Now that, like me, the hon. Gentleman has time to reflect from the Back Benches, he might consider that part of this problem was that he always fought the last battle. That one is dead and gone. The current Mayor gets his message across because he makes the right case to Londoners. I would think it a good thing if an independent newspaper supported my policies; it would be better than having to pay £1.5 million or £2 million to cook up a newspaper to support them instead. So I do not think he has advanced his case with that intervention.
For another example, the right hon. Member for Leeds Central could pop across to Greenwich from Tower Hamlets and have a look at the—taxpayer-funded, of course—Greenwich Time which has been published for several years now by the Labour-controlled council. In one recent editorial, the council leader attacked the Government’s policies of austerity for damaging the people of Greenwich. That is an interesting view which might have come straight from the pen of the shadow Chancellor—perhaps it did, for all I know—but I am not convinced that it is relevant to the role of the local authority.
Neither am I convinced that it is the role of that interesting Greenwich publication to tell me about the football fixtures or the cinema listings or to give me helpful restaurant reviews. It is the same with East End Life. These are all worthy things that a commercial local paper does, but to use the phrase of my hon. Friend the Member for Mid Dorset and North Poole (Annette Brooke), it is not a sensible use of council resources. I am sure we all want leisure or weight-loss ideas, but it is not the job of these supposed newspapers—these council publications—to provide them. It is a deliberate move on to the turf of privately run, independent newspapers. I say “deliberate” because in some cases, I regret to say, local authorities do not like the competition and criticism. That is what this is about.
Moving away from Greenwich, the right hon. Member for Leeds Central could cross the river again to Newham, where The Newham Mag makes great play of the “savage cuts”—an interesting phrase that I am sure the ever-restrained mayor of Newham had nothing to do with—imposed by the Government. In one fascinating passage, it stated that some councils pulled the plug on their Christmas lights this year because of “savage cuts” in their funding from central Government. When we worked on the formula grant, my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State and I did not consider taking out local authorities’ Christmas light funding. It was a clever use of words to try to suggest that central Government were being Scrooge and making it impossible for people to have Christmas lights on their high street. The article did not mention, of course, that Newham council did not cut the publicity budget, which paid for The Newham Mag, and which even on a conservative estimate would run to about 10 sets of high street lights. Interestingly, even in otherwise legitimate advertising—about making benefit claims and where to go—every reference to cuts is prefaced with “savage” or “massive”. It is clearly politically loaded and another example of how councils are acting against the spirit of the code.