City council explores cutting free parking on holidays
Free parking on holidays in the capital could be ended in a bid to increase funding for 'lifeline' Edinburgh bus services.
Currently, parking is free on Boxing Day, Easter Monday, Christmas Day and New Years' Day.
But on Thursday, councillors voted to explore cutting all four free parking days to help fund vital but commercially unprofitable bus routes in the city.
Labour councillor and Transport and Environment Committee convener Stephen Jenkinson said: 'The idea is to try and widen the scope, just to see what the art of the possible is with regards to how much finance could potentially be raised.'
The original plan, as presented by Liberal Democrat councillor Neil Ross, was to cut free parking on Boxing Day and Easter Monday, but leave the other two parking holidays intact.
However, he accepted an amendment to his motion by Cllr Jenkinson that will see officers explore cutting all four parking holidays.
Cllr Ross said: 'In context of making standard charges across the board, 365 days a year, I did explore that with parking officers.
'We looked at Christmas Day and New Years' Day, and the response I had was that that wouldn't produce any revenue.
'It would cost the council, simply because of the overtime rates that would require to be paid to the parking wardens. But we can explore that as well.'
Council officers will also explore how much revenue could be brought in for subsidising bus services from several other parking changes.
These include abolishing 'pay and display' parking bays near the city centre, as well as getting rid of free motorcycle parking bays in the city.
Cllr Ross previously told the Local Democracy Reporting Service that he hoped any funds raised from the possible parking changes could support the addition of new bus services in the city, which run on unprofitable yet socially useful routes.
One example is the 42 bus – axed two years ago, it provided a link between Craigleith and Portobello.
The city currently subsidises several bus routes, both through Lothian Buses and through other operators, but it is hoped that any services funded by increased parking income would be new.
SNP councillor Neil Gardiner expressed hope that funding from any possible change to the parking rules could help fund improved bus service to Ratho.
He said: 'What we need to do in this area is bring innovative thinking.
'I think there's an appetite with the Lost Shore wave garden in our ward as well to potentially contribute to a better bus service for Ratho, which is currently, shamefully, the most isolated community in Edinburgh.
'Ratho wants action. I hope that I can get support across the chamber for that today to get one more step in what we're all looking for, to get Ratho its bus service.'
An amendment filed by Cllr Gardiner asking officers to explore opportunities for businesses to support the running of subsidised bus routes was approved by councillors.
Officers will report back on the feasibility of making the parking changes to subsidise bus services at the September meeting of the Transport and Environment Committee.
Get all the latest news from around the country Follow STV News
Scan the QR code on your mobile device for all the latest news from around the country
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
The Guardian
3 hours ago
- The Guardian
‘They feel betrayed': how Reform UK is targeting votes in Britain's manufacturing heartlands
When Nigel Farage called for the nationalisation of British Steel on a visit to the Scunthorpe steelworks this spring, it was a marked change in direction for a man who had spent almost all of his political career campaigning for a smaller, Thatcherite state. Two years earlier, he had questioned why British taxpayers' money should be thrown into keeping the fires of the very same blast furnaces burning. Back in 2018 he told an interviewer: 'I supported Margaret Thatcher's modernisation and reforms of the economy. It was painful for some people, but it had to happen.' After gaining a fifth MP and sweeping to a string of victories in England's local elections last month, his Reform UK is coming for Labour in places Keir Starmer's party once considered its traditional heartlands: the former mill towns, pit villages and workshops of northern England and the Midlands, the steel towns of south Wales and the shipyards of Scotland. Farage's success in what journalists and politicians know as the 'red wall' – ripped from Labour control by Boris Johnson in 2019 – is no coincidence. The targeted campaign plotted from Reform's Millbank Tower headquarters overlooking the River Thames has the general election in 2029 squarely in mind. Rightwing populists around the world are increasingly campaigning on the consequences of deindustrialisation: from Donald Trump's efforts to champion the US rust belt to Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) targeting east German auto workers. Railing against net zero, sky-high energy prices and threats to sovereignty – after supply chain disruption in the Covid crisis, and a fracturing geopolitical landscape – are central to the playbook. There is, however, an irony of a privately educated former commodities trader and career politician offering