Labour Only Do It In The Afternoon
Our citizens curious for knowledge about what our Labour masters and mistresses have in store for them will now have to flock to the Town Hall in the afternoons to hear words of wisdom from their leaders. Cabinet meetings for the next three months will start at 2.30 p.m. to enable Labour bosses to 'nod through' the business without the unnecessary presence of our citizens most of whom will be at work or caring for relatives or children. Our highly paid officers will be able to have the evening off watching soccer or getting to know their families.
Not since the dark days of the Blitz has the Cabinet, or its previous incarnation, met in the daytime. Any elected Opposition member, or citizen for that matter, who works in a school or in a job with fixed daytime hours is disenfranchised. Clearly, we won't be seeing mobs of sinister tee-shirted children marshalled by aggressive stewards jeering at the Cabinet as used to be the case when Labour were in opposition. Remember when they dressed children in bin liners to shout abuse at H.M. The Queen much to the anger of one of our head teachers who silently wrote down the names of the children from his school who he recognised on TV?
Sadly, the past is also no guide to our future. With budget making fast approaching and stealth taxes on the horizon it seemed a good moment to review what our masters proposed just 12 months ago. Lo! They advocated the demise of Lambeth Life, our monthly information bulletin from the Town Hall, whose newsprint is so costly you can't even light a fire with it. The elimination of jobs in the press office was another cut proposed by Labour's veteran finance guru who works for The Times business pages and vast reductions in agency staff as well as IT projects being put on hold plus job cuts in policy and performance.
When May 5th dawned, of course, all these initiatives were forgotten in the grab for power. The Times business journalist had returned to his role of writing about capitalism. Lambeth Life still comes through some of our letter boxes with pictures of our new leaders adorning every page. Curiously, the same department who publishes it used to say no pictures could appear of politicians. New posts have been created in the miscommunications department and that temp somewhere in the town hall who came from an agency to do the photocopying last summer was still here at Christmas. New figures show that it costs more than GB pounds 2,000 a year to pay for every paper pusher working in the town hall - and that doesn't count the new offices refurbished over Christmas at vast expense to the tax payer.
Our tax payers are in for a hard time with Labour extracting the maximum council tax increase permitted by their government of 4.99 per cent with an extra two per cent to cover Mayor Livingstone's foreign policy initiatives in Venezuela. In the meantime waste and excess is tolerated. The cost of borrowing a library book in Lambeth, if you can find one in any of the libraries, is GB pounds 10.29 compared to GB pounds 3.64 in neighbouring Wandsworth where it is rumoured there are books. The figures, courtesy of CIPFA, were published last week although data from the most efficient library at Upper Norwood was not included, despite the authority spending GB pounds 1.1 million a year on headquarters library mandarins.
Not since the dark days of the Blitz has the Cabinet, or its previous incarnation, met in the daytime. Any elected Opposition member, or citizen for that matter, who works in a school or in a job with fixed daytime hours is disenfranchised. Clearly, we won't be seeing mobs of sinister tee-shirted children marshalled by aggressive stewards jeering at the Cabinet as used to be the case when Labour were in opposition. Remember when they dressed children in bin liners to shout abuse at H.M. The Queen much to the anger of one of our head teachers who silently wrote down the names of the children from his school who he recognised on TV?
Sadly, the past is also no guide to our future. With budget making fast approaching and stealth taxes on the horizon it seemed a good moment to review what our masters proposed just 12 months ago. Lo! They advocated the demise of Lambeth Life, our monthly information bulletin from the Town Hall, whose newsprint is so costly you can't even light a fire with it. The elimination of jobs in the press office was another cut proposed by Labour's veteran finance guru who works for The Times business pages and vast reductions in agency staff as well as IT projects being put on hold plus job cuts in policy and performance.
When May 5th dawned, of course, all these initiatives were forgotten in the grab for power. The Times business journalist had returned to his role of writing about capitalism. Lambeth Life still comes through some of our letter boxes with pictures of our new leaders adorning every page. Curiously, the same department who publishes it used to say no pictures could appear of politicians. New posts have been created in the miscommunications department and that temp somewhere in the town hall who came from an agency to do the photocopying last summer was still here at Christmas. New figures show that it costs more than GB pounds 2,000 a year to pay for every paper pusher working in the town hall - and that doesn't count the new offices refurbished over Christmas at vast expense to the tax payer.
Our tax payers are in for a hard time with Labour extracting the maximum council tax increase permitted by their government of 4.99 per cent with an extra two per cent to cover Mayor Livingstone's foreign policy initiatives in Venezuela. In the meantime waste and excess is tolerated. The cost of borrowing a library book in Lambeth, if you can find one in any of the libraries, is GB pounds 10.29 compared to GB pounds 3.64 in neighbouring Wandsworth where it is rumoured there are books. The figures, courtesy of CIPFA, were published last week although data from the most efficient library at Upper Norwood was not included, despite the authority spending GB pounds 1.1 million a year on headquarters library mandarins.
Labels: Cabinet, Council tax, Democracy, Libraries
posted by Cllr John Whelan on Wednesday, January 24, 2007
