The death of democracy on Teesside
“It’s like trying to look at a Magic Eye, this stuff. Just when I think I can see it, it slips out of focus,” writes a journalist friend with years and years of experience.
We’ve been providing moral support to each other and sharing information via WhatsApp over the last few months as we try to make sense of the complex political landscape of Teesside and the wider Tees Valley area. I don’t for a minute think that I’ve been able to provide them with the same sort of support that they’ve provided me, but who else can they joke about evasive and impotent FOI responses with?
When you spend your daily life sifting through registers of interest and records on Companies House’s website, trying to keep track of every single social media spat between local councillors, it’s hard not to feel completely flat about the prospect of this week’s local elections. Particularly if your patch covers Teesside.
The complicated political picture across this portion of the North East covers the “Red Wall” heartland; formerly safe Labour territory which is seen from London as a test case for the rest of the monolith they see as “The North”.
The Tees Valley Combined Authority (TVCA) covers five local authorities — Darlington, Hartlepool, Stockton-on-Tees, Middlesbrough and Redcar & Cleveland. It was established in 2016, with each of the council’s leaders sitting on its executive board, which is chaired by an elected metro mayor. Since the post’s establishment in 2017 the mayor has been Ben Houchen.
Houchen had just turned 30 when the local Conservatives selected him as their candidate for the upcoming mayoral election. A councillor in Stockton since 2011 and a losing candidate in the 2012 Middlesbrough by-election and 2014 European elections, he was a shot at nothing for the Tories in this new, uncharted territory of metro mayors, and crossed the 50% threshold to become elected on second round votes.
He was re-elected in 2021 with a landslide 72.8% of votes thanks in part to a taking-no-prisoners campaign and a Labour party who struggled to find a strong candidate to stand against him; and largely on the promise of unfinished business in office — specifically the Teesside freeport. This project is the flagship site of the UK Government’s post-Brexit freeport agenda — Levelling Up in action. It covers 4,500 acres, and promises 20,000 jobs on a site which mostly straddles the hinterland between Middlesbrough and Redcar where the former steelworks stood before closing for good in 2015.
The site is controlled by a private company called Teesworks Ltd, originally set up in March 2020 as a 50/50 joint venture between TVCA subsidiary the South Tees Development Corporation (STDC) and some local businessmen. Around 18 months later the shares had been redistributed so that the public retained only 10% of the business while those local property developers owned 90% of the enormous site without paying so much as a penny.
Coverage of these dealings, and the labyrinthine business structures of the companies that conduct this business has been extensive in Private Eye, which has elicited the sort of responses from Houchen where he describes their reporting as “conspiracy theories and propaganda published in a comic”.
Houchen’s relationship with the media is interesting as an objective case study, but as a reporter or anybody concerned about democracy and transparency it is completely depressing.
When I first reported on the freeport in my first few weeks at The Northern Echo I approached Houchen’s office for comment. As well as a typically long-winded response from Houchen (he often uses the third person as if he’s fantasising about addressing the Speaker in the House of Commons), his team had passed on my details to the area’s local Tory MPs, as well as to a representative of the private businessmen who own shares in Teesworks — Chris Musgrave and Martin Corney. I know this because these additional parties sent unsolicited statements to me before my story had been published.
Since that moment in early January I struggled to get responses from TVCA’s press team for even the most mundane of stories, and I later learned that my rarely-used dummy Facebook account had been pre-emptively blocked from Houchen’s page (he had blocked me on Twitter before I’d even joined The Echo). Meanwhile, colleagues would continue to get press releases about the promise of jobs to come and inward investment, particularly if those releases were reproduced without additional context or questions being asked.
Elsewhere, I know of other journalists who have had stories spiked by Houchen as soon as questions are asked — with the mayor’s office slipping out potentially contentious news in the eighth paragraph of a news release about some new project or other that promises yet more jobs in Teesside in years to come. It doesn’t matter if those jobs don’t materialise in the short term.
In this year’s pre-election period, it’s hard to not feel utterly deflated at the state of things in the area, as accountability seems completely absent. Houchen has been hammering a lie that Labour’s leader in Darlington, Steve Harker, has said he would “defund” the airport that TVCA bought in 2019 for £40m. Harker’s comment was that having a Labour council leader on the TVCA’s executive would “change the dynamic” of operations, and that he hoped for a more transparent way of doing things.
