The People's Republic of Walsall

I used to work in a town called Walsall. No, not Warsaw, Walsall. It's a bit like the Polish capital only smaller and the food queues are longer.
Although drug dealing, street shootings and teenage prostitution have done much to raise the profile of Walsall after years of decline, the town is really famous for two things. Firstly, it has a world renowned leather goods and saddlery industry - hence the local football team is nicknamed The Saddlers. Secondly, it used to have, without doubt, the looniest council in Northern Europe.
Prescott and his henchmen eventually marched up to Walsall to sack half of its Labour councillors and to instigate a system which operates to this day whereby council officers and appointed businessmen run the authority.

I worked in Walsall for many years as a journo and, before it was privatised, had fantastic copy from and sport with the good councillors of the borough, whether they were Tory, Labour, Lib Dem or Independent Conservative, Liberal, UK Independence Party, Old Labour, New Labour or Socialist Alliance. Yes, those groups were all represented on the authority and it was invariably a hung council, with no-one in overall control, so that nothing ever got done or what was done was a complete and utter knob-up. The other attraction of the place to a hack was that both Labour and the Tories were riddled with divisions, so much so that they hated members of their own groups far more than then did councillors of a different party.
Among the greatest moments in the life of this council was when one venerable member complained that he had not been given the chance to air his views at a meeting. The words he uttered were: "Tha'r ay God fair. I ay spaked yet." Yes, he even managed to conjugate the verb "to spake" and identify the perfect tense.
Then there was the chairman of the libraries committee who, having listened to a long, boring and virtually incomprehensible debut speech by a young member, summarised the content by saying: "Well, that just goes to show that there's more than one way of killing a donkey than by stuffing it to death with strawberries."
There was the magical moment when the break-away Labour group became bored at a meeting of the full council and so began simultaneously pressing their microphone buttons so as to interfere with the hearing loop system in the chamber. This caused the stone deaf and aged mayor to spend most of the meeting shouting "Aye? What? Hello? Speak up!" much to the amusement of the socialists.
There was the time when Walsall donated its aged mayoral Daimler to its twin town in France and I went over there to interview the Gallic recipients and find out just how grateful they were. It turned out the car was a complete nail and, far from being a gift, the French had had to spend £12,000 just to get it into a serviceable condition so it could go on display somewhere. On my return to Blighty I told the leader of Walsall Council this, expecting him to be deeply embarrassed, but all he said was: "Why d'yow think we gid it 'em?"
Well, just last week, Walsall's superb local authority was at it again. A friend told me that on Thursday afternoon, while staff were marooned in their offices by the Town Hall as rain of Biblical proportions was pouring down outside, they looked down to see council workmen watering the hanging baskets in the street!
God bless Walsall Council. Grantham shall not have it.