Merlin Betts
To read this as a series, head here.
You might be excused for thinking that Hastings is doing well. People are flocking over and down to experience the charms of this unique, creative and historical seaside borough – a stretch of coastline that represents what Britain has been and is trying to be. But then you stop for a second and look around you. Details flash before your terrified eyes: the lack of housing, the floods, the healthcare crisis, rising cost of living, crime rates, and the general urban deprivation of an underfunded and largely ignored segment of the South East.
Our latest (preliminary) council budget is a response to this mixed reality, and about as gloomy as you might expect. Although, when you hear the councillors talk, especially the leadership, there is an excited undercurrent of aspiration, maybe even hope, in a surprising number of their words.
When I wandered out to the Stade Hall on a cool winter’s evening last year, I was expecting a bit of activity. Not huge throngs of folk, but some people. A bit like when Southern Water did a day there to pretend that performing below average was an impressive achievement. I made it for the last hour or two of the council’s open budget consultation in the Hall, and it was looking sparse. People had been in all day, so I was told, but I was the first one who actually wanted to talk about the budget. I ended up speculating and chatting some shop with Cllrs Maya Evans and Simon Willis, treading very lightly on the topic of this grim but necessary survival finance for a struggling council.
There’s worry because a very real risk is looming: a section 114 notice, which is a local authority’s version of bankruptcy. With that you can say goodbye to any community involvement and any other politics – it goes into administration and the last flecks of meat are chiselled from the bone.
Find out more in five parts and a strange interlude.
Bordering bankruptcy: how did we get here? A brief but far-reaching exploration of recent history.
A swashbuckling tale of medieval valour. Old rumblings about our ruin.
What’s a council in crisis to do? The main budgetary drain, explained.
The big debate that wasn’t. Rough minutes from a council meeting.
Sound the clarion, call the volunteers. Can we solve the crisis by getting together?
Unitary power. Can we solve the crisis by seizing power?
Bordering bankruptcy: how did we get here?
When he was trying to get picked (‘elected’ they like to say) as Tory leader, Rishi Sunak stood at a Tunbridge Wells garden party and said he planned to take funding away from deprived urban areas and give it to those who really need it – the burghers of Tunny Wells. But he was too late. Ten years of Tory power had already cut grant funding to local government by 40%, or £18.5billion, all while council costs were rising – think social care, housing, the slow-growing cost of living crisis. These cuts happened while council tax was capped at 2% (later 3%), pending a successful local referendum to raise it.
To run such a referendum in Hastings costs tens of thousands (the council estimate it at £100,000), more in a bigger area, and then who’ll really vote to pay more council tax? We have to save £4,000,000, why would we risk £100,000 on a no-hope referendum? So realistically this 3% is almost an impassable cap on local government income – only those who already have the money to do a public relations campaign and a referendum can afford to raise tax, and they probably don’t need to.
Even then, as Hugh Sullivan has commented in HIP, “central government would withhold funding from any borough whose local electorate dared to make its own contribution to raising itself from public penury.” Translation: if we tried to get our own money, we’d probably stop getting any from this government. That means we either lose out on lots of regeneration projects or crash into a section 114. We try to strike out on our own, we get pulled back in. I’m not actually sure how far I agree with this analysis, though. At least, I’m not sure how much of a boon Westminster support really is. Still, with the council firmly committed to the goal of regeneration, it doesn’t matter much what I think. They feel at least partly compelled to court the Department of Levelling Up and Communities (DLUC) and hope something good can come of it.
I wonder what motive Westminster has to stop local authorities functioning properly anyway? It is making life much harder for us, even if it wants to pretend otherwise. The levelling up funding, for example, is controlled by a conglomerate of diffuse local interests (the Town Deal board) and has to be approved by DLUC, but the local authority (HBC) has to take responsibility for the project, even though it’s effectively a minority partner. To my mind that’s a bit of a recipe for destruction – and indeed the Town Deal doesn’t seem to be going so well, but that’s a vague statement, and an article for another time.
