A Knight in A Museum?

Always first to support local government the Express and Star put this little beauty out today
http://www.expressandstar.com/news/2014/01/13/historic-bantock-house-museum-faces-axe-in-latest-wolverhampton-cutbacks/

I like Bantock Park lots. A very accessible space that caters for a number of leisure and recreation interests and the house and gardens are exquisite, managed by a dedicated team that takes visible pride in its work. There's a smashing cafe and meeting/exhibition facilities.
It's great but it's not essential and the Express and Star has, whilst wearing a bright waistcoat and a rascal's hat, taken an opportunity to raise the temperature on an already pretty-much battered council. And the "usual suspect" voices squeak for attention.

• Expenses
• Wages
• "Mad projects"
• Lining their own pockets
• I could balance the books

...type statements proliferate and as this kind of noise is made, a quieter and more sinister agenda embeds itself.

Governance without the capacity to direct assets held by those in Governance is administration. And there is a strategic component to Governance: an important dimension of being able to somehow envision what a "better future" (remember that?) might look like and what we might need to do to get there. For councils it is a tough, tough plate spinning act between statutory duties, spending constraints and "what we want to do."

That the electorate has systematically disengaged with local politics is a greater risk to the people of Wolverhampton (or anywhere else) than is the re-configuring of how we might keep open a community asset that though valuable, could barely be described as "essential". Yet in rejecting that which is of aesthetic value we deprive ourselves of that which is, in its own right "good and improving" whatever the historical context.

We have it would seem arrived at a place where the visionaries of the 19th century would have shied from. A place of "essentials only". We are offered a political context that seems to consist of the self-serving when for the vast majority of the elected members the reverse, in Wolverhampton and elsewhere is nearer the truth. Good people, hard working and kind people give their time for expenses that reflect only in part the importance of their role.One that is all too easy to criticise from a point of often poorly informed prejudice.

Local Authority employees work, by definition in an uncertain and challenging context,  certain sometimes of the certainty of the perverse semi-truth "You can spend all of your life doing good and better on a day-to-day basis and no-one knows: screw up once and everyone knows." And these are free-loaders, spongers and time-servers? Really?

So Express and Star, perhaps you'd like to dedicate some space to the real impact of cuts on centrally held services that reach out and touch people every day. Maybe some of your bright waist-coated,  rascal-hatted mischief might direct itself at the effectiveness of services now delivered by the private sector-particularly for the recipients of something that is decidedly less than it once was. Perhaps you'd like to call to account the relentless assault on local democracy and decision making and the abandonment of the high values of civic pride and social cohesion.

Bantock House is beautiful. So is aspiration, access and a sense of belonging, purpose and security in your own parish, town or city and perhaps we should start from there.