Jacq Kelly interviews the newly installed leader of City of Edinburgh Council, Jenny Dawe
It’s fair to say that no self-respecting politician can claim to have cut their teeth on the frontline until they have been misquoted in print. Jenny Dawe, the new Liberal Democrat leader of City of Edinburgh Council, recently graduated with distinction in Edinburgh’s Evening News. “Dawe ready to wield axe on flagship plans,” claimed the headline in the daily publication, following the second meeting of the council since May’s election. the article went on to detail a number of measures that she had inherited and was subsequently questioning – MagLev, for example – followed by a leader claiming that Dawe wanted to “dissolve” the partnership that Glasgow City and City of Edinburgh Council had been constructing under the old administrations.
“It’s clear what the Lib Dems are against,” carped the editorial, but “the city awaits with interest to see what they are for. It’s time for them to come out of opposition.”
It seemed a bit harsh given that the copy appeared after what was, after all, only the second council meeting. At the time of our interview, Dawe’s staff had yet to get round to even unpacking her furniture in the leader’s office and muscly men were busy rolling – yes rolling – full filing cabinets up staircases to their new locations. On top of that, the claim that she was set to abandon the city collaboration scheme between Edinburgh and Glasgow was, she says, simply not true.
While she stands by her opposition to MagLev – a “hugely expensive project for a journey that is such a short distance” – she sees the value of working with other Scottish cities for the good of Scotland as a whole.
“I feel I was kind of misquoted in the headline. What I was saying was that I want to see the benefits for Edinburgh – I want to be convinced
I feel I was kind of misquoted in the headline. What I was saying was that I want to see the benefits for Edinburgh – I want to be convinced 
. When you are in opposition, you actually get an enormous amount less information than I already realise you get when you are in the administration. the amount of information that has been piled onto us over the past week … we’ve been given so much information about things, much more reasoned arguments about why certain policies are adopted.
“So my comments on Edinburgh-Glasgow were, yes, Edinburgh is part of the city region going up to Fife and down to the Borders. It’s also part of a sort-of conglomeration going east-west across the country and I can see the advantages in competing against other European cities where you do have that kind of access that seems to work quite well. I was not saying that I was against it per se but that I basically want – and, in fact, I have now been given – a briefing that explains in more detail the actual benefits that might accrue.”
How things have changed for the Lib Dems on Edinburgh City Council and how things have changed for the council as a whole. In her still-bare room, Dawe talks about how “brilliant” it feels to be the first ever Lib Dem leader of the council, particularly given the disappointment of the 2003 election when the Lib Dems, with just 0.5 per cent less of the vote citywide than Labour, ended up with half the number of seats as them.
Like many new council leaders across Scotland, Dawe has a challenge ahead, leading a Lib Dem-sNP coalition where the split between the administration and the opposition is 29-29, with the Provost – Lib Dem councillor George Grubb – holding the casting vote. Labour didn’t take keenly to the backbenches but rather they spent most of the first meeting of the council being as obstructive as possible. But things seem to be settling down and it looks like progress will be possible, albeit with a great deal of negotiation and appeasement.
Dawe is much respected within the Lib Dems, and in a strong position to lead her group. In a debate on water fluoridisation at Lib Dem conference in Aberdeen 2003, Dawe was referred to by more than one speaker as the best example of a “good liberal”, and cited as the reason they would, like her, be voting for a motion opposing fluoridisation. “that’s been said a few times and it’s actually something that I am proud to be described as,” she says.
While she’s unlikely to have any problems whipping her own team, working in coalition will, inevitably, present some challenges. Having navigated the coalition talks successfully – an exhausting process after a tiring election campaign and then two days of vote counting – the challenges now include getting through the Lib Dem manifesto with a budget that was set by the previous administration and a coalition partner to please.
“Ours was the much more detailed manifesto,” she says of the talks. that, in a way, made it easier for a manifesto like the sNP’s to fit in with theirs, with the notable exception of the issue of trams; the Lib Dems are very much in favour of the tram scheme, the sNP very much less so. “We were in discussions with the tories, Labour – the Greens kind of opted out of it. I think they decided that they wanted to be a pressure group on the council and didn’t want to participate in any real kind of administration so that kind of reduced our options to two – either Labour or the sNP. Certainly it would have been easier to have done it with Labour as the numbers would have given us a slight but comfortable margin in any vote.”
So far there has not been a breaking point, she says, though acknowledging that coalition can always be tricky.
