Former home secretary's warning of 'post-Soviet' meltdown prompts accusation that Labour is using Sheffield as 'political battering ram'
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A warning by David Blunkett of "post-Soviet" meltdown in Sheffield has prompted Liberal Democrat accusations that Labour is using the city as a "political battering ram". Photograph: Martin Argles for the Guardian
It is difficult to understand why anyone who takes the reins of power in Sheffield would want to work anywhere else.
The leader of the council occupies a spacious suite of offices in the last great Victorian town hall that opened in 1897, four years before the Queen's death.
The famous Downing Street staircase, lined with the portraits of former prime ministers, looks like the backstairs of a country house in comparison with Sheffield town hall. The sweeping staircase from the town hall's immaculately maintained ground floor greeting area rivals those gracing the finest chancelleries in Europe.
On the way up visitors pass a statue of the 15th Duke of Norfolk, a philanthropic Tory who served as the city's last mayor and first Lord Mayor. Successive holders of England's premier dukedom, who own much of Sheffield, did rather well in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries when the city became one of the world's great centres of steel production.
The collapse of the steel industry in the 1970s and 1980s led to a serious decline in the city's fortunes. It was at this point that David Blunkett first made his name as a firebrand left wing leader of Sheffield City Council between 1980-87. Sir Irvine Patnick, the last Tory to hold Nick Clegg's seat of Sheffield Hallam, accused the future champion of New Labour of creating the "People's Republic of South Yorkshire".
Blunkett swapped his billet in the town hall for a seat in parliament in 1987. Only last year Paul Scriven, the Liberal Democrat leader of the council, hoped to follow in Blunkett's tracks. He came within 165 votes of capturing the parliamentary seat of Sheffield Central from Labour.
Blunkett and Scriven, leaders of the council in different eras, are now locking horns over the spending cuts in Sheffield in a debate which is being echoed across the country.
Scriven accuses Blunkett of wanting to return to the days when Labour used Sheffield as a "political battering ram". The Lib Dems were enraged when the former home secretary warned of a "post-Soviet" meltdown in which people would be forced to fend for themselves. Blunkett, who is MP for Sheffield Brightside and Hillsborough, raised the prospect last September of scavenging in the streets if the area-based grant, which tackles deprivation and is worth £215m to Sheffield until 2015, was scrapped.
Clegg, who appeared on the platform with Blunkett, denied that the grant (also known as the Working Neighbourhoods Fund) would be scrapped, according to the Sheffield Telegraph. In the autumn spending review the grant was duly scrapped, though the Treasury said it did this because it wanted to wrap "funding streams" into the overall settlement.
Scriven says the warning from Blunkett is typical of a Labour party that fails to take responsibility for the "financial mess" it bequeathed the nation last year and fails to acknowledge that it would be imposing similar cuts in government. Scriven told me during a recent trip to the city ahead of the local elections on 5 May:
The history of the 1980s of how Labour used this council as a political battering ram is not good for this city. I really fear the red flag gets hoisted above the town hall again and we get into confrontation and not dialogue, when we can with government, to deal with a financial mess left by Labour.
The leader of the council questions the decision by the coalition government to "frontload" the cuts. Sheffield is having to impose £215m in cuts over the next four years, of which £80m must be introduced this year as part of George Osborne's "frontloading" of the reductions.
But, as a former health service manager, Scriven understands the need to make a prompt start on cuts:
Those who have studied how you reduce the public sector funding [have found] you have got to pressure in right at the beginning, otherwise you get slippage which you can't make back up towards the end because the opportunity has gone. So it is about putting pressure into the system to make sure it happens rather than some political design to say that nearer the election we can have tax cuts.
Scriven says that even amid this backdrop he has cut with care:
Who can you best trust in these really difficult times to make the savings that the council need to make in a way that is doing its absolute best to protect frontline services and minimise job losses?
