Middlesbrough Town Hall hosts Regional Grand Committee (From The Northern Echo)

Middlesbrough Town Hall hosts Regional Grand Committee

7:32am Saturday 26th September 2009

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SIR STUART BELL rose stiffly from the front bench in Middlesbrough Town Hall’s imperious council chamber, the burgundy plush of the empty seats around him a visible reproach to the majority of North-East MPs who had failed to attend yesterday’s inaugural Regional Grand Committee.

“We have a saying in the House of Commons,” he began. “Everything that could be said has been said, but not everybody has said it’.” And so he went on to say it some more.

The lions carved into the woodwork above the doorframes were roaring their approval when this experiment in doorstep democracy began at 10.30am.

But as the time crawled towards 1.30pm, their open mouths and bared teeth looked increasingly like an unstifled yawn.

Because this wasn’t a debate. Of the region’s 30 MPs, 28 are Labour. Twelve showed up on time, and they passed the time finding new and innovative ways of saying how much they agreed with one another, how much the Labour Government had done for their constituencies and how much the Conservatives would simply ruin it.

The best performance of the occasion came from the Union flag hanging above the chamber. It is so elderly that its once vibrant colours have faded to brown and its once staunch cloth has aged to see-through. But during the three hours, it did not stir once, despite the hot air bellowing beneath it.

The one slightly dissenting voice came from Sir Alan Beith, the Liberal Democrat MP for Berwick. He spoke persuasively about the need for greater public spending on road and rail links, and about how One North East, the regional development agency (RDA), was “a really valuable addition” to the economy.

Tribally, the Labour MPs ganged up to bully him, but they needn’t have bothered.

He was returning from his party conference, which had voted to make “savage” cuts in public spending and to scrap the RDAs. If Sir Alan walked with a limp, it was because he had been shot in the foot by his own side.

With no Tories attending, it was left to Labour to fill in the time. The first half-hour, when MPs asked pithy questions of the North-East Minister Nick Brown, raised valuable points. Mr Brown insisted that the Government was doing all it could to save Corus, but the Tees Valley MPs left him in no doubt that it should be doing even more.

It was the remaining 150 minutes of “debate” that dragged, and that was the fault of the format rather than the MPs: if Michael Owen is presented with an open goal and invited to score, he will; if a politician is presented with a captive audience and invited to speechify, he will. They can’t help themselves. Only Ashok Kumar manfully passed up the opportunity.

The public, who put in a decent attendance in contrast to the stayaway MPs, slowly sidled out, leaving more burgundy plush unoccupied. Doorstep democracy is a good idea, but the grand committee requires a rethink, as there were times yesterday when it felt time had stood still.

And it had.

The large clock, presented when the grand chamber opened in 1887, said eight seconds and 21 minutes past eight throughout, having stopped years ago.

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