I imagine (somewhat optimistically) there must be a reason for this drift of government policy. Is it a misunderstanding of central state organisation and economics? Is it part of their broader plan to asset-strip Britain until there’s nothing left, and then they can turn the remaining organics into gene-slaves for their space empire? I can’t see the rationale for a Conservative government crushing, rather than conserving, the small town social landscapes their party was built from. Unless, of course, it was never about small towns, but rather about profit-margins on a national balance sheet, or champagne and helicopter rides (fast carriages driven by wild stallions, in the old days?).
Unlike the government in Westminster, councils can’t borrow. They have grants, taxes, and very few other ways of making money. And their financial landscape is complicated in other ways. When you get a bill in, it tells you (in small, boring-looking print) that you’re paying East Sussex County Council (ESCC), Hastings Borough Council (HBC), the Police and Crime Commissioner, the East Sussex Fire Authority and whoever else. But to most readers that just means “council tax” and your council is Hastings borough. So your natural assumption is that HBC are taking more of your money to waste it – because we’re in financial crisis, so they can’t have spent it well. In reality it’s bigger changes to the way local government raises money, and the internal politics of county and borough, that mean you pay more without seeing much improvement. ESCC can bump up taxes a percentage point or two and you might be forgiven, when something like that turns up on your bill, for thinking that HBC are charging you more to bail themselves out. They aren’t, and they can’t.
Before the media and Westminster noticed that the cost of living is too high and started to talk about it on the national stage, Britain already had a growing housing crisis, especially in heavily populated and already deprived urban areas. Councils across the land were spending an average of 2.6% more each year on social care, with no signs of that increase stopping. A raft of other ongoing social and economic changes have also been putting huge pressure on day-to-day life, and when people are struggling, it’s generally local authorities on the frontline to help them, local authorities undergoing massive cuts and funding limitations. Either that or people have to potluck on charity.
So for the last 10-15 years, longer most likely, local government had been eroded, with the authorities worst hit being those under the most pressure – and Hastings is a prime example. According to the latest ONS figures, we’re the 13th most deprived area in the country. What does that make us? Well, expensive, amongst other things.
A swashbuckling tale of medieval valour
Do any of you remember the story of Hastings Castle… ? The prototype was made of wood when William the Bastard came over from Normandy in 1066 to do his part in creating England. Some mason-looking types turned it into stone a couple of years later, but apparently none of the architects had heard that story (a parable perhaps) about building your house on the sand.
Different times back then, not so many biblical scholars, and their word for sandstone might not have been so blindingly obvious as what we have now. I mean, the Old English mealm sounds nothing like mealmstán, does it? And how about those Normans. Apparently you’ve got greve and gret. No excuses, really – they were all just playing silly buggers. That or the castle was a very slow-burn kind of Saxon terrorism.
The Castle and its surroundings became the foundation for a noble house, Eu (don’t mind the smell). It was even directly owned at one point by the future King Edward I (the one who hated Scotland and, according to the wee Australian, had a gay son) but he was short on cash and sold it. In the Winter of 1287, disaster struck, putting an end to the castle’s noble lineage: a storm blew half of it down – because it was built on sandstone that had been steadily eroding all those years. The nobles gave up on it after that.
Well, the land passed through a knight (or a sir to be precise) who apparently set the tradition of farming it, which was kept as standard until an Earl of Chichester took charge of it in 1824, beginning an archaeological dig. You know those pre-Victorians and their growing obsession with the ‘gothic’. It’s less archaeology and more “look pals, a real gothic ruin, what fun!” He tried to rebuild bits of it, and then it goes quiet again until 1951 when the Hastings Corporation thought it’d make a good tourist attraction. And that’s more or less the situation we find it in now.
Bit like the fall of the (Western) Roman Empire – looked so grand until it dramatically collapsed into a dark age that ran for about a thousand years, with rich chieftains’ children gawking at its remains, and now what? (The very slow demise of) industrialised capitalism under an essentially Roman Catholic social culture? It might as well be Hastings.
What a peculiar tale. I wonder why it comes to mind…
What’s a council in crisis to do?
Alright, so the biggest single problem for our budget is the local housing crisis and how blindingly expensive it is to run temporary accommodation.
