reports found in the Commons Library, which then go onto their leaflets. What they actually do is systematically damage the lives of our people.
The public are starting to see Reform, the Lib Dems and the Greens for what they are too. They play on the difficulty of the situation with quick slogans and cheap shots. But promises without a genuine plan - thought out beyond the first step - are meaningless. Let us not forget that Labour promised change too.
Conservatives are doing two essential things: trusting our truly local leaders to get the job done and fight for their areas, and planning our policy in line with our values before launching it across the media and onto our leaflets. Kemi is turning us around - the whole country is starting to see it.
It hurts to see how careless the Starmer Government is with the everyday lives of the people in East Cambridgeshire. But at least his election gave us the opportunity to stop, reset, and come back fighting for the millions of people Labour have shamelessly left behind.
COUNCILLOR LUCIUS VELLACOTT
Soham South and Wicken Ward, East Cambridgeshire District Council
Skills Scrutiny Lead for Cambridgeshire and Peterborough
