Danny Moran: The trouble with Marcia…rebel councillor Marcia Hutchinson speaks out

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No Manchester politician has been as controversial in recent memory. In the words of Sir Richard Leese: “I have never experienced one member causing so much anger” Windrush-spawned, Bradford-raised, Oxford-educated, former planning solicitor Marcia Hutchinson bagged an MBE for her services to cultural diversity in publishing before founding a mentorship scheme for people of African heritage wanting enter local politics.
Last year she won election to Manchester City Council herself after campaigning to turn pockets of land along the River Medlock into parks. She stood down after posting an incendiary open letter to Levenshulme News about the Labour group Whips Office, having being asked to take down tweets congratulating proteges who’d been selected to stand against sitting councillors.
The furore escalated into a war of words over racism, time off work due to stress, followed by the decision to quit. While a by-election in Ancoats & Beswick may be small beer in the news cycle, it seemed worthwhile to solicit her views on the contest to succeed her.
So is Marcia Hutchinson a dangerous loose canon too quick to cry racism or a loss to the talent pool available in Albert Square?
Even an edited transcript of her comments makes for scalding reading.
My first encounter with you was last September. I was due to write a snippet about Wythenshawe market but I couldn’t get hold of Rob Nunney, the Green Party councillor there, and I needed something for the morning. I had your number, so I rang you to get an update on the letter issue instead, and was taken aback by what you began to tell me.
You told me that the real reason Sir Richard Leese was stepping down was that he faced deselection in his own ward. You painted a picture that the leadership had been spooked by Ekua Bayunu’s challenge in May and that ‘powerbrokers’ within his ward had done a deal to withdraw their support for him. Rather than face deselection, you said, Sir Richard had stepped down before subsequently taking the job that he has.  
Other sources told me that was nonsense as the Regional Executive would never allow such a thing to happen. They would find a reason to stop it. So do you stand by the claim? Is it still your understanding that that was the case?
Yeah. I’ve only got it second hand. I haven’t got anything direct. Ekua standing against him in May…they bent over backwards to claim it was nothing, it was a mere trifle.
Your open letter blew the whistle on the Whips Office. But is there anything different in the way Manchester City Council’s Whips Office operates to any other? Doesn’t the Whips Office simply do what Whips Offices do? 
 I don’t have any experience of other Whips Offices. What I have seen from personal experience is the way Manchester Labour group Whips Office operates in a way which is explicitly racist.
I tried to explain this when I met Bev Craig. It is the selective enforcement of rules against particular people. So people will be told well you broke a rule. But other people who have broken the same rule are not chastised… I’ve been hounded out but it’s still going on for Ekua.
Is it not the point of politics to cultivate and exercise power by developing a support base, making coalitions based on mutual aims, and changing things that way? To crash and burn after a matter of just a few months could be regarded simply as failure at the political game? 
Firstly, I don’t think I’ve crashed and burned. I think I’ve made a very measured decision having entered into a toxic atmosphere and thought this atmosphere is really, really dangerous.
Somebody said to me, one of the senior councillors, he basically said you’re being a bit too ‘in peoples’ faces’. The upshot of the conversation was that in ten years time you too could be on the exec. And I tried not to laugh.
In your resignation letter you say you’ve endured more racism in 5 years in Labour than in the rest of your life. How would you answer the charge that you’re hiding behind the racism issue, that the allegation is easily made to mask your discontent over other issues?  
I would say firstly that those people are almost certainly white men because those are the people who have been attacking me. The first incident was when I didn’t get selected. I approached the group I didn’t get support from and said I was a much better candidate than the person you did support, a white woman, you supported her in three or four different seats until she got elected.
The response was ‘you Marcia have been racist about this white woman.’ We would not consider supporting you unless you apologise. Now we’re through the looking glass if white men are telling a black woman that a condition of a continued conversation with her is that she first apologises for her racism..
With a new leader in place though, a woman of the ‘soft left’, why not stay on?
I don’t know that Bev is on the soft left. My exit meeting with her led me to question that.
Is it your claim that the process by which Gareth Worthington was selected as the Labour candidate to replace you was rigged?
 Completely. Number one they changed the rules to allow men in – first time it’s ever been done, so late that even the paperwork says it’s got to be women. Number two, they prevent certain people being allowed into the meeting where the voting is being done.
Is Gareth not a perfect Labour candidate for Ancoats & Beswick? A CityCo employee well placed to fix well-known ward problems such as waste collection and so on?
I think he’ll be an okay councillor. But I think his main advantage is he’ll be a centre-right councillor who’ll do as he’s told. The thing about being a councillor is there are lots and lots of challenges, not just Cutting Room Square.
Is the regeneration of Ancoats not a crowning achievement of Sir Richard Leese’s tenure?
No, and the reason is that it was given away too cheaply. If you give a developer a huge chunk of land for a pound and then let them build whatever they like…anyone can have a crowning achievement. You can understand when an area is completely run down. There’s no developer in 2022 who’s taking a risk building a block of flats in Ancoats.
