Purdah Options

[Simon Kirby]

Story here.

"The council has been awarded a £5.07m grant from the Department for Transport on the basis that it agreed to fund the remaining 30 per cent – or £2.17m."

As I understand it our government, national and local, are supposed to respect this period of purdah and not publish this kind of news. If this really is WBC putting this news out there then it really is very poor form.

[MontyPython]

Does this article infringe Purdah?

http://www.newburytoday.co.uk/news/news/14...-difficult.html

[Simon Kirby]

Does this article infringe Purdah?

http://www.newburytoday.co.uk/news/news/14...-difficult.html

You know, this really is a large part of the problem. The leader of a parish council has no standing, he is a councillor like any other councillor. The job of parish councillors is to identify problems and opportunities in their parish and to work together to find a consensus, they don't need "leading" in that endeavour and the faux-honorific of "Leader" is nothing but a distraction.

The report quotes Conservative group leader Tony Stretton (Con, Clay Hill) saying “It is time for some fresh input and that can only be achieved by a change of administration. That change is Conservative.”

Nonsense, that's just out of the frying pan into the fire. Any one of the Tories, Stretton included, could have stood up and challenged the ineptitude of the Council over the last decade, but other than some ineffectual pre-election handbagging from Edwards a few weeks ago they've pretty much slept through the last ten years.

What the Council really needs is for the elected councillors each to take it upon themselves to represent their community, challenge their administration, and work together to find a consensus irrespective of party affiliation.

This "Leader" thing significantly hampers that, and I think the designation should be dropped. A parish council is a collective and its councillors have equal standing.

[user23]

You know, this really is a large part of the problem. The leader of a parish council has no standing, he is a councillor like any other councillor. The job of parish councillors is to identify problems and opportunities in their parish and to work together to find a consensus, they don't need "leading" in that endeavour and the faux-honorific of "Leader" is nothing but a distraction.

The report quotes Conservative group leader Tony Stretton (Con, Clay Hill) saying "It is time for some fresh input and that can only be achieved by a change of administration. That change is Conservative."

Nonsense, that's just out of the frying pan into the fire. Any one of the Tories, Stretton included, could have stood up and challenged the ineptitude of the Council over the last decade, but other than some ineffectual pre-election handbagging from Edwards a few weeks ago they've pretty much slept through the last ten years.

What the Council really needs is for the elected councillors each to take it upon themselves to represent their community, challenge their administration, and work together to find a consensus irrespective of party affiliation.

This "Leader" thing significantly hampers that, and I think the designation should be dropped. A parish council is a collective and its councillors have equal standing.

Having a single leader is a bad thing, you say?

[Simon Kirby]

Having a single leader is a bad thing, you say?

It's a different argument, but I'm game:

The Apolitical Democrats is a political party registered with the electoral commission. We're a registered party because, amongst other things, we want to be able to call ourselves "Apolitical" on the ballot paper and campaign under the "Apolitical" umbrella to define our particular brand of political independence, and you can only do that as a registered party. It is a requirement of registration that the party has a "leader".

However, we're not dogmatic and as a party we have no policy as such, other than our guiding principles of free-thinking independence and a commitment to consult and listen objectively to all points of view.

But to re-state my point, my objection is to the artificial designation of a single parish councillor as "leader" of the council, because there is no statutory basis for that designation and indeed it runs counter to the defining principle that parish councillors are equally and collectively responsible for council decisions, and it encourages individual councillors to subordinate their opinions to the "leader" and abrogate their responsibility, and this is a problem that has blighted our town council.