hope for Britain's deindustrialised communities, where successive governments have promised – and largely failed – to turn around decades of living standards stagnation. In the first on a series on the battle for Britain's deindustrialised areas, the Guardian maps out the rise in support for Reform, and speaks to its campaigners, Labour, the Conservatives, union leaders and economists to document the high-stakes fight. From the vantage point of the 34th floor of the Shard, Zia Yusuf explained how Reform would unshackle the City of London by cutting wealth taxes and deregulating bitcoin. But the party's then chair had his sights elsewhere at the same time. The former Goldman Sachs banker and millionaire startup founder said there was good reason why working-class voters were turning to Reform. 'If you go and speak to people who live in these communities, they just feel completely betrayed,' he said. 'I spent a lot of time in Runcorn. A lot of this is driven basically by a political class that's never really thought about the experience of people living in these areas. And Nigel speaks to those people. '[As with] one of the things Trump is trying to do – whatever your views on the approach he is taking – I think we've got to manufacture more things here. We've got to have energy security. We can't be in a crazy situation where we're unable to produce primary steel.' The message of reindustrialisation is viewed as a unifying theme for Reform's policies. In the pivot to the economic left, Farage's road trip has taken him to Runcorn and Newton Aycliffe, County Durham – where Reform triumphed in elections last month – and the steel towns of Scunthorpe and Port Talbot. In Port Talbot, the south Wales town that recently lost its blast furnaces, he demanded their reopening – along with the valleys' coalmines. However, Labour is fighting back. Rachel Reeves placed investment and regional economic 'renewal' at the heart of her spending review last week, namechecking places that would be sprayed with cash. The government's long-awaited industrial strategy, due on Monday, is designed to bolster manufacturing, and there are hopes that it will tackle sky-high energy prices for industry. Such is the threat in Labour's old heartlands that Starmer used a hastily arranged visit to a St Helens glass factory last month to decry Reform for its 'fantasy economics', comparing Farage to Liz Truss. Will Jennings, the professor of political science and public policy at the University of Southampton, said: 'The fact they are focusing their campaigns there are because the sorts of voters drawn to their messages are there. 'The structure of support for Reform, much like for the Brexit party and Ukip before it, very much tends to be in particular areas, described often, sometimes unhelpfully, as 'left-behind towns'. They tend to be older, have former manufacturing industries, tend to be distant from Westminster, and tend to have suffered economic loss.' Reform came second to Labour in 89 constituencies at the 2024 general election, running Starmer's party closest in the 103-year-old south Wales Labour stronghold of Llanelli, a steel town once famous for manufacturing tinplate. Most of the constituencies are in the north and Midlands. It is these seats where the 2029 battle will be most fierce. Analysis by the Guardian shows these target seats have a higher share of manufacturing jobs than the country at large, demonstrating that, despite decades of industrial decline, they remain more dependent than most on steel, car manufacturing and chemicals. Overall they account for a fifth of Britain's industrial base. Including towns such as Redcar, Wigan and Rotherham, the average share of manufacturing employment is 12.3%, compared with 8.8% for the UK as a whole. The seat of Washington and Gateshead South, home to the vast Nissan factory near Sunderland, has the highest share, at 35.3%. Separate research by the Trades Union Congress shows Labour seats with the most manufacturing jobs are more likely to have Reform as the second party (34% of seats), compared with the average across all Labour constituencies (22%). Recent predictions from MRP models show Reform would win at least 180 seats if an election was held tomorrow, including nearly all of the places where it placed second to Labour in 2024. Most of the seats cover towns that have been hit hard economically by manufacturing decline. When Margaret Thatcher came to power in 1979, Britain's industrial base was already dwindling from its peak in the early 20th century, yet still contributed about 30% to GDP. Many areas were also still dominated by industry – including Hartlepool, Burnley and Stoke-on-Trent, where more than half of all jobs were in manufacturing. The deindustrialisation of the 1980s was, however, brutally fast as the UK transitioned to a more services-oriented economy, reliant on imported goods. Today manufacturing accounts for about a tenth of annual output. But Reform is not only targeting nostalgia for a bygone age when Britain made things. When the factories closed, the jobs they offered were either not replaced or were supplanted by lower-paid, insecure work. Whole towns have suffered economically as a result, falling behind the rest of the country despite the promises of successive governments to turn things around. Austerity made matters worse. Last month, research by academics at the University of Staffordshire showed cuts since 1984 have disproportionately affected coalfield and deindustrialised areas, including reductions in welfare and benefit worth £32.6bn between 2010 and 2021. Andy Haldane, the former Bank of England chief economist, said: 'Whichever lens you look at – economic, social, environmental – those places have been lost, and in that sense they have been left behind. And if not overlooked, then underinvested in, systematically, over at least a generation. If not two. 