Recently we have had two cleaning-up events under the council’s ‘Lets FACE it’ programme.

The first was in the courts area in Broadfield South, and the second at the flood pond near Rathlin Road. In both cases there were local residents doing the work, assisted by council officers who provided tools, supplies and some manpower. And local councillors were there too.

At Rathlin Road last week the event was organised by the local churches who had quite a few of their congregation there. I know councillor Patel was there, as I spoke to him a few days afterwards, and I am assuming his colleague Brian Quinn was there too.

In the press coverage of the first event, the (Tory) councillors were at the front of all the photos, and quoted in the story. They even made a slideshow of the clean up which they were showing at a subsequent council event, making it look like it was a Tory-organised event – until we complained about them trying to appropriate council-funded work for party political purposes. In the second event the (Labour) councillors were not mentioned at all.

Why is this?

Possibilities which occur to me are:

• The Tories are better at PR than we are
• The papers are biased towards the Tories
• The Labour councillors are more modest and happy to let local residents take all the credit
• Pure chance

Whatever the reason, it is not good for us.

We saw the same thing with the local Post Office closure. All the local councillors were involved in talks with the PO to find a replacement, but it was the Tories who were in all the newspaper articles making it look as if only they were involved.

When I was doing my time as a Broadfield councillor I liked to keep a low profile and tried to avoid the newspapers and photographers. I found that they would always mis-quote me or take a single sentence and quote ti out of context. In the end I made sure that I only ever spoke to them in very long sentences containing long words so they could not use any of it. It meant that I could get on with doing what I wanted to, but in the long run it might not have been a good tactic since we lost the seat.

But it looks like we are going to have to play that game, and give as much attention to getting positive press attention as we do to actually getting things done.

I am still amazed that the Labour party has this reputation as masters of spin, when most of us are obviously not very good at it.

(I was not at Rathlin Road. For some reason I thought it was happening on a Thursday…)