Masthead
One of my photos

Dull Council Meeting

April 14th, 2006 · Posted by Skuds in Politics · No Comments · Politics

I know council meetings are supposed to be dull, but last night's was extremely pedestrian compared to the last one I went to.  By the end of it I really wished I had gone to see Spizzenergi at the 100 Club instead.

(Interesting fact – since leaving the council I have been to more Spizzenergi concerts than I have been to council meetings.)

Here is a picture of Crawley's beautiful brown vinyl council chamber…

As a contrast, here is the packed public gallery…

The chap at the front was a real member of the public.  The others in the picture are the wife of a Labour councillor and three Labour candidates in the May elections.  The four of us are all standing in Tory seats, three of them extremely safe Tory seats.

The last full council meeting we went to was the extraordinary meeting at the Hawth, where the auditorium was full, a video link was relaying the meeting to the foyer, and several councillors, including the mayor, ignored the whip to make it a nail-biting vote.

This time round two members of the public turned up, but one left before I took a photo, and all the votes were almost unanimous. One was unanimous apart from a single Tory voting against (and I'm not 100% sure she knew what was going on anyway to be honest) and another abstaining, and the another one saw all the Labour and Tory councillors vote the same way with the Lib-Dems voting against.

Throughout most of the night the Labour and Tory councillors were falling over each other to compliment each other. L chairs were effusively praising their C deputies, C shadow executives were praising their L opposite number, and I thought I had fallen through the looking glass. It even got to the point where the council's leader criticized the Tory county council's policy on reconfiguration of PCTs and the Tory leader stood up and agreed with him.

I suppose consensus politics is a good thing in a way, but its not a spectator sport. I wonder if this is a result of the code of conduct and Standard Board of England leaving councillors unable to really say what they are thinking?

Towards the end there was a slight outbreak of futile attempts to score political points, but by then even the single reporter from the local press had given up and gone home. I don't think the single non-aligned person in the public gallery was swayed by these comments, but I think he deserves a prize for staying to the end.

Something else I did not know was how uncomfortable the seats in the public gallery are after an hour. If the place is demolished to make way for the Town Centre North development it will not be difficult to build a better-looking, more comfortable, friendlier council chamber with better ventilation and sound systems.

Tags: ······

No Comments so far ↓

Like the collective mind of the Daily Mail, comments are closed.