Have a thought for Darren Grimes, the 32-year-old Reform councillor. Since becoming deputy leader of Durham County Council in May, he has been investigated more than two dozen times by his officials following complaints. Among other things, he has been accused of bringing the council into disrepute, failing to treat people with respect and not representing people with different views. Of those complaints, the vast majority have been dismissed, but a handful are still under investigation.
Darren has condemned this ‘persecution’ and he’s amended the council’s code of conduct to include clauses protecting free speech. I should declare an interest since those amendments were based on a policy the Free Speech Union drafted for Bromley Council with a councillor called Simon Fawthrop, himself subject to vexatious complaints.
But if the government has its way, things are about to get worse for mavericks such as Grimes and Fawthrop. This week, the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government unveiled plans to give local authorities ‘sweeping’ powers ‘to suspend councillors and mayors’ and ‘withhold allowances’ where their behaviour ‘falls short’. Steve Reed, the Communities Secretary, said: ‘We must clean up local politics by rooting out those who bring the system into disrepute.’
What exactly does MHCLG mean by local politicians who ‘fall short’ because they ‘bring the system into disrepute’? I’ll use three examples from the FSU’s files to answer that.
Take Onnalee Cubitt, an independent councillor in Basingstoke. In 2020, when deputy mayor, she was investigated after she objected to a £1.7 million refurbishment that would have meant stripping all the original features out of the council chamber and the mayor’s parlour. ‘The council and its collective history does not belong to us,’ she wrote in an email to colleagues. ‘Why would we want to create a utilitarian “Year Zero” space at vast expense… devoid of character and any sense of our collective past?’
Some of her fellow councillors complained that her use of the term ‘Year Zero’ was an insult to the victims of Pol Pot’s murderous regime. ‘In no way is a civic reorganisation anything like a genocide,’ said the leader of the Labour group. Absurd, obviously, since the term ‘Year Zero’ has entered the political lexicon and is commonly used to refer to a great number of things. But she still had to endure a two-month investigation.
Then there’s Maureen O’Bern, a 58-year-old employee of Labour-controlled Wigan Council, who was suspended after expressing concern on social media about a multi-million pound construction contract it had awarded to a state-owned Chinese company. ‘I’m worried about Chinese investment in our infrastructure,’ she wrote. ‘With investment, you get influence and power. I don’t want that from a totalitarian state that doesn’t respect human rights.’ She was accused of ‘bringing the council’s reputation into disrepute’, placed under investigation and then fired.
The last thing we need is to give more power to town-hall Sir Humphreys
Finally, there’s John Edwards, an independent councillor in Sandhurst, Berkshire. He was reported to the police by a Labour colleague for ‘stirring up hate’ after he asked on Facebook why 300 Afghan refugees were being housed at a local hotel when ‘many of our own veterans remain homeless’. Even though the police didn’t follow up, he was told by Bracknell Forest Council that he had a ‘case to answer’. It turned out the Afghans being offered asylum were among the 19,000 endangered by the Ministry of Defence leak. Surely that’s precisely the kind of scandal councillors should be asking questions about, yet he’s still stuck in the usual Kafka-esque nightmare.
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The Great British Schools Debate
These, then, are the councillors and council workers who deserve to be punished in the eyes of their Labour colleagues – and, presumably, Steve Reed. Things will get even worse if councils adopt the code of conduct recommended by the Local Government Association, which requires them to ‘promote equalities’.
With the FSU’s help, Onnalee was exonerated, went on to become mayor and was re-elected in 2023, while Maureen stood as an independent after losing her job and is now a Wigan councillor. John’s fate hangs in the balance, but we’re hoping for a good outcome. How will they fare under MHCLG’s tyrannical regime? To restore the reputation of local authorities, the last thing we need is to give more power to town-hall Sir Humphreys. It’s independent councillors like them, speaking truth to power, who need central government’s help.
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