I've got a temporary library card, and I know how to use it...

As a child, I was an avid reader of books. I spent much of the summer of, I think, 1971, in the library at Notting Hill Gate, ploughing through the "Thomas the Tank Engine" series. And I still enjoy reading, assuming that I can carve out the time to do so.

But you know how it is. There's so much information, news and stuff on the internet, and it's all in the palm of your hand. And so, I spend too much time online and not enough doing the panoply of other things that I could occupy myself with.

But I can't entirely believe that this is good for me, and the internet is often a bit "short attention span", whereas a book allows an idea, plot or story to be extended, developed. And so, I found myself in the Ipswich County Library in Northgate Street yesterday afternoon, signing up for a library card.

In Creeting St Peter, we did have a library of sorts, the Mobile Library, which came to the village every fortnight at 11.45 a.m. on a Friday. Not terribly convenient for those, like me, with jobs, and if you wanted something other than the obviously limited range that a medium-sized bus could hold, you had to order it in advance and hope that they could get it onto the bus in time. Alternatively, you could travel into Stowmarket and use the library there, but I wasn't often in the town, and you really need to return books on time - are you really going to make a special trip to do that?

However, the library is now a gentle eight-minute walk away, and it's open seven days a week, so taking books out is not only viable, it's very easy. Getting a temporary borrower card was the only immediate option, as I apparently need proof of my address to obtain the full range of services (note to self, find something with both my name and address on it...). But it did allow me to borrow up to three books immediately so, I thought, let's make a start.

Accordingly, I drew out two books, "Nation" by Terry Pratchett and "Borderland: A Journey Through the History of Ukraine" by Anna Reid and took them back to the desk to be recorded and stamped out with a date stamp redolent of my days as a Senior Library Prefect at Kingsbury High School.

I've got until 12 October to return them so, if you'll excuse me...

A manifesto for Suffolk - talking about an evolution?

Whilst in Brighton, I found myself volunteering to help with the Suffolk County Co-ordinating Committee, a sinister group of Liberal Democrats working to elect more Liberal Democrats across Suffolk.

Now, in fairness, I've been there before, and it wasn't exactly the most exciting thing that I've ever done. But all good people should rally around the flag, and I've become a bit better at political strategy (you'd like to think so after all these years, wouldn't you?). Besides, you really can't just stand back and leave others to do the hard yards.

And so, I've spent part of an evening talked about a manifesto for next year's County Council elections. Unsurprisingly, you won't find any details here, because the drafting process is still at an early stage, and it's not going to be imposed upon our campaigners and activists without some consultation.

That said, there will be some obvious key elements. The Party nationally has outlined some key priorities, and you'd reasonably expect us to major on those in Suffolk, plus there are a number of challenges that face shire counties across the piece, especially that of finance.

It's going to be an interesting set of elections in Suffolk. Labour, who have generally been weak outside of the key towns, will now doubtless feel obliged to fight rural divisions, whilst the Greens will be ambitious to expand their influence beyond Mid Suffolk and the Waveney Valley and Reform will be something of a joker given their current lack of organisation and structure. The Conservatives have it all to lose, but in an atomised electorate, seats may well be won with relatively low percentages of the vote.

Our task, if you like, will be to find the space to make our presence felt amongst the hubbub of competing voices. How ready we are for the challenge is something that I hope to find out, having rather kept out of local Liberal Democrat politics in recent years.

Suffolk Local Government reform - it’s like deja vu all over again…

The news that an incoming government has decided to cancel the proposed devolution deal for Suffolk is not entirely a surprise. After all, we’ve been here before…

In 2009, a rather rushed attempt at creating Unitary Authorities ran hopelessly into the sand, partly because Hazel Blears, the then Minister, couldn’t stick to a consistent line on what the requirements for a coherent Unitary authority might be, and partly because the then mostly Conservative-led Districts were loathe to give up their positions and powers. Having tossed the whole mess back to local politicians, the incoming Coalition government shot the whole thing down in one of its earlier decisions.

And, in a rather fine example of history repeating itself, the Conservative-proposed Devolution Plan for Suffolk has been snuffed out within weeks of the new Labour government being formed.

Now don’t get me wrong, I didn’t mourn either decision. The Unitary proposals were designed to protect Labour’s position in Ipswich, knowing that any Unitary that took in the surrounding (Conservative voting) rural hinterland made it less likely that Labour would retain control, and cynically overlooked the guidance on the optimal size of a Unitary.

But, at the time (and even then local government finances were beginning to be squeezed), a two-Unitary arrangement for Suffolk offered some genuine opportunities to reduce spending in such a way as to protect frontline services. Alas, it was not to be.