Why do so many people need temporary accommodation? Hastings Borough Council’s chief housing officer, Chris Hancock, told the Local Government Chronicle, “We looked at those figures for properties that were advertised for private rent. Not only do they not meet local housing allowance [LHA/housing benefit], the very large majority of them, over 90%, are more than an £80 a month shortfall from the local housing allowances. That’s the big underlying issue. People have just been unable to afford the rental increases.” And nor can HBC. They only own and run about 10% of their temporary accommodation, the rest is ‘night-by-night’ rental running at about £350 a week according to Mr Hancock, and he says Westminster only pays £90 of that.
My rough calculations for 500 temporary homes puts the HBC cost at about £6,500,000 annually. That’s 87% of their council tax income for 2022-2023. My numbers are a bit rough here, but you get the point.
A bit of background to that. Most council housing stock was sold off years ago to the housing associations that became the terrifying, monolithic Southern Housing. Regulations are put in place to make it difficult for even very rich councils to develop in-house accommodation once again (not least of all, right to buy). But councils still have a statutory duty to provide temporary accommodation to those who need it. So, even if they can’t build, buy or own their own houses long-term, they are still legally required to provide. This means landlords renting to the council can charge above market value for badly maintained and ill-suited properties, and the council can do bugger all about it.
Bring it up to date with the seafront destinations of Hastings, Old Town and St Leonards becoming desirable homes and a viable spot for tourism, and even the landlords renting to the council start to transform into AirBnBs. Loophole accommodation (AirBnBs being a prime example) tend to be dramatically more profitable and get around messy confrontations with tenants and their rights. They limit the pool of available housing, so the value of remaining properties for council and longer term rent goes up further. Spiralling costs push more people out of their homes, leading to an influx of more AirBnBs, or new tenants from higher income brackets. Beyond that we have the constant harassment of land speculators helping to keep about 3,000 of our 44,000 homes empty* while 1,500 households are on the housing register, according to HBC. It’s a vicious spiral that’ll see more than just the council out of pocket.
*Edit: for better figures Hastings Online Times’ great piece on the Housing Rebellion estimates 678 long-term empty homes and 748 second homes.
Oh, last October, a New Statesman journalist estimated that we have almost 1,000 AirBnBs in the town centre alone. Combine the empty homes and the holiday lets… and you’ll find a lot of greedy chisellers dining well tonight on silver platters. Don’t let it fool you: white powder is a main course.
But wait! Stop there. I’m up on my high horse, blood-boiling, ready to start the executions – that’s not entirely fair. In the interest of shoehorning some balance in here, I need to mention that a lot of our local landlords only have one extra property and, particularly with interest rates being what they are, they’re making barely any money off that property. We can’t be demonising these individuals. They’re just trying to survive. I might still, personally, question the decision to buy more than one home, but realistically most people aren’t weird idealists like I might be. They just want to have a pension or inheritance that they can understand and keep control of, or the most functional method of their moving house was to have more than one at once. Attacking this kind of landlord is like arresting someone for possession: it’s pointless and rude. I’m not attacking them. I’m attacking the people who landlord en masse, especially those who operate as companies: they are demonstrably having a horrific impact on this town.
So housing’s the big one. It’s the main factor that drove us to be 13th most deprived authority in 2019, and while “barriers to housing and services” dramatically worsened between 2015-2019, “living environment” seemed to substantially improve. I think some folks call that ‘gentrification’.
An honourable mention to social care, roads and highways, and the fiascos with Southern Water and the climate crisis, nevermind the state of the Conquest, our police force, or the academies.
A lot of these other costs and services aren’t even in the purview of Hastings Council. Nah – they’re East Sussex County Council, which has a lot more money and, yeah, you guessed it, is Tory-led. If you wonder why the roads and pavements never get fixed, well, it’s them, basically. Labour wouldn’t do much better, but they do tend to throw marginally more money at the deprived residents of places like Hastings (rather than the depraved residents of Tunny Wells with their Lib Dems and their Alliance) which is why our council was until recently run by increasingly miserable Labour veterans. Now eight of them are slightly happier Hastings Independents and apparently the only ones providing any moral or spiritual leadership for the town – the only ones looking after our soul! Or trying to. More on that as soon as they say more than a few sentences.
