Why can't Dave and Gordon learn a few lessons from Britain's most gloriously un-PC supermayor
By Robert Hardman
Last updated at 8:41 AM on 29th August 2009
By his own admission, Peter Davies would make a dreadful Foreign Secretary. Aside from the fact that he has never been in a plane and has been abroad only once (a four-day break to Paris in 1988), diplomacy is not his forte.
This is, after all, a man who proudly proclaims his contempt for 'diversity'.
So the week after next it is going to be interesting when Mr Davies welcomes a delegation of German VIPs on an all-expenses-paid visit to his home town - and tells them not to bother coming back.
'I have only two words of German: "Auf" and "Wiedersehen", ' he says. 'But those are the only words I need.'
And no one is going to stop this proud Yorkshireman. To the shock and dismay of many local councillors and MPs, most of Westminster and the entire Government, the assiduously straight-talking Mr Davies has just become one of the most powerful politicians in Britain.
To make things worse, he did so while a member of one of its tiniest parties, the English Democrats. And to cap it all, his first act was to slash his own pay by 60 per cent.
Less than three months ago, by a narrow margin, this retired schoolmaster was unexpectedly elected executive mayor of the once impregnable - and famously corrupt - Labour citadel of Doncaster. Imagine a Socialist Worker mayor in Surrey and you get the picture.
Executive mayors were a Blairite wheeze to rejuvenate clapped-out, inner-city town halls by creating all-powerful civic superstars (preferably cronies of Tony). Only a handful of cities voted for the idea, though.
The best-known is the Mayor of London, though his powers are by far the weakest. The capital was deemed too important for a single mayoral ego so that post, occupied by Boris Johnson, is largely promotional, with appointing, ribbon- cutting and Olympic finger buffets thrown in.
In the provinces, though, the 11 other executive mayors reign like medieval princes.
'Boris? He's a eunuch,' scoffs Mr Davies, who chooses and supervises a cabinet that controls education, transport, social services and pretty much everything else across his domain. And with a quarter of a million people, Doncaster is by far the biggest of these fiefdoms.
That is why Mr Davies matters. He has made a punchy start which, if replicated nationwide, would lead to public sector bedlam. The question is who should be most worried about his success: Labour or the Tories? Because his message threatens both.
Within a week of his election, Mr Davies had slashed his own salary from £73,000 to £30,000, scrapped the mayoral limousine and abolished the council's free newspaper.
He has written to the Electoral Commission asking them to scrap two-thirds of Doncaster's 63 council seats in order to save the town £800,000 a year.
'If Pittsburgh can manage with nine councillors, why do we need 63?' he asks. 'They each get a basic salary of £12,590 and we have only eight council meetings a year anyway.'
Deeply sceptical of 'green claptrap', he must be the only mayor in Britain who wants more traffic in his town. He says it will boost business and has just announced plans for more parking spaces and an end to bus-only routes. 'Like it or not, we live in the age of the car,' he says.
He wants to cut all 'non-jobs' in his 13,500 workforce - such as platinum-pensioned 'community cohesion officers' - and aims to shrivel future pay deals for council executives.
Much as he likes his chief executive, Paul Hart, he says his £175,000 salary is 'a joke' and that any successor can expect half.
'Don't believe that stuff about "having to pay the best to get the best". It's arrant nonsense - look what it did to the City,' he says.
And he is in the process of 'de-twinning' Doncaster from its five twin towns around the world. Twinning, he says, is all about free holidays for councillors and their staff. On taking office, he was amazed to discover that the council had agreed to pay a £2,800 hotel bill during next month's St Leger race meeting at the local racecourse.
The money is for entertaining councillors from Herten, Doncaster's (soon-to-be-ex) twin town in Germany. It was too late to cancel the reservations, but Mr Davies will ensure the exercise is not repeated.
'Racing happens to be my passion, but I don't expect the taxpayer to fund it,' he says.
While these preliminary cuts may be local government heresy, what has really marked out Mr Davies for liberal opprobrium is his gratuitously provocative assault on what he calls 'the culture of political correctness'.
He has scrapped all future funding for Doncaster's annual Gay Pride event. 'I'm not a homophobe, but I don't see why council taxpayers should pay to celebrate anyone's sexuality,' he says.
He has scrapped funding for council translation services on the grounds that people should be encouraged to learn English. And he has scrapped the word 'diversity' from his list of cabinet portfolios.
'Going on about diversity causes racial tension, it doesn't improve it,' he says. 'The Government has just admitted that gipsies should be given special treatment and that only makes people angry. I want every citizen of Doncaster to be equal.'
Mr Davies is certainly setting himself up for demonisation - by Labour, Tory and Liberal alike. And the twice-married father-of-three hasn't even hit the 100-day mark. His critics are quiet for now, but I dare say Labour HQ has recruited a team of smear merchants to trawl through his past and his bins. He certainly speaks his mind, which is always a godsend for enemy spin doctors.
Here's Davies on climate change:
'I'm not green and I'm not conned by global warming.'
On women in the workplace: 'Why do we expect pregnant women to work?'
On council affiliations: 'I don't want to join things; I want to unjoin them.'
After expressing his support for an English History Day, he received a chummy email from a woman claiming to be a former pupil trying to lure him into saying something racist about Black History Month.
'She turned out to be a fake and I'm no racist,' says Mr Davies. Besides, it was hardly the ideal way of contacting the mayor. He does not use a computer - all his emails are printed out by his staff.
Mr Davies likes to call himself a maverick, but isn't he just a headline-grabbing populist?
Having been elected because he is a non-politician and 'a breath of fresh air' (a recurring phrase among his supporters), won't he end up going native and claiming for mayoral duck houses? Or does he represent the start of a sea change in local, even national, politics?
If a man well to the Right of the Tory leadership can capture a socialist pit town on Arthur Scargill's doorstep, anything is possible.
Having come to Doncaster, I find a bluff, but canny operator sitting in a spectacularly drab Sixties office block that once housed the Coal Board. Mr Davies has attempted to cheer up his viewless office with three racing prints (his own), but without success.
Much as his opponents will try, he is not easy to pigeonhole. He wants to slash costs, but he is not some asset-stripping suit from a big business background.
He is a retired state employee who spent 30 years teaching religious studies. He hates the cult of 'diversity', but says he took his pupils to mosques, synagogues and temples to help them understand other faiths.
A non-practising Anglican, he says he is attracted by certain tenets of Buddhism and believes the Taliban could teach us a thing or two about family values.
'Who says we have the moral right to tell Afghan society how to live?' he says. 'Our troops should not be there.'
Blimey. I can almost sense a touch of the George Galloways - until we turn to crime. He is a keen devotee of the birch and noose. The Doncaster-born son of a socialist butcher, Mr Davies was a Labour activist until 1973, when the rhetoric at a May Day rally drove him to the Conservatives.
He supported that party for more than 20 years, until John Major signed up to the Maastricht Treaty, whereupon Mr Davies joined the UK Independence Party (UKIP).
He says he soon tired of UKIP's infighting and 'hypocrisy', so moved to the lesser-known English Democrats because he was 'fed up with England being taken for a ride'.
continued... http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/arti...diversity.html
Britain's most gloriously un-PC supermayor
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