Policies that made sense in the 80s and 90s when you were trying to get the area up to a certain level don’t make sense once it’s reached that level. It doesn’t make sense for the council to pay £35m for the retail park site when they’re buying and then sell the site by the tram stop for £9m.
Manchester Life as far as I’m aware is registered offshore. This is public money, this is council land, and nobody’s being transparent about where the money is, what the profit split is between Abu Dhabi and the city council.
Is Beswick swept under the carpet?
In this election, no! Beswick is the key to the ward because Ancoats has so much churn, there are lots and lots of people who are not registered to vote, who are not English, who didn’t live here. A lot of the ‘Twitterati’ there aren’t registered.
The people who have lived here for years and who are registered and go out and vote…they’re in Beswick. What shocks me is how little they get back. I’ve knocked on doors of people: “don’t waste time here love, we’re Labour, go somewhere else, you’ve got my vote.” And then just as I’m leaving… “But the parking! We can’t park!”
There is almost a schizophrenia within Labour of ‘we want your solid working class votes of people who would never consider voting anything other than Labour’ and yet you’re not doing anything for them. Something as small as residents’ parking isn’t happening. The social housing that would keep their children in the area doesn’t exist.
 After resigning and taking time off you organized a hustings and have been in the press for your ‘five parks’ plan for pockets of land along the River Medlock. Why return to the fray?   
As a branch member I was one of the people in the meeting who selected the candidate.The second thing is that I live here.
Friends of Medlock Way has been set up, and I was surprised at the strength of feeling. We organized an event, I invited Gareth, and two days later I got a message saying it clashes with my canvassing. I’m like, oh really..?
Is Gareth not listening?  
I’ve got his leaflet…he doesn’t really say anything. He lives in Ancoats, he feels very strongly about Ancoats…Beswick not so much. You know, investing in green spaces is a classic one. “There will also be improvements to Pin Mill Brow including replacing and repairing signage to make the area more accessible.”
Signage? Come on! People have been reporting fly tipping, nothing’s been done about it, and now you’ve got contractors backing lorries up using cutters to open the fencing and tipping entire lorryloads in. By Palmerston Street, pn a commercial scale.
Is that not something you could have looked at during your own time as a councillor?
Yes…and to get on to the council and say why haven’t we got a park? Yes, I know parks cost money. There’s all the money. There are the sites you could sell to developers and get the money. There’s huge, huge chunks of council land. I wrote to officers, I didn’t get any reply.
What, then, does Ancoats & Beswick need?
People need green spaces. After the debacle of the Central Retail Park site…it’s a shame that such an adversarial approach was taken and I think Richard led this. Instead of saying “we paid £35m for it” [they could have said] “there’s no way the whole area can be a park but we guarantee 20, 30, 40 percent of the site will be green.”
It’s really obvious that you’ve got old Ancoats and Beswick, and new Ancoats. You’ve got a lot of new people coming into Ancoats who are afraid of anyone with a Mancunian accent and you’ve got all these people in Beswick who dislike the incomers. So housing is a really big issue, more so than maybe any other ward because of the huge disparities.
It’s great that the Grey Mare Lane estate is being renovated, it’s great that Manchester has just built some zero carbon houses. I’m not an out and out critic of everything the council is doing, I’m just saying they’re not really listening. They adopt a them-and-us approach to local residents who disagree with them.
I have to say as a former planning solicitor who specialized in working for developers – not councils – I’ve never seen a council lean so strongly in favour of developers. I still know developers that I worked with in London who say you know there’s no way we could get stuff elsewhere that we get in Manchester.
You can’t get ‘zero social housing’ in London. You’ve got all these issues of ‘poor doors’ in London where they have a different entrance [for social tenants] No worries about that in Manchester because there is no social housing.
So I know from developer friends, consultant friends…it’s a free-for-all here.
 Surely the real problem in Manchester is less the whips and more the majority in the chamber…the 94 of 96 seats which are held by a single party?
 A one party state means that decisions are not made in the chamber, they’re made in the ante-rooms.
At one planning committee I remember people picketing outside. I remember going in and thinking “you’re picketing the wrong meeting. The decision on how we’re all going to vote has been made earlier.”
If the Labour group meets and then an hour later the planning committee meets and they’re all exactly the same people where’s the discussion? In one case I was told “yeah, good Marcia, it’ll be good to have somebody sounding a bit of opposition in the meeting,” It was almost a rehearsal.
So there are pre-meetings for planning?
There are pre-meetings for all committees on the assumption that there is an opposition.
Is a pre-meeting for planning not illegal?  
I don’t know. I don’t think it is illegal if it’s the members of one political party, if the Labour planning committee members get together and talk about what the Labour planning guys are going to do.
Lib Dem leader John Leech told me he walked in on a pre-meeting for planning. Ekua Bayunu told me she thought there were pre-meetings for planning. I was told that it was illegal.  
I don’t know if it’s illegal.
Then I spoke to a Labour councillor who was on the planning committee for the Ancoats car park decision and I said “do you have pre-meetings for planning?” and he said “absolutely not, that would be illegal.”  
So they will not call it a pre-meeting. They will call it a ‘Labour group meeting’. It is exactly the same people who will meet one or two hours later in the planning committee.
What’s next for you?
Well I’m sixty this year so I don’t know. But really I’ve got no interest in wasting my time…

@dannyxmoran

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