I’ll add a link here for anyone who wants to read a detailed breakdown of the preliminary budget (as soon as I’ve written it), so you can see the areas that might be worst hit by our required savings. Some of them, like an Anti-Social Behaviour prevention scheme, are going to be funded from alternate sources and not cut completely, or at least that’s the plan.
My main message here is that despite the horror and the chaos, it’s not all panic. The council are doing a fairly good job of holding fast, keeping the wolf away from the door. All that. I might be the bringer of bad news, but once you understand how bad the situation is… you can start to understand that the council’s actually holding the line (for now), which is good!
The big debate that wasn’t
I didn’t go to the full council meeting that approved the preliminary budget, but I did watch the video. It kicks off with a classic Paul Barnett speech, sounding like a Hastings Independent Group manifesto the very day before they came out as independents. There was hope, for a moment, that it would be a positive, maybe even entertaining hour and a half.
After that it descends into a kind of chaos. To my ears the same two questions were repeatedly asked, with a similar but slightly more illuminating answer each time, then people forgot where they were and what they were doing, so they had to have a break. It centred around Cllr Andy Patmore and Cllr Julia Hilton, the opposition leaders, and the Chief Financial Officer Kit Wheeler. Other leadership figures, like Jane Hartnell and Cllrs Batsford and Roarke would occasionally step in to clarify a point or ask that the meeting move on. Reminds me of working at HIP.
Patmore spoke for the Conservatives, emphasising a recent report that says HBC has, historically, only managed to make 80% of the savings it has sought. Kit ultimately replied, ‘Mate, we’ve got 125% of the required savings plotted into this scheme. If we drop by 20% that’s still 105% savings made.’
Head of the Greens Julia Hilton took a different tack, expressing concern over the lack of detail in the pre-budget, and the potential inadequacy of the way the council monitors progress on these things. There wasn’t much of a reply to this – Kit essentially had to say ‘We’re working on it, there’ll be more information coming as we go.’ Which is similar to “I don’t know” but not quite the same. The council is trying to improve its internal functions, even as it’s having to cut them, and this was not the place to run a detailed examination of those improvement/alteration projects. But Julia’s right, we need to keep an eye.
In his opening speech Paul seemed to have imagined some kind of alternate reality where various cllrs would debate the specific details of proposed savings and maybe even suggest some savings of their own. He didn’t get that. Ultimately both the Greens and the Tories put their hands up and said, ‘Well done for the pre-budget, but we won’t talk about it until it’s a proper budget. See you in February.’ Which, for a couple of groups effectively accusing the council leadership of laziness and disorder, seemed pretty lazy and arguably didn’t help the council overall to provide a strong face/strong response to the crisis.
I’m a bit moody about the Greens. Perhaps unfairly. But they’d been in coalition with Paul Barnett’s Labour leadership until the national party said Paul wasn’t allowed to that. They’d said decision-making at HBC should be shared among the different parties, that our local governance should be more collective and consensual. The Hastings Independents come out, I think in response to all that, and the Greens are suddenly saying no, bad timing, showing poor leadership. Et tu Hilton? I dunno, seeing Labour and Tory bile in the Observer the other week, hoping it’d be slightly balanced out by the Greens, I was a bit shocked that it wasn’t. Whatever. I don’t know the ins-and-outs of their inter-party squabbles.
I have missed out, however, that Cllr Hilton also successfully proposed five amendments to the Corporate plan, not strictly related to the budget, at the full council meeting. The corporate plan is just their overall strategy at HBC. Her amendments focussed on taking more serious steps to remedy the climate crisis, and making commitments to reduce inequality in town, particularly with regards to being age friendly. They were good, they were accepted.
I remind myself, as I remind you reader, that councillors are part-timers who have real jobs and lives as well. Everything they achieve – particularly what the leaders achieve while wrangling with a financial nightmare – is good hard work. Much as I can and will occasionally condemn them and laugh at what they’re doing (particularly the pointless politicking we see in the two big parties) they’re all good people, all doing their best. We can help by supporting them, not heckling them.
