Birmingham Council House
It would appear that the opposition Labour group on Birmingham City Council has hired the services of a new speechwriter, possibly in anticipation of taking control of Britain’s largest public authority in May.
There is no other way to explain the confident performance by veteran labour leader Sir Albert Bore, whose speech at the annual budget-fixing meeting amounted to a surgical attack on what he sees as the many failings of the city’s Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition.
Deputy Labour leader Ian Ward even told a joke. OK, it was hardly Frank Carson stuff, but radical new territory for the serious-minded Ward. Who, he wondered, would write the Liam Byrne ‘all the money’s gone’ note after the May elections? Would it be Tory council leader Mike Whitby, or his cabinet finance colleague Randal Brew?
Sir Albert stuck the knife in as soon as he stood up to reply to Coun Whitby’s speech, which set the budget scene and made the case for £100 million of savings on top of £210 million already agreed.
It would be unthinkable, Sir Albert suggested, for Chancellor George Osborne to be heard in the kind of “stunned silence” with which Tory and Lib Dem councillors treated Coun Whitby’s speech. He had a point. The council leader was on his feet for half an hour, but did not receive a ripple of applause from his own side, never mind sustained cheers. In fact, nobody in the council chamber
