I'm Sticking My Snout Back In The Trough!

Last week, I returned from a short Easter break to find a letter from the Council waiting for me. It was from the Borough’s Returning Officer informing me that my nomination to be a candidate in May’s local elections had been accepted. If I am re-elected for Labour in New Cross Ward and serve a full term, that will mean that by 2018, I would have been a Councillor continuously for 20 years. This will make me one of the ‘Old Lags’, as a fellow councillor puts it, which I take to be a term of ‘endearment’ used to describe the longest-serving Councillors.

We are constantly reminded that when it comes to popularity and public respect, politicians, like Cardiff City, are struggling at the foot of the table. This is a position we share with estate agents and probably bankers. I am not sure if people had their local councillors in mind when they offered this judgement to the pollsters. I would guess that most people don’t think about the fact that they have a local councillor. By and large people don’t know who their Councillors are. Plus they tend not to vote for them. Turnout in the Deptford constituency in the 2010 General election was 62.1%. Most wards across the Borough struggled to achieve half that in 2006, with some seeing turnout languishing below 25%. Yet following the expenses scandal that engulfed Parliament in 2008 and has simmered away quietly ever since, the public have shown a tendency to tar us all with the same brush. I think many of us have experienced the attitude, particularly when out campaigning, that we are only interested in being elected to the Council to feather our own nest, because the salaries are so high and the allowances so generous.

Whilst doing a bit of de-cluttering at home before the builders came in the other week, I found a copy of The Report of the Independent Panel on The Remuneration of Councillors in London. The panel, chaired by Professor Malcolm Grant, published this report in February 1999, having been asked to look into the issue by the Association of London Government in December 1998. The recommendations were broadly adopted and formed the basis of the Members’ Allowance schemes introduced by London Boroughs and operated to this day. There are a few key points I would draw attention to:

• They found that the average councillor spends over 80 hours a week on the job. 
• They believed this was too much and should be reduced to 60 hours a month. 
• The believed that the first 20 hours that councillors devote to their role should be considered voluntary, to reflect the element of public service involved in being a councillor. They, therefore, thought that this time should not be remunerated. 
• They recommended that the remaining 40 hours should be paid for at the mean London white collar wage. They believed that at the time, this implied a standard backbench allowance of £7,500 per annum. (This has grown over time so that in Lewisham it currently stands at £9,812). 
• Extra allowances should be paid to those councillors with additional responsibilities which require them to spend more time on their duties than allowed for in the 60 hours covered by the basic allowance. 

Lewisham’s scheme of allowances can be seen here. There is a column in the table that records the expenses that Councillors have claimed. In 2012-13 the Mayor and elected Members claimed £655.91. That’s altogether. That’s an average claim of less that £12 per individual. Councillors have also recently been expelled by Eric Pickles from their Council’s pension scheme, bearing in mind that our membership of it was on terms and conditions that were less generous than those which applied to staff.

In short, an ordinary backbench councillor is expected to work for free for at least a third but maybe as much as half of their time, whilst accruing no pension entitlement. Or, to put it another way, Councillors are engaged by the electorate on terms and conditions that, if the Council they serve on sought to apply them to other staff, it would be breaking the law.

I am not trying to drum up sympathy, but I think it is fair to say that most reasonable people would concede that the remuneration of Councillors is not lavish. Those who are privileged enough to be elected on 22 May are likely to be rather more public spirited and less self interested than the prevailing view of politicians in general might suggest. Oink, Oink!

My London Marathon Homily

Yesterday, I ran the London Marathon for the Lavender Trust (donations still being accepted here). I managed to get round the course in 3 hours 54 minutes and 41 seconds – a personal best, or PB as we experienced athletes prefer to say. I have only ever run London and it is a great one to do because it's pretty flat and you have tremendous crowd support, plus it's brilliantly organised. The only downside is that those in the Mass Start run in such vast numbers that every runner does a lot of weaving. This sounds rather trivial until you realise how much it adds to the distance you run to cover the course. This year for me it was an extra 0.4 miles. Two years ago, when I last did it, it was an extra half a mile. The phrase, 'Insult to Injury', does spring to mind, as you stagger up towards Buckingham Palace, look at your Garmin and see you have covered the official course length of 26.2 miles but still have what seems like an eternity to go.

The other great thing about the London Marathon is the results page on its website. Anyone can log on and call up anybody's result. You can see not only their finishing times and where they were placed, but also their times and speeds at 5km intervals and at the halfway point. You can also look at photographs of each runner at various stages on the race. If you look at Ed Balls and me, you will see 2 middle-aged men in agony, running with heads bent over, looking like a couple of tramps scanning the road for discarded cigarette ends. Sadiq Khan on the other hand looks like he is out for a gentle jog around the park, smiling and looking perfectly relaxed. I can't believe those photos of him with his medal are taken at the end. He looks as fresh as a daisy.