Bearing that in mind, I’ll mention some positive projects that could help us resolve this big issue of the housing crisis.
Sound the clarion, call the volunteers
The only other power here apart from rules-regulated government and profit-governed business is community. Yep, people getting things done through their own through goodwill, effective organisation and small-scale fundraising. We have a lot of growing community-led solutions to the town’s housing problems but they’re almost all in the early stages of development, and would need radical co-operation with the other powers in town to quickly succeed on a large scale.
The council is fascinated by this idea of listening to and co-operating with community groups – and put Cllr Simon Willis in charge of Housing and Community Development to say so. Back in August 2023, Paul Barnett even asked, politely, that residents give up their spare rooms and gardens to help with the temporary accommodation problem. How optimistic he was! At the end of December the Hastings Independents who’ve split from Labour (including Cllr Willis himself) have made some excellent rumblings about the importance of Hastings beyond party politics, about community, about enabling rather than directing. These are all good signs, believe it or not, and necessary responses to an ever-dwindling pot of government money to call from.
The town’s leading business interests on the other hand are a bit late to the party because, put bluntly, there’s no profit in it. There is money in it, there is massive improvement to the daily lives of town residents, but it’s not really something you can asset-manage into private equity if you know what I mean. Our only hope for that sector (‘business’) is to mobilise charities and smaller enterprises which’ll find it much easier to integrate with community projects because, generally, the sterling signs in their irises aren’t as large and pendulous. Some of them are just trying to get by, and of course that has to be respected.
At least, that’s what I had in my head until a few days ago. Then I suddenly remembered that a CIC (a community interest company) is actually part of the business sector rather than the community (often called the ‘voluntary’) sector. So, really, there’s a whole ream of growing business interests in town that are devoting their budgets to social goals and restricting how much profit goes to shareholders. And this is great news: community’s partially represented both in government and in the private sector.
But I can hear you asking now, “Who is this ‘community’ you’re talking about? Isn’t this just more pseudo-communist weirdness from the anti-semitic left?” Well, no. Community is that small but growing branch of society that runs itself. It’s not a business, it’s not a form of government. You could call it ‘voluntary’ because it is, and actually ‘voluntary’ might not be a bad summary. People doing what they want because they think it’s good. The key unit of community organisation, I’d suggest, rather than a charity or a CIC, is a co-operative or a community land trust. We have plenty of these in Hastings too.
Before the new year there was a meeting at the Observer Building to set up the Hastings Housing Alliance. A lot of community groups and interest organisations attended, and their potential future sounds promising. There’s a little too much going on there to simply summarise, so here’s the article I wrote on it [link soon to be added – it’s another big one, and I’m just running the final edits].
A bit like the council budget, the Alliance is exactly what we need to be doing, but it’s happening somewhat tentatively. I think this is simply because we’re not supposed to be organising ourselves. The council isn’t supposed to get out of a section 114 and manage on its own. We’re not supposed to take property away from developers and put it in the hands of the people who actually live there. And historically, when we start doing what we’re not supposed to do, bad things happen. Bad, bad things. But, so far – no bad things on the horizon! So let’s get on with it I say, before someone with money and guns notices what we’re up to.
I promised a practical solution, and you might think I’ve not given one yet. A while ago I drafted an article for Hastings Rental Health in which they mentioned a fascinating co-op in East London called Phoenix. It was set up in the 80s to bring empty buildings back into use by acting as a go-between for tenants and landlords. Unlike the guardian schemes you see, it’s not exploitative. They look after both the tenants’ interests and the landlords’, while trying to negotiate and maintain decent terms for both sides. When things go wrong, the co-op takes responsibility and cleans it up, whoever’s made the mess.
Sounds like a cracking scheme, and just the kind of thing we might need for Hastings’ 3,000 empty homes, short of squatting them or compulsory purchase orders (which I’d personally much prefer, but you know… you get what you’re given sometimes).
