How Ministers forced Tier 3 status on Rotherham and South Yorkshire – Chris Read

It seems simple enough, doesn’t it? Right up until the moment I offer you £20m. Would that cover it, or would you stick it out for £30m?

Let’s add to the scenario. By accepting the money, although you will almost certainly save multiple lives, it will come at a cost to other people’s incomes.

Not the people who earn large 
salaries particularly, but those who are already dependent on the minimum level of legal pay. No Rawlsian income tax system here. Some people on the minimum wage would have their incomes cut by a third as part of the 
pact.

“Ah,” you might say, “but I can use my millions in order to tide them over!”

No, that isn’t allowed under the terms of the deal.

OK, you might think, if I’m lucky enough to already have some money, with a bit of accountancy jiggery pokery I could use that to help the people who might be losing out. “No,” comes the answer.

And all the time, as you work your way through the impenetrable logic of the damned, you know that this isn’t a thought experiment.

People really are falling ill. Hundreds of them. Worse maybe, whatever steps you take you won’t know the response until three or four weeks later. The universe will be silent as to whether you’ve really kept people safe until hundreds more are struggling to breathe.

This was the dawning nightmare that faced council leaders across the North of England last week. Dressed up behind the rhetoric of local decision making, we strained to work out how to traverse the moral maze.

Those conversations in South Yorkshire, like those I suspect everywhere else, started in good faith. We have watched with horror as the quiet period over the summer has given way to coronavirus infection rates rising exponentially.

We went several weeks in Rotherham where no one died. Now the fatalities have begun again. More than 340 grieving families in our community alone, and no end in sight.

By the time a suitably furious email arrived in my inbox from a lady whose mother’s cancer treatment had just had to be postponed because of a lack of hospital capacity, I didn’t need much persuading that curbing 10 per cent of infections was worthwhile.

The real question is why the Government was pretending to care what I said at all. If the science says we need tougher restrictions, then they can impose them. We know that, they shut down the whole country earlier this year – closing some pubs in Rotherham shouldn’t be much of a do. The only thing government was keen to hear was suggestions for things they could close.

Councils will receive the £8 per head that the Government had already decided before we started talking to them – that too was non-negotiable. As was keeping unspent business grant support from earlier in the year, or transferring more of South Yorkshire’s devolution money from capital investments into revenue we can use to pay people. It never was a negotiation. The computer said no to what seemed obvious and easy.

In the end, it was the best solution we could achieve. So I put my name to it. We’ll see in time whether that is better or worse than the outcome of our more voluble colleagues across the Pennines.

But this wasn’t localism, and it certainly wasn’t levelling up. We were political cover, either for restrictions deemed unpalatable to the Tory right, or for delaying life-saving measures. The package was already written on the back of a fag packet a long time before Ministers started asking for Zoom meetings.

We don’t know how long the restrictions will last. But we do know already that this has been a tawdry exercise in trying to shed responsibility while people have been dying.

The final kicker in our thought experiment; whilst we settled on a fairly healthy sounding £30m payment in exchange for doing the right thing, the real discussion about how it can be spent could only begin after it had been agreed.

The money I offered you to save a life may never really materialise at all. Yet it is all our broken system of government will allow. And that is a pact worthy of Faust.

Chris Read is the Labour leader
at Rotherham Council.

Support The Yorkshire Post and become a subscriber today. Your subscription will help us to continue to bring quality news to the people of Yorkshire. In return, you’ll see fewer ads on site, get free access to our app and receive exclusive members-only offers. Click here to subscribe.