Political talent is in short supply. So is a willingness to step up and take the burdens and the blows of office. The leader of Newcastle city council, Nick Forbes, has been toppled as a result of destructive tribal shenanigans, likely to deter others from giving up most of their life to become councillors. All political careers end in failure, goes the old dictum, and it’s usually so.
But Forbes’s career has been no failure. As leader of the council for 11 years, he steered his city through the lost decade’s savage cuts, protecting vulnerable people where he could and upholding Newcastle’s pride with ingenuity and political imagination.
One of a generation of outstanding Labour council leaders, he was deselected from his seat in Arthur’s Hill ward, which he represented for 22 years, after an ambush this month. His deselection is reported to have been the result of a clash with the former Labour chief whip, local MP Nick Brown. Rules may have been breached in the process, and the party will investigate, ChronicleLive reports. But Forbes prefers to walk away with his dignity intact, he tells me, not fight over rulebooks. What’s more, his tenure in office shouldn’t be defined by the petty factionalism that ended it, but by the hard task of preserving his city in an age of austerity, against vicious odds.
Does his downfall show he was a failure? Financially, some might say: at 48, he received total pay of £27,600 a year, with no pension, for the past 11 years for heavy responsibilities. But he walks away reflecting on how he navigated killer cuts of 40% of Westminster funding. Labour leaders are trapped by the Tories’ gleeful ploy to “devolve the axe”, forcing local authorities to make agonising choices with shrunken budgets, taking the full blast of local blame. Right from 2010, Labour cities – the poorest places – took the hardest hit, Tory shires the least. Now with “levelling up”, funds again are diverted to Tory towns – often not the poorest – rather than the most deprived cities.
What should they do? Protest, certainly. But they still have to carry out the cuts, find clever ways to raise funds and try to protect the weakest. “That’s our tightrope,” Forbes tells me, “to highlight the hardship of cuts without damaging the city’s reputation.” At election time, despite the blows, they still have to proclaim achievements – and Newcastle still dazzles its visitors.
Survival meant dealing with the enemy: he struck an early “city deal” with central government, he tells me, allowing Newcastle to keep business rates fixed for 25 years and to borrow to build. He also claims that they have built more council housing in the last 10 years than in the previous 30. “Aggressively pursuing” vacant owners, hundreds of empty properties have been brought back into use.
Defending families against the monstrous bedroom tax, they built homes with a “hobby room” rather than a spare bedroom. With the 2011 abolition of the education maintenance allowance, which supported poor children staying on in sixth forms, they found £15 a week for the neediest.
Newcastle council had a living wage long before the rest of the UK. Partnerships with the private sector have been key: that includes a “good work pledge”, where hundreds of employers agree union representation, pensions and no zero-hours contracts. “The government dismantled the welfare state, so we had to create our own.” Of course, it was slender protection against tidal waves of poverty from the £37bn national benefit cuts, money that was taken from pockets of the poor and from the city’s economy. When a large number of England’s 3,500 Sure Starts were lost, Newcastle kept them for 30% of the poorest. Only when Forbes cut the arts did national celebs protest, not about lost nurseries and youth clubs. Newcastle is a “city of sanctuary” for asylum seekers and unaccompanied refugee children, despite far-right marches and demos outside mosques. Its Labour councillors were mainly male and white, now half are women, with more ethnic minority members, including the UK’s first Roma councillor. As an LGBTQ+ leader, Forbes has taken shedloads of homophobic abuse.
He grumbles that London-based journalists rock up in Newcastle, hear his list of the city’s thriving inward investments and jobs created – but then go home to write only about grinding poverty, featuring “grim up north” scenes from Byker and Benwell. I plead partly guilty, because there’s no escaping the brutal effects of Westminster-induced hardship, though I reported on the Forbes administration’s enterprise and inventiveness too.
His detractors accused him of spending too long out of his ward – but those against “moderates” resented his place attending “moderate” Keir Starmer’s shadow cabinet. Each shadow minister now has a local Labour leader as part of their team, at last drawing on Labour’s formidable local strengths. Forbes will be gone from there, no longer chairing the Convention of the North and sitting as a member of the Northern Powerhouse Partnership.
Forbes should be remembered not for his fall amid red-on-red factionalism, but for his public service, even in the harshest years and against the odds. What a pointless and destructive waste.
Polly Toynbee is a Guardian columnist
