A Taskforce Too Far

It seems that every other day Cameron tries to get his mug in the papers by starting up some new "taskforce" headed up by either some over-rated celebrity or a nightmarish ghoul from the Tory past. This time he's got Michael Heseltine to "look into urban problems", something that anyone who knows anything about the horrors he inflicted upon the Docklands must find darkly comical. And to be brutally honest he didn't actually achieve anything in Liverpool; even Thatcher has acknowledged that.

But what's irritated me is the misleading rhetoric used by Cameron himself. This is what he said:

"For too long Conservatives have been seen as the party of the leafy suburbs.

"That's changing. We already run local authorities in urban areas like Trafford, Coventry, Bradford and London"

Now let's deal with this authority by authority.

Trafford

Is in fact a suburban area for the most part. It's true that it does include some inner city areas (right next to Manchester and Salford) but, ahem, the Tories don't actually have any councillers in those wards. The Tory stronghold in Trafford comes from the extremely rich (and extremely leafy) suburbs in the southwest of the borough.

Coventry

A more legitimate case can be made for Coventry; unlike most former MDC's Coventry is actually overwhelmingly urban. O/c the problem is that, technically at least, the Tories don't have overall control of Coventry City Council (they're one counciller short) and it should also be noted that after a year of defacto Tory rule on the council, Labour did very well in the city in the General Election. Go figure.

Bradford

Once again the Tories don't have overall control here; and unlike Coventry they aren't very close to getting it (they run a minority administration). And, to make things worse, Bradford MBC isn't just Bradford itself; it includes suburban areas and commuter towns to the west and also the Keighley area. Not-so-very suprisingly, Labour holds the most seats in the inner core of Bradford itself (and will probably gain more this year; the Tory councillers from those areas (largely nasty community machine politicians of the worst type) have disgraced themselves repeatedly over the past few years; one has recently been convicted of a fatal hit-and-run accident) and, as in Coventry, the Tories did badly here in the General Election (their % of the vote across the Met. District was basically the same as they polled here in the Euro elections. No comment needed).

London

Now this is just bizarre; I had always assumed that Ken Livingstone was currently a member of the Labour party. Perhaps Cameron meant the Greater London Assembly? Which hardly counts as a local authority... and on which they don't actually have a majority on eithr... or the boroughs? Well, the Tories don't actually run many London boroughs with serious urban problems, and in these boroughs the Tories don't (to put it mildly) do very well in the deprived areas.

Now, all of this seems to suggest that either Cameron is a liar, or he's astonishingly ignorant of the country he wants to lead (and worse still; the city that he lives in). Frankly I'm not sure whcih would be worse...