Much as it’s frustrating with some of the evil, monolithic providers, we do have to make sure that landlords are as much a part of the solution here as tenants and the local authority. We have to make sure that they don’t feel threatened and that they give up their greed and privilege because they realise it’s a waste of time and resources (not all landlords are greedy but, again, the big greedy ones are very noticeable). That’s the only way change is going to happen. Community is about everyone consenting, everyone volunteering to be part of the same movement and treat everyone else in it as part of a family – except in this family everyone had a choice, and chose to be there.
Unitary power
In 2019 the ONS did a survey on deprivation across the UK. Hastings is the 14th most income-deprived area in the country. The closest to that in East Sussex is Eastbourne at 91st. Every other area in East Sussex is well above the 100 mark. More broadly we’re the 13th most deprived area in the UK when you’re looking across all 11 indices (maybe read categories) of deprivation. In other words, that’s the data saying that East Sussex as a whole has little experience to share with Hastings, which appears to have unique and extreme problems separate to other urban authorities in the county.
In the world of local government we’ve got East Sussex County Council (ESCC) directly above us – it has most of the money, it’s responsible for a number of key services that HBC isn’t, like education, transport, social care, waste disposal (but not collection). It has a 5% council tax cap where we have 3%, and can bargain for more under exceptional circumstances. Given how different Hastings is to the rest of Sussex, we should be bringing these things in house.
Britain has form for making ‘unitary authorities’, where smaller councils like HBC are eaten up by bigger councils like ESCC. But it also has form for giving boroughs like us (at least 26 of them) that same unitary authority, taking a share of power away from the bigger district and county councils. Usually the boroughs are larger than 100,000 people, I’ll admit. So we might be looking at a Hastings and Rother borough rather than a purely Hastings one, and that’ll lead to all sorts of difficult politics, but still, you’d hope, a more localised and relevant treatment than what ESCC gives us.
The Conservative leader on HBC, Andy Patmore, wants us to get eaten up by ESCC. But that won’t fix anything. ESCC already regularly shows it doesn’t care about us. I mean have you seen the roads lately? Have you been in the infamous Harold Road pothole? Had its mugshot in the Observer I tell you! In Patmore’s own ward, he was photographed next to a whistling sinkhole on Pevensey Road, demanding that something be done about it. I live round there. After a long wait with the hole apparently filled, but part of the road still blocked off, you can now see the new sinkhole that’s fallen through close to or on top of the old one. And meanwhile you can wander over that pock-marked stretch of tarmac and hope it won’t collapse on you, waiting for weathering and freeze-thaw to wreck it further. I bet you can tell very similar stories all over town, though I haven’t seen many actual sinkholes about. That’s ESCC ‘looking after us’.
There’s a transport consultation going on at ESCC right now by the way. They want you to have your say, and there’s nothing to stop you complaining.
Side note: that Pevensey Road sinkhole I mentioned is very probably above the rail tunnel between Warrior Sq and West St Leonards. I’m no engineer, but I know tunnels tend to create an instability in the ground above them – moves around a bit more, less stable. I saw a private waterworks crew operating on the new hole the other day, two vans and a truck – a work team. We’ve had various leaks on that part of the road over the years. Adding it all up: could it be that the pitiful state of our water infrastructure has claimed another victim by undermining the roads above our rail tunnels? I smell a future article in the works… or maybe that’s just the drains frothing off again.
Back to this unitary matter. Deputy Council Leader Maya Evans actually wrote about it (while rightly bemoaning the state of our transport infrastructure) in the Jan 6th Observer, “From crater sized pot-holes and cracked paving slabs, to the infrequent and unreliable bus service and the near non-existent cycling network; everyone from the car user to the walker has a terrible time traversing our town… Many residents feel detached from East Sussex, with more in common with Hartlepool rather than Heathfield; probably one of the key arguments for having a unitary authority with all taxes raised in Hastings staying within the town and spent on local services”.
If you’re a green and annoyed at CO2 emissions or that our waste isn’t properly disposed of – we could bring that in house and take care of it. If you’re a parent in Ore who’s unhappy that your school library’s closed, we could have a word. Want the buses to run on time? Well maybe if the people paying for them are the people using them, they will start to run on time.
