The title of this mornings Blog is drawn from a tweet by the Conservative MP for Brighton Kemptown. The tweet was sent to a local Radio Station Juice FM and it reads:

@JuiceBrighton I am urging colleagues to put party politics aside and get rid of Green Brighton Council

The context for this tweet with its excruciating irony is the need to set the Council Tax level for residents of Brighton & Hove which I wrote about yesterday. The Brighton & Hove twitter channel has been busy over the last 48 hours with various debates and arguments primarily between the Labour group and the Green Councillors with some between the Conservatives and Green Councillors, and even some comments by people like me whose political affiliations are uncertain or non existent.

What Simon Kirby seems to be suggesting is that the Conservative Councillors in the City, 17 of whom are Politically Active, and one who is serving as the Mayor, should set aside their resistance to working with the Labour Councillors, 14 in total and combine their electoral power and vote for a no confidence motion in the Greens, or possibly simply vote to defeat the Green Budget. The Green Councillors number 21, and there is also one Independent Councillor. If either approach is attempted, I think that the Greens would be expected to step down from their position as the lead group on the Council and either the Conservative group would need to form a minority leadership or else a coalition between the Conservatives and some of the Labour Group (it seems unlikely any Green Councillors would be willing to help the Conservatives establish an administration). This approach would then give the new Council, a few weeks to establish their own budget, or to explain to Westminster that they had failed to do so, and then the Government would be obliged to send Civil Servants to help our own Officers to set a budget which would need to comply with Government limitations. The new administration would meanwhile need to manage the city for a year until the next set of local elections, a very unstable and confusing time for all concerned.

All of these options or possibilities are surely a great deal worse and more damaging for the city as a whole than what I believe the alternative is. That is for all three parties (or as many Councillors can do so) to put aside party advantage and focus on setting a credible and competent budget. As I wrote yesterday, I believe a budget that exceeds the Governments arbitrarily set threshold of 2% is something we as residents should be willing to consider if our elected representatives feel it is the only way of delivering services to the most vulnerable in our city. Whilst no other Councils have indicated they are thinking of breaching this threshold, many will have considered this as one of their options, recognising that the Governments position is essentially anti-democratic.

I had my own twitter exchange with Simon on Thursday, when news of the budget proposal became public. In his response to a comment I made to one of the Green Councillors his tweet included the comment “People in Brighton & Peacehaven expect their local MP to hold their Councils to account.” My own response was and is that we all expect our MPs to hold Councils to account, however I don’t think many people expect their MP to publicly advise colleagues to work to overturn democratically elected Councils. Simon might in any case like to reflect that for 3 years the Labour and Conservative groups have had the numerical strength to challenge the Greens on any number of issues. Despite this they have failed to do so on almost every occasion. I doubt that they are about to change their habits and cooperate for party advantage or even for the good of the city which is my own plea, but I would be delighted to be proven wrong.