Council tax is so unpopular

Published: 3 February, 2011

• UNUSUALLY, Camden’s Labour finance chief Theo Blackwell said something significant at the full council meeting. 

No, it wasn’t his cheap gimmick about asking residents he thinks might be bankers to pay him a voluntary 5p in the pound tax to run the services he has already identified for the chop. 

It was what he said about council tax. The government has promised help to councils to keep council tax rises to zero this year, so it would be lunacy for Camden to do anything other than this. Yet several Labour councillors at the meeting were wistfully speaking of raising council tax and it sounded very much like the current political fashion of “nudging” an audience towards accepting something they’d normally run a mile from. Therefore I asked Councillor Blackwell directly about Labour’s actual intentions. He said he had “an appetite for future council tax rises” and looked forward to “a modest increase in year two (2012) to blunt the effects of inflation or dedicate funds to soften the blows of some cuts”. 

Given he also suggested that it would have required a 30 per cent increase in council tax to offset the current cuts, this “modest increase” could end up being very immodest indeed. I think he accepted it would be lunacy to increase council tax this year, but sometimes you need a degree in advanced Marxist dialectics to interpret his spin precisely.

Council tax is very unpopular, affecting far more people than the bankers Cllr Blackwell is spinning about currently. He should concentrate on reorganising Camden’s delivery of services and back-office costs to address the damage caused by 13 years of Labour misrule nationally rather than scare local residents about raising their council tax.

CLLR ANDREW MENNEAR
Conservative, Frognal & Fitzjohns ward