Making a monkey out of Labour

FIVE years ago, almost to the night, I was sitting in Trimdon club watching the Tories topple as the local MP, Tony Blair, led Labour to an overwhelming historic victory.

One year ago, again almost to the night, I was watching in an altogether different atmosphere - very subdued compared to the electrifying excitement of 1997 - as Mr Blair won a second historic victory.

And then, last night, it was my allotted task to try to make sense of a third hugely historic victory in the North-East within five years: a monkey wins election as mayor in Hartlepool.

Does a monkey make a mockery of local government? Is this a sign of a deep-seated disaffection with Britain's self-serving political parties? You would, surely, only vote monkey if Labour, the Conservatives and the LibDems had absolutely nothing to offer you.

Does it show the contempt people feel for their powerless local councils? After all, surely you wouldn't let a monkey even run a swingboat stall at a fair, letalone anything that really mattered.

And what does it tell us about these new-style mayors? Surely if a monkey can make it, any Tom, Dick or Raymond can suddenly find themselves voted into power.

Or is this purely a local matter, just a strange happening in Hartlepool?

Certainly councils have been emasculated in recent years under first the Tories and now Labour. Their powers over education and health have been passed to unelected quangos. Even though one of H'Angus' key policies was to put more police on the street, he will have no power over Cleveland Police Authority to fulfil his pledge.

It appears to the public that all local councils do is empty the bins, tinker with vague subjects like economic regeneration, and put on pretty floral displays.

They have also lost their connection to local taxpayers' pockets. Although there has been immense squealing recently in the North-East about the size of the council tax rise, only three per cent of tax is raised in this way. The other 97 per cent is taken directly by the Treasury, so whichever way you vote at local elections it will make only a few pointless pennies difference in your pocket.

To try and re-connect the pockets with the councillors, the Tories are currently considering giving councils the power to set local VAT rates. The cost of your councillors would then be abundantly clear in your high street shops.

All of this, though, only explains the traditionally low turnout in local elections. Across the country last night, politicians were pleased that turnout had risen to slightly over 30 per cent - the vast majority of people were still turned off.

Certainly there is disaffection with all the political parties, but this does not mean that H'Angus was purely a protest vote. He did have some appealing policies beyond his gimmicky bananas for schoolchildren (not a bad idea, actually, according to nutritionalists). His campaign to save the Friarage sports centre on the Headlands has appealed in particular to younger people. It would be wrong, and unfair, to consider that he is a banana short of a full hand.

So is this the end of the directly-elected mayors experiment? It was designed to reinvigorate local democracy but, after such an embarrassing first attempt - with a possible Ray Mallon victory in Middlesbrough to come at around midday today - it is highly unlikely that we will see anymore. Indeed, in the run-up to last October's "democracy day" when six North-East councils put the mayoral idea to their people in a referendum, there was pressure applied from Westminster on other councils, notably centrepiece councils like Newcastle, to urge them to follow suit. However, in the last couple of months, as Mallon's bandwagon has rolled and H'Angus the Monkey has emerged out of nowhere, that pressure has disappeared.

Mr Blair was said to be personally responsible for the idea, partly because he is seen as lukewarm towards regional government and this was a way of avoiding it. H'Angus, though, has surely killed it off, and now attention turns to the White Paper on May 9 to see whether its designs for regional assemblies can re-connect people with their local government.

The directly-elected mayors experiment does not appear to have reinvigorated local democracy because the turnout in Hartlepool was just 30 per cent. In Middlesbrough today it is expected to be around 44 per cent which, considering Middlesbrough is an all postal vote which elsewhere has added 28 per cent to turnout figures, is pretty unexceptional.

So what does this tell us about Hartlepool? This, surely, is the key to last night's extraordinary scenes in the town. Elsewhere in the North-East, Labour did well - but Hartlepool was the exception. So what's wrong with Labour in Hartlepool? It should be part of the traditional North-East heartland, but the council is run by a LibDem/Conservative alliance, Labour having lost it after 22 years in May 2000.

The rapid churn of Labour leaders - three in three years in the late 1990s - shows the discontent within the local party. One of the reasons businessman Leo Gillen was selected as the party's candidate for mayor was that he was distanced from the local, discredited hierarchy.

Should Mr Mallon win in Middlesbrough today, or run Sylvia Connolly close, it too will be an exception and point to a malaise within the local Labour party. In Middlesbrough, Labour is inextricably linked to the mess that is Operation Lancet.

Another of last night's stranger results was Labour's loss of Norwich - for the first time since the 1920s - which was also for peculiarly local reasons. Norwich council, it will be remembered, was the one that wanted to cut down horse chestnut trees because it was concerned that conkers might fall on the heads of people underneath. It also tried to ban windowboxes from council flats for the same reason.

Worrying about things falling from the sky seems to have fatally undermined Labour in Norwich - similarly local reasons have done for it in Hartlepool and possibly Middlesbrough.

And so the monkey has hung Hartlepool out to dry. The town is still remembered - ridiculed - for what happened to that French spy nearly two centuries ago. It is to be hoped that last night's piece of history does not have a similarly long-lasting affect to the town's reputation.