This is one of the key differentiators. One only has to look across to our neighbours - Labour Manchester and Labour Leeds - to see huge cuts in frontline services, thousands of job losses in the coming financial year and Liberal Democrat Sheffield where there hasn't been one closure of a library, one closure of a Sure Start centre, one closure of a leisure centre, one closure of a swimming pool, public toilets and we are having to make 270 job reductions in the coming year.
It really is the difference between us being innovative, using good management techniques, looking at how we can provide services more effectively and efficiently without going straight for the axe to frontline services.
Paul Blomfield who defeated Scriven in Sheffield Central in last year's general election, says his former parliamentary opponent is simply deferring difficult decisions:
The Liberal Democrats have set a whole series of elephant traps for the incoming administration confident that it won't be them. And Nick has been talking about this as responsible local government. It is deeply cynical local government.
Labour needs to win three seats on 5 May to take control of the council which has been run as a minority administration by the Lib Dems for the past year. Julie Dore, the Labour leader in the city, is scathing about Clegg who has not been forgiven, she says, for failing to stand up for the city when an £80m loan to Sheffield Foregmasters was cancelled last June:
Nick Clegg is invisible. The elusive pimpernel. He's not on any of their leaflets. We have had high profile frontbenchers to Sheffield - Ed Miliband, Harriet Harman, John Healey, Andy Burnham.
Nick Clegg doesn't appear to be campaigning at all for the Liberal Democrats. But who knows? There are three weeks to go. People are very angry, they are very very angry. People tell us on the doorstep. It is not just local people feel angry. Business people feel angry. Forgemasters rippled through Sheffield.
Dore is quietly confident that Labour will regain control of the council on 5 May when a third of the council's 84 seats are up for election. This is because the Lib Dems is having to defend seats in four of the council's five marginal wards: Gleadless Valley, Walkley, Hillsborough and East Ecclesfield.
But Labour is taking nothing for granted because there is a strong anti-Labour vote in the city. Until 1994, when the Liberal Democrats first made a breakthrough in Sheffield, the Tories were the main opposition to Labour. The Tory vote has never returned to the party but it still appears keen to oppose Labour.
This is what one senior Labour figure in Sheffield told me:
What will make the result more interesting, and why we can't take things for granted, is that there used to be a strong Conservative presence.
Lots of Conservative voters began to realise during the 1990s that, if above everything, we want to get rid of Labour we'll start voting Lib Dem.
In large parts of the city that vote will hold solid. It is the anti-Labour vote from the right. Why would they abandon the Lib Dems now?
That view is borne out on the streets of Sheffield. In Nether Edge, a mixed income ward in the parliamentary constituency of Sheffield Central close to Clegg's leafy constituency of Sheffield Hallam in the south west of the city, former Tories said they will stick with the Lib Dems.
This is what Antonio Sandivasci, who runs a branch of Howdens Joinery in the city, told me:
I was a waverer to the blue side. But I vote Liberal Democrat now. I think these cuts need to happen. I am in business. You cannot say we have this massive bill and because we don't like bills we are not going to pay it. We all need to tighten our belts.
But in an adjoining street in the Brincliffe area of the ward Jayne Dore, a Lib Dem candidate, was given a taste of the anger at Nick Clegg's U-turn on tuition fees. Tim Sushams, 30, a primary school teacher, politely told Dore that he will not be supporting the Lib Dems after voting for Scriven in the general election last year. This is what Sushams says:
Last year in the general election I made a mistake voting Lib Dem. That was not the wisest decision I made. My wife says I am to blame for the Conservative government.
Nick Clegg comes across as someone who made his decision [to form a coalition with the Tories] on the grounds of political expediency. I know people have to make decisions. But it is his manner. I feel let down.
So Sheffield's political future is not straightforward. But one thing is clear: it will remain a Tory free zone, raising questions about David Cameron's ability to win a parliamentary majority if his party cannot return to northern urban areas.