The devolution deal which emerged last year was, unsurprisingly given the people responsible for it, astonishingly low on detail and appeared to be the Suffolk equivalent of the plans for a hyperspace bypass as referred to in Douglas Adams’s “Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy”. Whenever I asked my District and County Councillors what they knew of it, there was a fair bit of head shaking - which might have reflected the fact that Creeting St Peter had carelessly elected opposition councillors - but no real information.

Eventually, the County Council deigned to offer a briefing to Town and Parish councillors, presented by the Deputy Chief Executive, Stephen Meah-Sims. Had he not evidently decided to basically read the Council website to us (and yes, I checked in real time that he was doing so), it might even have been useful. As it was, there was a great deal of “the Council could do this or that” but no detail of any value. And besides, whilst the headline numbers looked significant, when you realised that they were intended to cover a thirty year period, the value of the proposals made it look as though the local Conservatives were only to happy to sell themselves cheaply.

In terms of governance, the proposed directly-elected leader appeared designed to create gridlock, especially in the light of the then political picture. The idea of directly electing someone to lead the County Council but to have a County Council that might have a majority of opposition councillors appeared absurd and there never was an answer to the question when put.

And now it’s dead, and whilst it won’t be mourned by many - the local Conservatives are obviously outraged - there is still a challenge ahead for all concerned. The County Council is being rapidly drained of its reserves - the free reserves are currently expected to run out by the end of 2026-27 - and with adult and children’s social care costs spiralling (the Council Leader’s words, not mine) and SEND provision becoming an increasing worry, any consolidation which allows the redirecting of funds to frontline services will be welcome.

Meanwhile, the District Councils have rather healthier finances. Mid Suffolk, my old stomping ground, is financially comfortable, ironically due to a successful investment in commercial property by the previous Conservative administration. That might suggest that any enthusiasm to use the healthier District finances to bail out the services currently run by the County might not be there to be exploited.

However this story ends though, with County Council elections due next year, and the outcome, at least in Suffolk, hard to predict, whoever forms the next administration is going to have some difficult questions to answer...

Mid Suffolk Town and Parish Councillors meet

Whilst I did say that I might get a little more involved with all things Liberal Democrat - you know where to find me everyone - I do still have a few other things to do. And this evening, it was time to resume in my capacity as Chair of the Mid Suffolk branch of the Suffolk Association of Local Councils (SALC).

We've had a minor organisational reshuffle, with the original two branches, Mid Suffolk North and Mid Suffolk South, combined into one larger branch, which reduces the number of meetings and, hopefully, increases attendance. And whilst I was Chair of Mid Suffolk South, the recent resignation of my opposite number in the North had meant that I was effectively Chair of a merged group.

Tonight, I was notionally up for re-election as Chair and, whilst I was happy to continue, I wouldn't have stood in the way of anyone who really wanted the job - I'm not one to stand in the way of the ambitious. But we had guest speakers to welcome first...

Laura and Naomi from the Mid Suffolk District Council Communities team were first up, highlighting the new "Feel Good Suffolk" project, intended to help people become more physically active, give up smoking and lose weight, with a joined-up approach to help people improve their quality of life.

We then had a brisk run through what else the Communities team does to support Town and Parish Councils and local volunteer groups, including the variety of grants that are out there to support our work. I ought to acknowledge that my own Council have benefited from some of the grant opportunities available, including recent locality grants from our District Councillors, which have financed a grit bin, a Parish noticeboard and refurbishment of the Church Room, the village's only building available for community events.

Next up was Teresa from Community Action Suffolk, hoping to encourage us all to form Good Neighbour Schemes in our communities. I recall that, during the pandemic, an informal support system sprang into life helping the more vulnerable members of the community with shopping, prescriptions and the like, and whilst people might not want to be part of a formal structure, it works well in some places.

And last, but not least, Laura from Suffolk County Council explained how the DEFRA Property Flood Resilience scheme was available to make grants of up to £5,000 to help make vulnerable properties safe from potential flooding in the wake of last year's Storm Babette.

All great presentations, and I wish that we'd had a better attendance and more time to explore the opportunities available. But we had to elect new officers and, after a brief exploration of possible candidates, I was gloriously re-elected as Chair. Alright, nobody wanted to challenge me or, perhaps even more accurately, nobody else wanted the job. But, nonetheless, I have another year of glorious leadership ahead of me.

I've got two new Vice-Chairs though, in addition to my old friend, Mark Clements from Old Newton and Dagworth, James Spencer from Great Finborough and Michelle Salazar from Eye, and I'm looking forward to working with them in the coming year.

We skipped the information exchange, as it was getting on a bit, and there weren't that many of us present. It was agreed though that we should invite the three new MPs (one Conservative, one Green, one Labour) to attend a future meeting so that they might get to know us, and what we do.