'The longer that has gone on and has turned into generational stasis, or a lack of social mobility, the greater people in those places have willingness to seek redemption elsewhere. Brexit was that, almost a decade ago. And Reform might be it now.' Haldane, the architect of levelling up, and a key figure in the last government's industrial strategy, said Farage had effectively become a 'tribune for the working classes'. The Guardian's analysis shows Reform's target seats would have an average ranking on the English index of multiple deprivation of 92, out of 543 places in total, with 1 being the most deprived. The index brings together a wide range of data sources to build a picture of deprivation, including income, work, education, health and crime rates. Sign up to Business Today Get set for the working day – we'll point you to all the business news and analysis you need every morning after newsletter promotion Average wages are £65 a week lower than the UK average. Unemployment, economic inactivity and the rate of jobless benefit claims are higher. To track the rise of Reform, Labour researchers have been using data from parliamentary petitions as a straw poll to see if the party is growing in their local area. Analysts are poring over data from the 'Call a General Election' online poll, launched within months of the last one, and signed by 3 million people. Signatories have to enter a postcode, enabling support to be plotted geographically. Hotspots included Essex and Lincolnshire – Reform strongholds. 'We're looking at how active they are, where we can assign a high probability that it [a petition] is being driven by Reform or their organised groups via WhatsApp,' said one adviser to a Labour MP. Almost all the Reform target seats backed Brexit, including 15 Labour won from the Tories in 2024. Most had only been Tory since 2019, when many decades-old Labour seats backed Boris Johnson's 'levelling up' and 'get Brexit done' messages. On average, leave voters tend to be more socially conservative and anti-immigration. Many 'red wall' MPs are pushing Starmer to adopt a tougher stance on immigration as a result, including the Blue Labour caucus founded by Maurice Glasman. Reform has pushed hard on the issue, in a high-stakes campaign after last summer's riots across the UK – including in many post-industrial towns. Experts said economic conditions alone did not explain anti-migrant views or justify rioting, but that austerity and stalling living standards fuelled grievances and mistrust of institutions. Luke Telford, a criminal and social policy academic at the University of York and author on Brexit and deindustrialisation, said: 'The key narratives we heard in the months after [the riots] was it is all about the far right and social media. 'Undoubtedly that's an important contributor to the outbursts of inarticulate rage we saw. But that rage doesn't occur in a vacuum, it is bound to certain social, cultural and economic conditions that combined. 'It's certain that the areas among the most deprived, were among those with high levels of rioting. It's impossible to ignore that kind of correlation.' However, fetishising industrial jobs and prioritising the restoration of British manufacturing might not be the best route to an economic renaissance. Not least because England's regions are more economically and culturally diverse places than some in Westminster give them credit for. Many economists say the idea is riddled with misunderstanding about modern Britain, where its strengths mainly lie in high-value services, rather than on low-paid production that is at risk of being automated away. Most Britons think manufacturing is important for the economy. Most parents do not want their children to pursue a career in the sector. 'I don't think you have to replace manufacturing job with manufacturing job in a Trump-like fashion to resist the rise of populism,' said Haldane. 