It’s boring and slow and tedious and old-fashioned to wait until you hear what someone from another party says before deciding whether or not you agree with it, isn’t it?
So hats off to those forward thinkers in Manchester Labour party who haven’t had to wait for the Budget to put down a motion for the forthcoming council meeting:
Motion – George Osborne’s Budget
Council notes the damaging impact of George Osborne’s budget on the people of Manchester.
Councillors: Leese (proposer), Karney (seconder), Priest, J Battle, N Murphy, Evans, Andrews
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18 Comments
Perhaps if Chancellors in modern times wouldn’t insist on pre-announcing and leaking almost all of their Budgets to the Newspapers and Media before delivering it to the Commons this wouldn’t happen ?
I thought Labour-run Manchester City Council wasted the money, but actually they’ve spent it on a time machine!
Do you seriously expect the clueless George Osborne to announce anything remotely sensible or fair?
In that case John, they would have used specifics. This motion is typical of the tribal behaviour of Labour in Manchester. In places like Sheffield and Birmingham, the councils have similar cuts and are not making anywhere near the levels of cuts Manchester are.
Manchester has hit the headlines over the past few weeks for all the wrong reasons. The Labour Council has been accused of making politically motivated cuts whilst axing front-line services, axing bin collections, youth centres, privatising our SureStart Centres and much more.
At the same time, the Government has revealed that the council is sitting on £108 MILLION of Council Reserves. At the same time that Labour were voting to slash our services, our Chief Executive was on Council Business in the luxury holiday resort of Cannes. At the same time Labour Councillors voted to decimate front-line services – they were voting to keep the Labour Council Leader’s luxury chauffeur driven car and driver and to keep a £200,000, one-day parade in the City Centre.
They should be cut backs…
Thanks to government leaks we know pretty much everything that’s going to be in the budget tomorrow – the New Politics, don’t you just love it!
I hold no brief fo Labour or Manchester council Dave.
They will have to face their electorate soon enough with what they have done.
I’m pointing out that every modern Chancellor does this including Brown even back to Lamont and beyond.
It’s hard to deny Osbourne’s have been leaked since details about enterprise zones and the possible amalgamation of NI and income tax have been plastered across the media for days.
It would just be nice if the Commons was given primacy again insead of turning every Budget into an orgy of spin, pre-spin and counter spin.
As for bemoaning tribal behaviour, that would carry far more weight if you didn’t decry it in such tribal terms yourself.
A few people have said this already, so I’ll say it in a different way.
It’s soooooo old fashioned to attack the Labour Party (don’t you just love plural politics) to defend the Tory Party when every single man, woman and child in the Country knows what Gideon’s going to do – because he’s leaked 98% of his budget.
New Politics = Old Politics.
Who’s defending the Tory Party?
To table a motion opposing something which hasn’t been published yet is not acceptable.
Most of the comments are not relevant, but those relating to the leaks and suggesting therefore that we can oppose the budget already are a little unfair, as you need to know the whole budget before you oppose it.
True. It’s a fairly safe bet that Manchester’s Labour group will not like this budget. However
There seems to be a lot of triabalism leading people to make logical leaps that are untenable. Firstly, I may be wrong, but I don’t see this as someone attacking Labour. It’s merely someone having a laugh at the risible behaviour of one Labour grouping on one council.
Secondly, pointing out that a criticism is ill-thought out, silly or wrong does not logically imply that the person or thing being criticised is right. Saying it’s wrong to criticise the budget before it’s been delivered does not imply any support or otherwise of the budget.
Without defending the clearly unacceptable behaviour of the Labour-run Manchester Council that Dave outlined above, I definitely sympathise with them on this matter.
It’s clear that Osborne won’t put forward a Budget which is beneficial to the people the Councillors are meant to represent and it is bound to have a ‘damaging impact’ in some form. To me, this is simply the Council setting up the Motion early so as to avoid a long delay after the Budget since there will, I’m sure, be plenty of damage for them to discuss at their meeting.
The Lib Dems may be in coalition with Osborne etc., but that does not mean that we should deride anyone who disagrees with the policies/Budgets put forward and use any excuse to attack them, in this case the pre-emptive thinking of an opposing Council, and in the past denouncing anyone who disagrees with the Tuition Fees policy as not understanding the facts. If we wish to be credible, should we not listen to what opposing groups have to say? And since, as yet, Manchester Council haven’t actually discussed it, and the only comment made here is that it will be damaging to them, there is surely no argument to disagree with at this time.
But Ciaran, they are not being attacked for criticising the budget, in fact they’re not being attacked at all.
They’re being sniggered at for being premature. That’s all that’s happening.
Rankersbo, my comments referred to Henry’s message, which I certainly saw as attacking the decision.
It kind of turned into a rant, but heh.
It was an interesting Budget. And yes I was attacking the decision, but not them personally obviously!
I agree with not deriding everyone who disagrees, hell, I’ve been fairly vocal in my disagreements over some policies in the past… But this does seem a little silly on the councillors’ parts to oppose something before it happens. And as it happens, there were some genuinely interesting things in the Budget which perhaps deserved a little more than ‘we oppose it’.
Dave Hennigan accusing Labour of tribal behaviour – pot, kettle black I’d say
As the saying goes what Manchester does today the world does tomorrow.
Perhaps Mark should also note that it is also old fashioned not to leak/brief the content of the budgets beforehand either, Was their a single major policy in the the budget that we didn’t know about beforehand.
Toryboys: If you followed me on Twitter you’d know that I did indeed note that 🙂