Victims of an old-fashioned stich-up!

stiched!

During breaking for coffee at a meeting with a senior Southampton City Council Officer recently, she commented that she was surprised how good a press the new Conservative administration was receiving in comparison with previous administrations. Oops! Today the press bit back with a front page spread on the Southern Daily Echo continued on page two and rounded off with a highly critical editorial.

The background is that the Conservatives, mindful of the fact they have no overall control (Labour & the Lib-Dems can easily combine to outvote the Tories or even remove them from office) and that the council is facing the most difficult revenue support grant settlement in its history, decided to published its draft budget months early for consultation. The rationale behind this is that it will lead to hopefully a more transparent and better informed budget making process. It also shows the other politicalgroups what the council is up against and not least demonstrates our political priorities.

One feeling Conservatives feel particularly concerned about locally is the plight of the elderly. It is those on modest fixed incomes that have been hit hardest by council tax increases since Labour came to power in 1997 and of course those on pension form a disproportionate number of this group. One way of alleviating this hardship is to introduce what we called the 10% discount for households where all the occupants were over 65 and paying the full level of council tax. From the reaction of The Echo you would think we were advocating a policy similar in social policy terms to the sacrificing the firstborn!

They certainly didn't hold back. Their central beef is 'Almost half of Southampton's pensioners will miss out on a promised ten per cent discount on their council tax'. They go on to accuse the Conservatives of ‘conning pensioners for votes’ -strong meat indeed, especially as it doesn’t happen to be true!
I would have thought that for the article to be fair they would have also felt obligated to point out that the reason most of those pensioners who are not eligible to get the discount is that they are having their council tax paid for by benefit anyway! You can hardly give someone a discount if they are not paying it anyway. While everyone is entitled to their view on the Tory budget and indeed its political priorities, I feel that the use of emotive language and misinformation is hardly productive.

It is interesting to speculate on the source of the story. My pet theory is that Matt Tipper, the local UNITE regional industrial organiser got onto them and fed them a few lines as he is bitterly opposed to the Conservatives and all there works. a hunk of old Socialist heavy metal, Tipper was a leading light in the decision to spend his members money on urging the public to 'Vote Labour' in a full page advert in the said Echo last May. readers may be interested to note however that despite being written to to ask for their views, Unite still haven't responded to our request for consultation on our budget proposals, despite us writing to them weeks ago- except in the press that is !