'But you do need to replace them with something that is at least as good, in terms of quality of work, pay, security and a degree of pride around it. And you do need to invest in the supporting infrastructure. Whether that's transport, housing, or social infrastructure – like youth clubs and parks.' Reindustrialisation runs like a seam of coal through the rhetoric of rightwing populists worldwide – seen most prominently in Trump's Make America Great Again campaign to 'bring back' factory jobs to rust belt states. Much of the intellectual driving force behind reviving industry emanates from the US. The economist Oren Cass and his American Compass conservative thinktank, with close ties to JD Vance in particular, has promoted a 'new right' strategy prioritising a pro-worker, pro-trade union, pro-industry agenda that is scathing of corporate America. Cass was among speakers – including Farage and Kemi Badenoch – at a London conference held by the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship (Arc) this year, sharing a stage with Michael Gove, the Spectator editor and former Tory cabinet minister. Founded by the Canadian psychologist and self-help author Jordan Peterson and the Tory peer Philippa Stroud, Arc's financial backers include the British hedge fund manager Paul Marshall and the Dubai-based investment firm Legatum – who also co-own GB News, where Farage has a prime-time show. Another figure is Matthew Goodwin, also a GB News commentator and regular speaker at Reform rallies. An ex-academic, he studied what he calls the 'realignment' of British politics, whereby the left has shifted to supporting liberal, metropolitan values, allowing the right to hoover up more socially conservative, working-class voters. Farage and Trump share common ground in promising to roll back net zero – ostensibly to boost manufacturing jobs in heavier polluting sectors, including oil and gas, coal, steel and chemicals. And both are courting trade union members and their worries over foreign competition, the impact of decarbonisation and high energy costs on heavy industry. Gary Smith, the general secretary of the GMB union, which includes offshore workers in Scotland among its members, has called for an 'honest debate' about Labour's plans for industry. He told the Guardian that net zero advocates on the left risked fuelling support for Reform by leaving workers out of the debate. 'Climate fundamentalism and rightwing populism are two cheeks of the same backside,' he said. 'We need to have a programme about jobs and apprenticeships to bring back hope. Neoliberalism is dead and globalisation as we knew it is over. Working-class people aren't voting for cheap TVs and training shoes. They want their jobs back.' At an event in Westminster late last year to lobby Labour MPs on high manufacturing energy costs, GMB's shop stewards were approached uninvited by the Reform deputy leader, Richard Tice, trying to curry their favour. But while Reform can count on support from some union members, the labour movement's leaders are furious at its overtures. 'We wouldn't talk to those fuckers. Load of posh boys hanging tough for the working class? They can go fuck themselves,' said one union boss. Paul Nowak, the general secretary of the TUC, said: 'The hypocrisy is stunning. This is a guy [Farage] who was hanging on the coat-tails of Donald Trump. He turns up at Scunthorpe saying he wants to save British Steel at the same time as his mate in the White House is slapping tariffs on steel and could cost jobs across Britain's manufacturing base. 'In industrial communities there is a lot of cynicism about politics and whether it can make a difference. But it can make a tangible difference to peoples lives who is in Downing Street.' For Labour, the challenge from Farage showed the importance of an 'ambitious' industrial strategy, he said. It could be central to its hopes of winning a second term.
New Statesman
3 hours ago
- New Statesman
Meet the Blue Labour bros
Illustration by Nate Kitch Blue Labour has always been more of a collection of guys than a faction. From its beginnings in the aftermath of the financial crisis, it was Maurice Glasman and a small handful of Jons and not a huge amount more. It is now having something of a resurgence, and beginning to develop a degree of internal reality, although the reality of its actual influence remains debated. A Blue Labour group of MPs formed at the end of last year; now a parliamentary staff network has been set up. There are, I'm told, around 15 of these staffers so far, planning a roster of events and meetings and general association. Over the last few weeks, I've been speaking to some of the new staff group to try and understand them. What does this lanyard class that hates the lanyard class believe? You can paint a picture of who they are with heavy use of the caveat 'mostly but not exclusively'. They are mostly, but not exclusively, men, and mostly, but not exclusively, quite young. They mostly work for new-intake MPs; they are mostly white, and mostly from outside of London. In short, they look like any random sampling of Labour's parliamentary staff class would. Some work for members of the Blue Labour MPs group; some work for completely conventional Starmer-era Labour MPs. Their diagnosis of what is wrong with the country and what Labour should do about it is commensurate with the rest of Blue Labour in its Dan Carden and Jonathan Hinder era. One member of the staff network views Blue Labour as a project of 'realigning the party with areas it represents'. Having come into the party as a Corbynite, they say they 'used to be much more liberal on immigration', but now believe that in the country the 'Overton Window has moved' and have moved with it. One staffer talks about being the grandchild of immigrants and hearing her family and friends increasingly express concern that more recent immigrants are not well integrated – indicating, she thinks, that worries about immigration and integration are far from the preserve of racists and traditionally anti-immigration parties, but are something Labour needs to reckon with. Another staffer says that Blue Labour is concerned with people who have been 'ignored by the establishment for decades', suffering both 'economic neglect' but also being 'ignored on issues like immigration'. He reckons that the 'liberalism of Blair has dominated the party for two decades', with 'not enough focus on class'. Another thinks we have an 'economy too focused on London and the South East', and that Labour is 'not giving white working-class men anything'. 