I tend to mention increased taxes as a potentially good thing (so did Maya), and people might not like that. I can understand if you don’t like paying council tax and don’t see where it goes. But if you were paying it all to Hastings (and only Hastings) for things you could see functioning around town, services tailored to help you… would you still say “tax bad”? Maybe. I prefer a voluntary contributions system myself, but again, sometimes you have to take what little good you can. How about “tax fairly practical under the circumstances?” rather than just “bad”?
Assuming you like the way I and maybe the Hastings Independents are thinking here, I’ve gotta warn you: the vicious swine in Westminster probably won’t release authority to us without some serious imbalance in their favour. With Rother being the district that it is, we’d have some chance of that combination working, maybe more so if we somehow get a Labour MP in next election (and Labour win overall) but also, maybe not.
Labour don’t like the rebellion occurring in their steadfastly loyal Hastings Borough Council that seems to have sacrificed so much (under Kier’s broader administration of the party) for so little. The Starmer squad don’t have much empathy for anyone that isn’t blindly obedient. And anyway, Helena Dollimore. Would you vote for her, Tory reader? Is Kier Starmer’s new Tory party close enough to what you like and trust to meet with electoral success? Because in this constituency, Labour need your votes. Time will tell.
The politics are weird here, I think. If we were a swing seat in this new world that’s fast approaching – would either side want to try and solidify power by granting us a unitary authority that, they’d hope, would be run by them?
I like to think we could bin all this speculation and go for an independent Hastings political organisation boasting cross-party support in the local area. A model that could be exported across Rother, leading us to put a serious case to parliament that we’re ill-represented by ESCC’s shenanigans and are so coherent in our own organisation that they have to give us higher authority. But right now that feels like dreaming. Although… the Hastings Independent group does now exist, and on their website they do call themselves “Hastings Independent Party”.
Britain’s Conclusion
You remember at the start of this I wrote that Hastings represents both Britain’s history and its present? Well I wasn’t being entirely facetious. Certainly as the South goes, we’re a pretty solid example of socio-economic breakdown, a trend that will likely increase across other communities rather than remain isolated to the signal fires.
Whose fault is this collapse? No one person. There’s no easy conviction here. Policies across various significant organisations – Westminster sure, but NHS administration, schools, housing providers, utilities, supermarkets, you name it – have just been going wrong for decades. The only way to really describe it is to call it a “cultural shift”. It’s probably linked to the rise of incompetent and embarrassing leaders across the West, like Boris, Trump, Truss and Biden.
With my historian’s hat on, I’d say we’re at a pinnacle of capitalism where the simple act of personal profit governs the majority of our cultural life. It’s been that way, more or less, for at least 40 years. That’s long enough to notice that when no-one’s really looking out for anyone else, even the people who voted them in as representatives, or who form their friendship groups, who do their surgeries, who teach their children… stop working so well. When it’s all about profit, you ultimately forget about real consequences, which, while they are related to numbers going up and down, are very much not figures on a balance sheet.
In Hastings, you have both the worst impacts of this shift in culture across multiple areas of society, and you have the makings of a counter-culture. A self-organising culture based on the principles of co-operation and community. This is partly representative of what’s going on across the country, and just like we’re being used to test NHS schemes (universal healthcare programme) we could be pioneering in other ways, ways that we lead on ourselves. This isn’t even revolutionary – our government has been cutting as many services as it possibly can, with more and more being handed over to non-state actors each year. From private companies to agents of ‘community,’ like charities, local businesses and occasionally community land trusts and co-ops. Other times, the service just stops existing at all, and again, the implication is that if we want it, we have to run it ourselves.
So, as the council struggles to balance its books and shifts its focus from money to actual impacts on communities, just have a think, reader, about what role you want to play in this town.
Hey there. If you want to respond to this article or add to it, then do get in touch. You don’t have to be an anarchist for your writing to be included here, but it helps. Email: news@hastings-examiner.uk and make sure you peruse our mission statement before you send anything over. Or just barge into the comments section below if that’s your idea of a good time.
Longread: Town on the Edge
Category: Features