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COMMENT: Labour Can Run But It Can’t Hide
February 24, 2011 10:52 AM
Democracy was dealt a terrible blow by Labour last night after retreating to a private room to rush through a Budget that will needlessly devastate a Borough's services.
With a large demonstration going on outside the Town Hall and a chanting group installed in a half-full public gallery, Labour Party managers quickly called a halt to proceedings and moved to the adjacent Assembly Rooms via the handy back stairs from their palatial suite of offices.
Here, Opposition parties discovered, everything had been set-up in advance to complete the meeting in private session surrounded by police officers. By these underhand means Labour Party Managers hoodwinked legitimate protestors and dispatched some of the most savage cuts seen in Lambeth in well under an hour.
By the time protestors now holed up in the Council Chamber itself realised what was happening, Labour councillors were congratulating themselves on a serious bit of subterfuge and had gone home. The operation was so slick that a casual observer might very well think that it had been planned all along.
Once the schoolboy grins of Labour apparatchiks have dispersed, where do such antics leave Lambeth? Poorer in every respect, we think.
For starters two delegations, one from the Parks Forum about cutting the highly valued Park Rangers, and the other from Lambeth Trade Unions, were deprived of the ability to speak to all councillors before they took the decision to vote on cutting valued services. In the case of libraries, members were being asked to approve measures that could lead to closures without any of the libraries being named.
Many of those affected by Labour's cuts had the right to hear why Labour politicians felt these were justified. Equally they had the right to listen to opposition councillors including Lib Dems, Conservatives, and a newly independent again ex-Labour councillor, who had different views on the extent of Labours cuts and indeed whether some services should be cut at all.
Liberal Democrats had offered a carefully costed Alternative Budget that saved many front-line services by making greater efficiencies and using reserves over the next few years to tide the Council over until those efficiencies come into play.
After all, if you're making 1,000 staff redundant shouldn't you at least sell off the council office blocks that will be empty as a result?
Labour, political to the last, rejected these calls and claimed our Alternative Budget was irrelevant and did not stack up financially. And yet it was approved as a legal budget by the Council's same finance officers who approved Labour's.
This demonstrates that any administration has choices about what they do. So next time a Labour politician appears on your doorstep, unlikely though that may seem, just ask him or her why they chose savage cuts to services rather than the Liberal Democrats legal Alterative Budget which would have saved them.
Wednesday 23rd February 2010, meanwhile, will go down in history as a bleak day in local democracy.
Never in the history of local politics has so much been needlessly cut in so short a time.