'You've got to read the way the world is going,' they say, and ask 'do we want it in a Labour way, or in a right-wing way?' However, while my impression of Jonathan Hinder is as a man of total conviction (believing among other things that universities should be allowed to go bust and that we should at least think very seriously about leaving the ECHR), the staffers seem just as animated by the process of thinking and talking about politics as they do by the positions themselves. Clearly one of the attractions is not the specific appeal of Blue Labour itself, but the space it provides to talk about things. Keir Starmer's Labour Party is not a very ideas-y place, and these are, on an intellectual level, painfully earnest young people. 'We debate quite a lot – it's good to talk about ideas and philosophy, and all the things staffers never talk about,' says one member; another feels there is a 'frustration with the lack of ideas from the progressive wing of the party'. A third notes that 'a lot of MPs are issues-led, but not political'. When I ask for political heroes, I get Crosland and Blair: my strong sense is that in a different internal climate, these people might not have found themselves at the door of Blue Labour, and instead been scattered, ploughing perhaps somewhat idiosyncratic furrows in a variety of different factions. However, while their attitude to the government could in broad terms be described as loyalist, the ideological vacuum of Starmerism – famously unburdened by doctrine – and the government's lack of (or even decidemad uninterest in) intellectual vitality brings them here. It's not surprising that the people who are here for the debating society have ended up in the tendency which began life as (and arguably has never been much more than) a series of seminars. The staff group's convenor does sees debate as part of the programme though: he says having 'debate and discussion' is really important in and of itself, but also hopes to help flesh out the Blue Labour policy programme (answering questions like, 'what is a Blue Labour foreign policy?' for example). This desire for debate also intersects with another current dynamic in the party: the total sidelining of the Labour left. Dan Carden, the leader of the Blue Labour MP caucus, was a member of Corbyn's shadow cabinet and came up through Unite (he has described his journey into Blue Labour as being from 'left to left'). Various members of the staff network started their political lives as Corbynites, and even those who didn't are fairly ardent believers in the need for a broad-church Labour Party. I hear some variant on 'Blair never expelled Corbyn' more than once in my conversations. One staffer thinks that thanks to Corbyn's foreign policy positions and the anti-Semitism scandal, 'the entire Corbyn project was delegitimised' and there wasn't a thorough evaluation of what worked and what didn't. Subscribe to The New Statesman today from only £8.99 per month Subscribe As much as one of the older members I speak to wants to stress that Blue Labour is not just a reaction to Reform and has been 'going for 15 years', the experience of Corbynism and of the loss of Red Wall seats in 2019 has clearly imprinted itself deeply on the tendency's new iteration. The new Blue Labour owes significant DNA not just to the valiant seminar-convening of Jonathan Rutherford and co., but also to post-2019 projects like the moderate 'Renaissance', the Corbynite 'No Holding Back', and the Labour Together thinking on show in 'Red Shift', the report which famously brought us Stevenage Woman. This post-Corbyn inheritance is also present in how the tendency talks about the state and the economy. In one staffer's view, Blue Labour's 'economic populism is more important than its cultural elements'; the group's convenor immediately says that it is Blue Labour's answers on political economy that most appealed to him. The staffers' views chime with the views of Blue Labour MPs Jonathan Hinder, Connor Naismith and David Smith, who wrote in LabourList last week that their agenda is 'an explicit challenge to the neoliberal, capitalist consensus, and it belongs to the radical labour tradition'. There is a reticence amongst the staffers when it comes to Glasman and some of his more recent interventions (the repeated assertion that progressives don't want you to enjoy sex with your wife; an appearance on Steve Bannon's podcast; tirades about the chancellor and the attorney general). While the group's convenor (who tells me that he first became interested in Blue Labour because when was younger he would 'watch