Teesside’s Tories, however, have repeated the lie and the idea that Labour wants to close the airport floats around completely unchallenged. Politicians of both main parties are largely untrusted, and the local media is ill-equipped to deal with deep partisan divisions.
Elsewhere on Teesside, Middlesbrough Council is in crisis with council staff and councillors’ relationships completely dysfunctional, while its independent mayor, Andy Preston, was revealed last month to own property within the jurisdiction of a newly-created development corporation for the town — despite being on the board of this new corporation.
Preston told the FT, who revealed this information, that the idea he was trying to gain financially from his position on the board “would be laughable if it wasn’t so offensive”.
Since then he’s been accused of bullying and intimidating behaviour in a meeting with the head of a local homeless charity where “he went like a madman” and shouted and screamed at them after they asked an innocuous question. A letter accusing the charity’s head of threatening a council member sent by Middlesbrough Council’s legal department followed in October 2022, only for the council to stand down last week, saying that they “were not in a position to substantiate any allegations” made against the person in question. The victim told me that they couldn’t pursue legal action because they don’t have the means.
Cleveland’s Police and Crime Commissioner, a former UKIP councillor named Steve Turner, is standing for election to Redcar and Cleveland Borough Council as a Conservative candidate in the same ward as his wife. Since 2016 the troubled Cleveland Police has had six Chief Constables, a number of whom have resigned amidst controversy and misconduct. The force is in special measures.
While being challenged as to whether or not it’s appropriate for a PCC to hold a seat on a local council, Turner has also been accused by three different people of abusing the power of his office, with his political opponents describing embarrassed police officers showing up at their front doors to tell them that they’re investigating complaints that they had received.
Last month, Redcar and Cleveland council’s leader Mary Lanigan was officially censured for her actions during a dispute with a neighbour after a panel found that she had lied to police by telling them that her husband had been attacked while the opposite was true.
These are all executives of TVCA or the Middlesbrough Mayoral Development Corporation, who are in charge of delivering enormous capital projects and desperately-needed regeneration in the area. Ignoring the petty day-to-day drama of the area’s politics, are any of them remotely qualified to deliver projects of this scale?
Keeping track of all of this is exhausting and demoralising. Those with left-leaning politics seem to agree, avoiding party politics altogether and focusing their efforts on community projects where they can improve local conditions directly. This is especially true since the end of Corbyn’s leadership of the Labour party and the power struggles that followed at local level.
I can only speak of Teesside, since this is where my direct experience is, but similar issues are surely faced by areas across the UK in terms of local engagement with politics, and the ability of local media to hold those in power to account.
The Local Democracy Reporting Service (LDRS) was launched in 2017, it places a journalist — funded by the BBC — at a local news organisation to cover the goings-on of local authorities and other public bodies. They are an invaluable asset to democracy, one which needs more investment and expansion, but while this role was finding its feet, so too were the combined authorities set up across England around the same time.
Places like Greater Manchester have always had attention on them from strong local journalists, as well as from those further afield looking to point the finger at any perceived failings by Labour’s mayor, Andy Burnham. Meanwhile, Tees Valley has been left away from the glare of accountability, which has allowed an environment where incumbent politicians have become outright hostile in public to journalists trying to hold them to account. A lack of transparency is the norm here.
If politics is to see increased devolution of powers, the same has to be seen in empowerment of media at local levels, too.
Holding politicians to account is crucial to democracy, but it’s also crucial to the provision of public services. When constituents are able to ask questions of politicians, and those politicians have to take the time to justify what they do in office, it slows the whole process down and can help avert or at least mitigate disasters of policy. It can save politicians from giving in to their worst instincts.
When those questions are cast aside and labelled as “conspiracy” or “propaganda” it can create an environment where politicians feel free to do what they want, eventually leading themselves into positions where they are completely out of their depth but unable to change course due to a combination of hubris, wilful ignorance, and the enormous pressure to deliver that they’ve put themselves under.
The situation in Teesside is enormously complicated, and constantly changing and shifting focus. With a Magic Eye puzzle, once the solution reveals itself to the viewer, it cannot be unseen — the same is true of politics here. Although it has been sequestered, either wilfully or through incompetence, the truth will come into sharp focus and viewers will be left kicking themselves about having not seen it previously.
