Desperation

At last night's meeting of the Full Medway Council (which I have dubbed the "minus one" meeting as each of the three political groups was minus one member) the Labour and LibDem Groups' sheer desperation to make something they could use out of every single item on the agenda became almost farcical at times.

The Conservative Group, though, performed very well, with some excellent contributions by several of our recently-elected members. Over half of our 32 members present contributed to the debates -- 18 of us in total. We provided the positive messages, whereas the opposition tried to derail anything we were proposing -- sometimes by putting forward tiny and silly amendments, which were generally intended to delay or completely scupper new projects; or just by speaking and voting against all the worthwhile ideas that we were putting forward.

This did rather demonstrate that they hadn't much of a clue as to how to run a Council, as came out clearly during the debates. I don't know whether this will be reported properly in the local media (hopefully so), but there were several members of the public in the gallery and they will know. Although it soon became apparent that a number of them had been drafted in by the Labour group, and at least one of them misbehaved (always a sign of a Labour-driven and "loaded" public gallery, by the way), there were at least three separate more independent people up there "in the Gods", and those three stayed right to the end, even including the last item which was on Members' allowances, of all things.

That was an interesting item, as it turned out, and symptomatic of whole the whole meeting had gone. Every year we have simply accepted the findings and recommendations of the Independent Remuneration Panel (even if the Leader had difficulty saying "remuneration" until last year -- in previous years it came out as "renumeration"!)

This year, as had been happening throughout the reports section of the meeting, the Labour Group proposed an amendment to tinker with one aspect of the proposals. It would have made very little difference in terms of money saved, yet would have gone against the principle of letting the independent panel decide -- not us. What they had proposed was that the Special Responsibility Allowances, such as the one I receive for being vice-chairman of one of the Scrutiny Committees, be frozen rather than increased in line with staff salary percentage increases that year (the normal method). Labour claimed it was "a gesture". Notably, most of this would impact Conservative members, so it was hardly a "gesture" on the part of Labour members...

The reason for this wheeze was obvious: it was to get a cheap headline. I stood up (when called by the Mayor) and explained that I had given up a lot in order to be able to take on the mantle of Scrutiny vice-chairman, and I put a lot of work and effort into doing my job, and earning my modest allowance (£3,648 per year, with tax and national-insurance deducted from that) which a couple of Labour members also receive but don't bother to do much to earn it.

I added that, on the other side of the coin, I had already been making my own gesture for almost eight years, in that I had never claimed anything for travel, subsistence or any other costs, from the day I was first elected. I quoted a couple of examples (one regular, the other occasional) that showed this included some reasonably expensive travel costs -- but in all cases I have personally absorbed all of it.

The difference here was that I had never sought publicity for this, and indeed I think that was the first time I have mentioned it in a public meeting. I finished my speech by wondering how many members of the opposition did the same as I do. They were very quiet...

Then one of them decided to tell the meeting that it "hadn't been their intention" for anyone to state what they themselves did or didn't do -- obviously a pop at me (and another of our Group who had said something along much the same lines as I had) and an attempt to recover from a very obvious and visible backfire of their purely party-politically-motivated amendment.

It didn't work: anyone present could see who had started this, and why, and the way that my colleague and I responded was completely appropriate. I was tempted to stand to make a "point of personal explanation" to mention this, and the cause-and-effect nature of this: "If you don't like the effect, don't instigate the cause" would probably have been my way of sending a final message to the opposition members. I let it go, on this (admittedly fairly minor) occasion; but one day, when they try something similar with a more important issue, I'll have 'em!

Thus ended the often convoluted and sometimes rather tortuous formal business of the meeting. As I had discussed with a couple of our newer members before it all started, the universal rule of Council meetings is that they will invariably go on for far longer than they need to, and usually longer than they really ought.

That was certainly borne out again last night. Plus ça change...