and read stuff online, lectures and articles, by Cruddas and Glasman') says the Labour peer's connections with the Maga movement are 'realpolitik', conversations Labour needs to be open to having, others are less positive and more awkward when asked about their long-time standard bearer. They also acknowledge that Blue Labour has, as one of them puts it, a 'brand issue' within Labour, a party whose membership are in the main bog-standard left liberals. They aren't wrong: one Labour MP I spoke to about this piece called Blue Labour 'four guys who claim they do have girlfriends but that they go to another school'. It's hard to escape the impression that this MP and critics like them won't be persuaded by one staffer's arguments that Blue Labour is 'not anti-liberal, it's a critique of liberalism' or another's earnest assertion that he just wants more of our political conversation to address the 'moral plane' of people's lives. Arguments about the out-of-touch nature of the political classes are probably not best made by Westminster bag carriers – as the bag carriers well know. (There are 'too many of me in the economy', the group's convenor, a white man in his 20s with an Oxbridge degree, tells me ruefully.) Everything, however, starts somewhere. Political history is scattered with the vehicles of bright young things, some of which went places and some of which didn't. This group of earnest young people could do worse for themselves than as the staff vanguard of Labour's most discussed faction – even if not all the discussion is wholly positive. That being said, the staff network claims fairly moderate ambitions for itself and its tendency: 'Can I ever see them putting forward NPF or NEC candidates? Honestly, no,' one member tells me. In the meantime, though, there's another seminar to attend. [See also: Labour's 'old right' has been reborn] Related
South Wales Argus
3 hours ago
- South Wales Argus
Abergavenny library mosque proposal decision date named
A decision to grant a 30-year lease on the former Abergavenny library was approved in May before being put on hold pending review by a council scrutiny committee, which met last week, and said the decision had to go back to the cabinet within 10 working days. Just days before the scrutiny committee took place the words 'No Masjid' and crosses were spray painted on to the grade II listed building with police investigating the criminal damage as a hate crime. Masjid is Arabic for place of worship or mosque. Monmouthshire council's Labour-led cabinet will now consider the arguments made at the place scrutiny committee when it meets for its regular meeting on Wednesday, June 25 and must decide whether to stand by its original decision or reconsider it. The scrutiny committee heard from Abergavenny mayor Philip Bowyer and town council colleague Gareth Wild, a Baptist minister, who both spoke in favour of the cabinet's decision to grant the lease to the Monmouthshire Muslim Community Association. READ MORE: Banner of support draped over Abergavenny mosque graffiti Four public speakers, including Sarah Chicken the warden of the alms houses next door to the former library, a resident, and Andrew Powell landlord of the nearby Groefield pub objected to the decision, citing reasons such as parking and potential for noise as to why a mosque and community centre would be unsuitable. Cabinet member Ben Callard, who lives near the proposed mosque and represents the area on the town council though he is the county councillor for Llanfoist and Govilon, explained no planning permission is required. Community centres and places of worship fall under the same planning use as a library. But he said the community association had promised to hold a public consultation on its plans, but that was criticised by councillors who called the decision in for review, as it was 'consultation after the decision'. The review was instigated by Conservative councillors Rachel Buckler and Louise Brown, who represent Devauden and Shirenewton, and Llanelly Hill independent Simon Howarth who questioned how the decision was made. They faced criticism as Abergavenny councillors and the town council backed the original decision. The former Abergavenny Library. The three questioned the council's process and complained there had been no scrutiny of the decision. Cllr Callard said the community association's bid was the highest scoring tender, and the £6,000 a year rent similar to one of the other bids, and rejected the idea it would be practical for the council to operate as a landlord if every lease had to go through a full scrutiny process. Cllr Callard also said if councillors disagreed with it offering the building for new uses, as it was no longer used as a pupil referral unit with the library having transferred to the town hall in 2015, the decision made last November to declare it 'surplus to requirements' should have been called in for review. The cabinet will consider the scrutiny committee's suggestions a re-tender should be run with specifications including an independent valuation, a survey of the building, consideration of the building's history and importance, a public consultation and the possibility of selling the building. It meets at County Hall in Usk at 4.30pm.
