| Topic: | Cabinet meeting 22 February. The meek will follow the weak | |
| Posted by: | George Knox | |
| Date/Time: | 19/02/11 22:06:00 |
| Your scrutiny paper. Depends on your word recently. It must be fairly horrible working in a Council where there is fear of redundancy and a lot of change putting extra pressure on the staff. So you may have to wait a bit. On the other hand when you are confronted with a statutory authority having to deliver to residents and also having response time standards to follow, it gets difficult in deciding whether to wait patiently or adopt the other tack of the person who shouts loudest gets the attention. Trouble is that you get accused of being a troublemaker and sometimes Councillors think you are attacking them because your politics are opposed to theirs – when in fact you are driven simply by what is appropriate and fair. I prefer to criticise where I think there is unfairness and that goes for young Councillor Withay(!! ;-) as much as it does for J Bell. Just at the moment I think Bell is making a seriously massive mistake because there is a very strong impression that he is trying to stitch up Ealing because he always wants to blame the Coalition for the cuts. The public now are too fed up with each party trying to stitch each other up because they are miles more concerned that every possible route is being taken to alleviate the worst of the cuts. There is just no evidence that he is doing this. It is such a pity that there are not more Labour Councillors who have the strength of integrity to stand up to him –instead of being dragged down. What they should but don’t want to is to demand a strategy change on 22 February so that services where possible are shared. Even the Overview and Scrutiny Committee this last Thursday was too chicken to introduce this. Shame that some senior officers are not opposing him but the prospect of losing say £70K per annum with nowhere to go is just too daunting. Some of the cuts seem so bad that it could almost be said Bell is behaving like a rank Tory. I certainly see little social justice running through his actions. But worst, he is not acting or behaving in the overall public interest and so may soon be winged permanently by dearth of leadership skills. Won’t be long now before there are marches and some violence. Strikes could well follow. If Bell were seen to be making genuine efforts to rationalise suppliers extensively and also keeping junior staff by stopping bonuses until the next local election for people (down to salaries of £58K), then perhaps he could be seen to be more on the side of most Council staff and also the 100,000 CT payers. This man must stop confronting us with his cynical ideology and put the people first. Scrutiny used not to be so rare because every now and then you had good local newspapers with intelligent journalists doing much more research. The Ham and Hi is a good example. Whether the Camden New Journal is still alive which also held the council to account I don’t know. Chiswick also used to have an excellent paper – also dead and buried. Trouble is that Councils spend money on their own mouthpiece (Around Ealing), instead of on local papers which means that the tomb of the Ealing Gazette is being dug faster. It certainly has less good quality coverage than before. I think these websites are run by a person and their dog and just do not have time to scrutinise. The journalists just do not seem to attend Council meetings regularly. And so unlike the Sun being able to claim that it was the “the Sun wot dunnit” our local journalists don’t seem inclined to campaign. So local government gets away with murder – possibly more so than national government which at least has the BBC and the like on its tail. Can’t see an Ealing second chamber of peers ratifying decisions (look what happened to brave Eric at the last election). All that seems possible is for citizens to be seconded to various committees but I don’t know how that works. However I do feel that the views of Residents Associations must in decision making processes be given far more weight. |