You can also search the results by age group and gender, and this is the real purpose of this post. I have run 6 London Marathons now and after every one I, like thousands of other finishers, have logged onto the results page to see their own result and compared it to others they know have taken part. This would include friends and family, celebrities and the elite runners. What has always interested me is how I did relative to the older runners in the field. I think this comes from a desire to keep my own achievements in perspective, but also to give me inspiration and a sense of what is possible in my later years. So, although this year I ran my best time and feel a bit smug because I did a faster time than certain people, this is what I feel I really need to note:

I was beaten by 126 men in the 60-64 age group.

I was beaten by 47 men in the 65-69 age group.

I was beaten by 8 of the 138 men over 70 who completed the course!

I was beaten by 7 women in the 60-64 age group.

I was beaten by 5 women in the 65-69 age group.

I did manage to beat all 33 women over 70 who completed the course.

This year, to beat the fastest man in the 60-64 age group I would have had to knock well over an hour off my time (his actual time was an amazing 2 hrs 48 mins 46 secs) Incredibly, if I had wanted to beat the fastest man over 70, I would have had to run better than 3 03 50! What's more, this was 10 minutes faster than the fastest man in the 65-69 age group (3 13 50). 

That so many older people are achieving such remarkable times in the arduous discipline of marathon running, comes as an instructive counter to the familiar story that rising obesity, lack of fitness and ill health are gripping the nation. You can't run sub 4 hour marathons at any age without prolonged, regular training involving long (13 mile plus) runs. If you run seriously, you will know that up and down the country, running clubs are putting on well organised, competitive running events every weekend over various distances. Each event will normally have hundreds of participants, of all ages and all shapes and sizes. More and more people seem to be catching the running bug.

Perhaps we need to raise our expectations of what we can physically accomplish in our later years and change our view of 'old age'.

The Re-Return Of The Master. Keynesian Stimulus Is Back On The Agenda.

Today, excitement is being generated by the IMF’s announcement that it expects the UK economy to grow by 2.9% this year, the fastest rate of any G7 economy. This is the latest instalment in the, ‘Rejoice! Britain is recovering!’ narrative that has become the received wisdom over the last few months, something that I have observed with increasing bemusement. As a Labour politician, I would be expected to rubbish this message and the Coalition’s attempts to get it across, albeit a rather easy task with so much of the media on their side. There are plenty of opportunities here. For example, this would be fairly modest post recessionary growth, if our experience of previous recessions is anything to go by. Plus much can be said about this growth being generated by rising debt, falling savings rates, and housing market bubbles, together with our worsening trade balance. However, as a businessman and investor (of my own modest pension pot), my self interest lies in being scrupulously objective when assessing what is likely to happen to the economy over the short to medium term. I need the economy to do well for my business to provide me with a living and for my savings to grow and provide me with an income in retirement. But if I do think this recovery is too good to be true, then I need to take action to protect myself. Consequently, I spend a lot of time trying to get behind the headlines and discover the reports that, although freely available, don’t get talked about very much. My hope is that I might stumble across a canary in a coal mine, as I did in 2006-7, and save myself from financial loss.

Over the last few days, I came across a number of such reports. The first was this one on the BBC website, which said that the Chinese government were going to embark on yet another round of fiscal stimulus, as they were so concerned about the slowdown in their economy. Then later the same day the BBC reported that Christine Legarde of the IMF was calling for more fiscal stimulus because she was 'concerned that the global economy could be heading for years of 'sub-par growth''. A few days later, former US Treasury Secretary, Larry Summers, writing a piece in the FT entitled What the world must do to kickstart growth, called for fiscal stimulus in the US to counter slow growth, what he calls 'secular stagnation'.

Can you see a theme emerging here?

The UK economy doesn't exist in a vacuum. Is it rational to be so optimistic about its prospects when it is widely believed that the global economy is so fragile that action by governments is needed to ensure that healthy growth is sustained? Moreover, the likelihood of generating the political will necessary to achieve this in the US and Europe must be pretty slim. This is not least because the Very Serious People, to borrow a phrase from the economist Paul Krugman, at the IMF, ECB, EU, etc, have been enthusiastic proselytisers for Austerity for the last 4 years. Things would need to get very much worse than they are now for such a humiliating about-turn to take place.

The mouth may speak what the heart is full of, but if you want to know what someone really believes, then look at what they do with their money. I am seriously thinking that when it comes to my small nest egg, it may be time to consider following that old stockbroking adage, 'sell in May and go away'.