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Labour - Cabinet or Closet?
February 11, 2009 10:00 AM
Anyone who has ever attended a Labour-run Lambeth Council Cabinet meeting, intended to decide on important issues of the day, must leave wondering what democratic purpose it serves?
Each and every meeting is drilled with a macho, almost marshal, precision, an eye on the clock and possibly the exit, and with an almost closeted fear of drifting away from the official hard Labour line.
Opposition parties are told they are heretics for even suggesting that the Sun does not circle around the Labour party, residents who may not appreciate what is being done to them are dismissed as mere NIMBY's and discontented council tenants are effectively told that they should just be jolly grateful they've got a roof over their heads at all.
The Council Leader is often heard to use the slogan " We're on your side" but the reality and bitter experience of many members of the public present is usually very different. Few are allowed to speak. Any criticism is to be stifled at all costs, preferably with a sneering rebuke. Any dissenter is clearly offside.
Labour is right about everything.
Housing Crisis? Nothing more than a little local difficulty. Shaky finances? A Golden Age has now dawned. Schools? Don't mention that it was Labour that closed them. Housing rent rises? Tenants have had it too easy for too long. Fairer parking? You must be joking!
A casual observer might wonder why they bother to hold the meeting in public at all when it is so clearly a rubber-stamping exercise?
Yet it is par for the course. Council meetings have been purged of all genuine debate, scrutiny committees have been largely emasculated, and any semblance that Lambeth Life had of being a genuine Council information sheet has long gone. It is about as politically neutral as Pravda.
Still there's one tiny glimmer of hope. People are realising that Labour's stranglehold on Lambeth is now coming peacefully to an end.
In just over a year Labour will have to face the same people they've ignored, trampled over and dismissed so contemptuously.
There's no escape for Labour because they've changed all the rules over the past three years, they've been running things with a large majority, they've allowed no debate, they haven't consulted and, most damning of all, they haven't listened.
The electorate happily, is the final arbiter, the final referee - and that referee has the power to say to bullies "I'm sending you off."