Three Things Stoke Got Wrong with its City of Culture Bid

And so Coventry is the City of Culture for 2021, which more or less knocks Stoke-on-Trent out of the running for 2025 too. Would you award the accolade to a West Midlands city twice on the trot? Nope, and so the time is now to pick over Stoke-on-Trent's bid. There were three very obvious things the Stoke team got so very wrong future entrants would do well to learn from. Whether they made much of a difference to the judging panel, headed by establishment lefty Phil Redmond, is not known nor are they ever likely to be known. Still, why leave anything to chance?

1. The first mistake was making the bid explicitly political. "Deputy" Council Leader Abi Brown (pictured) was all over it like a case of measles. She fronted the coverage and did all the important interviews. It was as if she was personally bidding for the City of Culture rather than a team of council officers and sundry specialists and notables. To anyone observing askance this looked desperately like a politician trying to own a good thing for their own profile while shoring up future electoral support. No doubt politicians were heavily involved in Coventry's successful bid, but they didn't make it about them.

2. Stoke-on-Trent City Council has an inglorious history of super-centralisation. How the bid was run by Abi, council chief executive David Sidaway, and a cabal of trusted lieutenants to the exclusion of others was no surprise. Okay, letting Labour councillors anywhere near the bid was never going to happen. But the Tories' own coalition partners, the City Independents, were kept out of view. If you are trying to draw the city together around a common cause, you have to practice unity and inclusion yourself. Nevertheless, this went above and beyond excluding rivals and opponents inside and outside the governing coalition. Local companies, local charities and third sector outfits, local schools, colleges and universities, all were involved but the involvement was on the bid leaders' terms. Suggestions for initiatives (especially if they referred to strategic issues) flew in one ear and out the other. This led to missed opportunities, inflexibility and, in some cases, incompetence. Like the shindig organised to promote the bid at Westminster, organised through the office of Jack Brereton - Stoke's only Tory MP. Movers and shakers from across North Staffordshire were invited down to London to rub shoulders and network with ... themselves. Meanwhile, Coventry's similar effort drew in politicians from the wider WestMids region and they used their contacts to ensure a decent group of the great and the good turned out from politics, media, business, etc. They had a good cluster going, while the stupid overmanagement of the Stoke bid led to a cluster of an altogether different character.

3. The City of Culture bid should be an occasion for showing off your home town. You know, highlighting all that is best and undiscovered about the place. The role of the politicians, therefore, is not to unveil stupid, petty-minded and cruel policies during the last stretch of the competition. That is all they need to do. So what did our Tory-led coalition with the City Independents and UKIP do? They announced they were consulting on a vindictive crack down on the homeless. Instead of banning rough sleepers outright from the environs of the city centre, they instead wanted to fine people for bedding down for the night in tents. That it was dropped earlier this week doesn't matter, it made national news. For a city recovering from a reputation for small-minded prejudice (witness difficulties with the BNP and more recently, UKIP), it doesn't take rocket science to suppose seeing this ugly side of the Potteries alive and well in its council blotted Stoke's copy book with the judging panel. Therein lies the perils of making the bid explicitly political. You can talk a good game of united strength being stronger, but publicly declaring an intention to victimise your most vulnerable residents shows you up as a hypocritical humbug.