Mieka Smiles

I WAS so naive. When I became a councillor, I was convinced that it would be the start of a brave new world for my town of Middlesbrough, which had suffered at the hands of a complacent Labour administration for decades.

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Don’t get me wrong, there were things that we put in place that changed our town for the better. But, in the main, there was one major thing that stood in our way of a Middlesbrough rebirth: the council officers. You have good ones, of course. Hardworking ones, absolutely. But many of the big cheeses spend their days sitting in endless meetings — probably debating a new tax-funded logo to the far end of a fart — whilst ignoring basic services they’re actually paid to deliver. Poor Birmingham is the glaring example of this. Those residents are still quite literally drowning in rubbish as the top bosses shift the blame and pocket salaries higher than the PM.

This has long infuriated me, even at my own council, where I’ve been a Conservative councillor since 2019. We recently had a chief executive - as nice a bloke as he was — with a package capped at £234,000 a year while the council continued to haemorrhage money.