Let’s Re-imagine Brighton & Hove City Council.

So, nine months on, how is our Labour council doing? Better than the Greens? At least Labour are committed to widening public engagement right? I would say an emphatic wrong!   

As the party political carousel moves from Red to Green to Red (and, for all we know, back to Green again in 2027 – or sooner!), no-one can really blame residents for ignoring local elections. Add this to the spectre of an elite layer of senior council executives who are, arguably, the individuals behind the wheel of every city department (with councillors taking backseat like kids playing and squabbling) and maybe we can console ourselves that at least executive ma and pa know where they’re going …. Right? Again I would say an emphatic wrong!          

Ever get the feeling you’ve been cheated?

In Brighton & Hove’s May elections, 40 percent of the electorate made it to the polling stations and gave Labour 38 out of the 54 seats available (the city has 204,255 residents registered to vote). It was a Labour landslide that sent more than a few Labour newbies into a panic (oh no! I’ve been elected). Those of us who fought the election as candidates for Brighton & Hove Independents sensed what was happening in the minds of voters. Yes, the Greens needed to be sent packing but it was the need to send a message to the universally disliked Tory train-wreck of a government that rocked the vote. And so the Green administration went from 20 to 7 seats, Labour went from 16 to 38. On election night, even before the final result had been announced, a new Labour leader was crowned. It is said that a gathering of victorious councillors (including some extremely young and starry eyed) squeezed into a side-room of the Brighton Centre to anoint Bella Sankey as their new leader.

Back in the town, the morning after election night achieved excitement levels of around zero amongst the 120,000 or so citizens of B&H who didn’t vote (many of whom neither knew nor cared that there’d been a frenzied effort to wheel the council back from Green to Red). I doubt more than a handful of Labour voters – most doing their bit to assist the ‘Tories are toast’ war-effort – had ever heard of Bella Sankey. Think about it – around 39,000 citizens eligible to vote – out of an electorate of 204,255 – cast their vote for a Labour candidate. Picture the scene in Queens Park ward ‘we need to vote Labour!’, ‘but who is Tristram Burden?’ (never heard of him), ‘who is Chandni Mistry?’ (never heard of her), ‘its okay, it doesn’t matter, just tick the box! only good will come of it!’.

But let’s be fair to the 39,000 who voted Labour. Almost one year on, we might imagine all but a few Labour die-hards are absolutely feeling like they’ve been cheated. They certainly do in Queens Park, where no-one seems to know what happened to the 19 year Chandni who won her seat with 1700 votes only to be expelled by the Labour Party in December along with Cllr Gajjar in Kemptown. 

Assuming the public know or care about these matters, voters and non-voters alike (and let’s face it many have bigger problems to attend to), look on in a state of bemused resignation – a mixture of shock and ‘reality check’. What were we thinking!  Exactly how many rounds of Green/Labour musical chairs do we need for the penny to drop? As Julie Burchill wearily commented: “It’s like there’s an ongoing competition between the Greens and Labour to see who can finish off B&H in the shortest time”. In Sankey’s race to the bottom, it started well. The first dog out of the Labour traps appeared to be heading for a ‘review’ of the Green insanity that regarded ripping out the roundabout opposite Palace Pier a thoroughly good idea. Good! we thought, Sankey’s team have finally twigged that the Valley Gardens Forum campaigners were not car loving lizards who love pollution but rather a savvy group of residents and traders who had noticed how the council’s own consultants were warning that replacing the roundabout with traffic lights will cause unspecified years of “journey disbenefits” (that’s traffic in plain English). Luckily (we thought), Labour have understood that the wide-eyed Green belief that “traffic evaporation” (plain English = when everyone gives up driving in despair) will vaporise the local economy too. No such luck. With Labour’s announcement in January that the final phase of the Valley Gardens phase 3 project will go ahead as planned, policy greyhound #1 raced to the finish line just as the officer elite required.