And with that, I thanked everyone for coming and brought the meeting to an end. And if you're a Town or Parish Councillor in Mid Suffolk, why not join us on 5 December for our next meeting, where we are hoping to discuss community transport.

Suitably inspired, I return to Suffolk

Conference over, I’ve taken a rather leisurely route back to Suffolk, having first diverted to a quirky hotel bar to spend a few hours with the Awkward Squad, decompressing after the Leader’s Speech.

It is for others to comment on the content of Ed Davey’s speech, but the warm-up, with seventy-one MPs sweeping onto the stage (and beyond) was a powerful reminder of what the Party achieved on 4 July. And the sense of joy after so many years of pain and disappointment was quite cathartic. You might almost feel inspired to deliver the odd leaflet or two. I might even do that at some point.

But I am reminded that my particular “skill” is bureaucracy - dealing with the process stuff that, if not done, restricts the resources available to campaign and, hopefully win. If you like, helping to remove the obstacles to progress.

And whilst I don’t have many official roles, I am modestly good at connecting people to other people who might be able to help them. For example, a conversation with an old friend from Liberal Democrats Abroad, and a conveniently timed Slack message from the Chair of Federal Council, has offered an opportunity to seek improvements to the Party’s technology that might help to connect Local Parties to Liberal Democrat voters and supporters overseas and allow greater involvement in candidate selections, for example.

Often, the challenge when trying to do something is as much about knowing who to talk to and how to reach them and, if I can help with the connections, it seems obvious that I should.

So, my hope is to try and be a little more engaged locally, be a bit more activist in my wider efforts and give a little more back to a Party which has, over very nearly forty years, given me rather more than I might have expected. Because, in the quest to build a better country, we all ought to be willing to make our own small contribution, even if it is an indirect one.

From Creeting St Peter to the (Liberal Democrat) world…

So, I’ve come to the Liberal Democrat Autumn Conference here in Brighton. Admittedly, that’s because I’m a Liberal Democrat, but also because I’ve got things to do.

As a member of Federal Council, it’s important to me to talk to members and find out what’s going on, but I’m also here in my new capacity as the apparently prospective new Chair of the Smaller Councils Committee of the National Association of Local Councils (NALC), talking about the importance of our sector. And given that many of our new MPs represent parished areas, we want to encourage them to work with, and preferably reach out to, the Town and Parish Councils on their patches. I’ll admit that we’d like to work with them on promoting our agenda too.

As a means of picking up issues, and of gaining local support, working with the sector gives you a door into some of the hyper-local issues that help to build support for you if you can address them. And, through Parish newsletters and social media platforms, you can expand your reach beyond overtly party political leaflets.

So, that means encouraging MPs to reach out to their County Associations, supporting town councils with advice, working with ALDC (whose responsiveness is greatly appreciated) on their upcoming event for Town and Parish councillors. And, from my perspective, ensuring that the role and scope of smaller, often non-party political, Parish Councils is not overlooked.

If you’d told me fifteen years ago that I’d be playing any sort of significant role in the world of local government’s lowest tier, I’d probably have looked at you slightly quizzically. It just goes to show what living in a small village can do for you…

That’ll teach me to move a bit faster…

Much of my political “career” has come about for one of three main reasons;

• I was the slowest person in the room to say “no”
• It was a job that nobody else much fancied
• I was in the right spot at the right time

I ought not to complain in truth, after all, I’ve had opportunities that most people don’t get, I’ve travelled the world and I’ve probably done some good along the way. And, something that does perplex me, a surprising number of people have gained the idea that I might be vaguely capable.

Now I’m not getting carried away here. As a bureaucrat with a curious passion for good governance, I fill a niche which is not always well populated, especially in the sphere of politics - party or otherwise. Politicians generally want to decide things rather than deal with the implementation bit - that’s what civil servants and local government officers are for, right? - and even in the usually less intense town and parish council sector, councillors are sometimes keener to express their views than to follow them up with action.

And, over the years, I’ve observed a range of organisations and leadership styles, hopefully learning a little bit from each (albeit sometimes not to do it like that…) and reached the point where not only do I get to be a Chair, but people actually suggest that I might be a credible one.

This is somewhat complicated, in that I combine a fairly strong imposter complex (really, you couldn’t find someone better/more suitable?) with a lack of competitive edge (if you want it that badly, don’t let me get in your way…). At the same time, however, I hold some fairly strong views about leadership, something that some of my past managers and colleagues have discovered, occasionally painfully. I am, ultimately, more collegial than commanding, more organiser than leader.

“What has triggered this attack of introspection?”, I hear you ask. Well, I’ve been invited to put my name forward to do something, to fill a vacancy. And I’ve been given an interesting argument for taking up the offer.

Decisions, decisions…