“to be perfectly honest, I sometimes forget that it’s a Lib Dem/SNP administration and I am sure that the SNP sometimes forget as well. Steve Cardownie will sometimes say things and think, ‘should I have said that?’, I’ll think things and think, ‘I have to remember to take on board somebody else’s views’ and it will be the same with our group meetings. I think it is inevitably going to mean that we end up with more meetings hammering things out. We’ll have our own internal group meetings as we obviously want to further as much of our manifesto as possible and they obviously don’t agree with every word of it so there will be occasions where issues arise that will need hammering out with the other party.”
One of the first things that the coalition has done is to pass a motion ordering a review of the governance of the council. the Lib Dems stood on a platform of changing the governance of the city, an issue that they acknowledge won’t be of a huge amount of interest to the general public, but which is important to ensure transparency and involvement. “In general terms, I think with STV and the more coalition and consensual politics, I don’t think Edinburgh could have – in fact, it couldn’t have – continued to operate the one-party executive that we had. When it was introduced, we were against it right from the start because we thought that it would lead to two classes of councillor; those who were within the closed cabinet and those who were outwith and that is indeed what happened, both within the Labour Party itself where those councillors who were not within the executive felt quite disenfranchised from decision making. We all felt that the knowledge and experience that we had built up under the old committee system was completely lost.”
It is hoped that the re-introduction of cross-party systems will make sure members become more knowledgeable and lead to better decision making. It will be needed – as well as working within financial boundaries they have little control over for the next financial year, the council will have to settle the issue of equal pay – prickly for most authorities – take tough decisions on property rationalisation as well as try to implement manifestos. there’s also COSLA to navigate, although much of that hangs in the balance as authorities divvy up their COSLA allocations between the different parties now represented across administrations.
so far, Dawe has been to two COSLA meetings – her first leader’s meeting and one meeting with the Cabinet secretary for Finance and sustainable Growth, John swinney. she acknowledges the contribution that current COSLA president Pat Watters (the job will be up for re-election on June 29) has made in ensuring that COSLA tends to get the future of councils to the fore rather than the future of one particular group of councillors, and the important role that such an organisation can play. Aberdeen City Council leader Kate Dean will continue to represent the Lib Dems in COsLA for the foreseeable future and in Edinburgh. Dawe has tried to ensure that an egalitarian approach was taken in ensuring representation at COSLA from her authority.
“We’ve actually been very proportional in the way that we have divvied up COSLA places here in Edinburgh as opposed to what Labour did in the past. that was always a huge bone of contention. I had to fight for years to get a place on COSLA for the Lib Dems – eventually we got it but we’ve divvied it up so that Labour get their proportional representation on that body.”
As for the meeting with Swinney, a bit of probing is required. Like many of the new ministers, Swinney – in all probability snowed under with work while he masters his new brief – has made no major announcements regarding local government as yet. something that contrasts with the approach of his predecessor Tom McCabe. Dawe is forthcoming and cautiously optimistic about the meeting with the Cabinet secretary – a meeting that was instigated by the Executive.
“He was very keen to stress that we might find a different attitude from the new administration from what had gone previously. He was wanting to assure us that there would be less ring-fencing of funds, which is, of course, music to any councillor’s ears […] he was keen to tell us that he saw local government as being a very important part of the governance of scotland, not something that you have to put up with. He dwelt a lot on community planning and I have to say, I did at that point wonder if it was a little bit of a learnt remit […] but there was quite a lot of discussion about that and the difficulty in getting some of the other non-elected organisations on board such as scottish Water and health boards, to actually get them to work closely with local councils and he was also keen to assure us that he was not in favour of more and more targets being set for councils.”
While she describes the meeting as reassuring, one item was notably missing from the agenda. the SNP have argued long and hard for changes to local taxation and, more recently, a freeze on the council tax. there were a lot of things unsaid, says Dawe. It doesn’t take a huge leap of imagination to figure that Dawe will be using whatever sway she and other council leaders have with the Executive to argue against local government funding cuts. But it’s instructive that, when asked what she will prioritise over the next six months, she talks up the manifesto that the Lib Dems campaigned on. “Particularly, those aspects that maybe don’t cost a lot of money – just a change in the culture and more of a ‘can-do’ culture”.
No one has commented on this article.
Related news items:
|
Holyrood magazine is the fortnightly insiders guide to understanding the complexity of Scottish politics and policy developments and is widely regarded as being the leading publication for political news and information in Scotland.