The second policy-dog was released out of the traps by Sankey herself. This concerned the threat posed by extreme gender identity theory to pupil safeguarding in schools. Our questions seeking reassurance on this (that is, questions submitted to the first full council in July by Bev Barstow and myself) were either ignored or responded to with Sankey’s notorious accusation of “baseless smears”. Brighton & Hove News readers can make their own minds up about this controversy by recalling Frank Le Duc’s even-handed reporting in an October article. Suffice to say that, once again, the ideological zeal of our local political class is startling. At the risk of exhausting our greyhound metaphor or stating the obvious, the rabbit ‘lure’ is, of course, carefully set in motion by our ideologues-in-chief, the executive-elite. It’s less a race course metaphor than an XL Bully on the loose because this salivating dog isn’t nearly finished yet.

At the October 19th Full Council resident Kay Lyons was, without warning, physically ejected from the council chamber midway through a question to Sankey. Instructed by the Mayor in the Chair to stop reading, Kay had continued with her question. Apparently, this question (which was the brief follow-up the pesky public are allowed) had not been “relevant” to the first. Some observers would contend, however, that the rampaging dog entered the chamber that day, precisely at the moment Kay Lyons uttered the words “child protection”. The follow-up had begun with “As outlined in my first question, more space for public engagement will give vital expression to widely held views and serious concerns which the council seem oblivious to”. The ‘child protection’ example she then tried to give (presumably as a preamble to the ‘not relevant’ question she didn’t get a chance to ask) was never heard because a senior officer switched off her mic. On the webcast we just about hear “… I believe Brighton & Hove City Council have been acting illegally in promoting extreme gender ideology in schools ..”. The proceedings immediately descend into a serious of interruptions from the Mayor and the eventual ejection of Kay by security men as a sizeable group of councillors laughed. Of course, the council will argue that the unprecedented manhandling and ejection of a woman as she tried to complete her question was nothing to do with the issue she was trying to raise (rather, it was based on a rule that says the second question must be relevant to the first). We gather she has complained on the basis that she hadn’t had a chance to ask her question, but the council has rejected her complaint. But if anyone is in doubt about the council’s attitude toward those who dare to question gender ideology in its schools, Sankey was on hand to describe Kay Lyons as “aggressive”; a person with an “agenda” making a “protest” that in some way (Sankey did not explain), threatened “our precious trans kids”.

On Monday evening January 29^th, fellow Brighton & Hove Independent party member Bev Barstow and I attended the third in Bella Sankey’s ‘Re-imagine Brighton and Hove’ public engagement events – this time on the subject of ‘how we can make Brighton & Hove a safer city for women and girls’. When a council senior officer (the Assistant Director for Policy & Communications no less) saw the content of a leaflet that had been passed around she set about confiscating it – including snatching it from the publics hands. Because the leaflet, written by a survivor of sexual violence unable to attend, had raised the issue of single sex counselling services, the officer condemned it as “offensive”. Labour councillors at the event dutifully backed up the official ruling that this survivor’s desire for women-only services was transphobic. The BHCC message is truly chilling: rape survivors who don’t want men in women-only spaces are bigots. You can read about this incident in Jo Wadsworth’s report here.

Before being physically ejected from October’s full council as a result of her follow-up comments, Kay Lyons’s first question had asked, “In the light of Cllr Sankey’s commitment to widen public participation will she agree to either monthly full council meetings or a new, radical and additional forum for direct democratic engagement?”. Pleased with Kay’s question, Sankey chose this moment to announce ‘Re-imagine Brighton & Hove’. This initiative would, Sankey assured Kay, “set up regular public forums for direct democratic engagement similar, I think, to the type you foresee …”.  Yet from the very first of these events, held in November (on the scourge of tagging), ‘Re-imagine Brighton & Hove’ deployed the PR methods favoured by city developers. Maxine Horn from the group BRAT (Business and Residents Against Tagging) went along expecting the council to finally present for discussion its strategy for combatting the problem. “Instead, it was a pens and sticky note workshop, stage managed, themes pre-determined”, Maxine told us, “table by table controlled feedback ate into the session leaving the minimum time for open questions”.

Whichever method we use to try and engage with our council we sure as heck know it when the questions we ask are unwelcome. So long as entirely reasonable and often extremely well-informed and well-argued public concern is treated this way, any claim that this administration is committed to widening public engagement is just a figment of Labour’s political imagination. We don’t need a council that treats citizens with contempt, we need a democracy… Re-imagine that!