Let’s get one thing clear from last night’s Full Council meeting on Devolution. Labour do not have a choice about anything when it comes to how devolution will happen to Tamworth, not in respect of Tamworth Borough Council being wound up, who the authority will be merged with, or a timeline as to when it will happen. It is all out of their hands. Despite the opening farce of Labour Leader Carol Dean crowing on about how much ‘work’ there is to do in preparation for it, there is actually none. If you were to read the report presented to Councillors for this meeting, you will note how short it is. Because there’s simply nothing the report can state other than what could happen.
Even more laughable was Carol Dean stating how ‘busy’ she had been with this topic. Given she had no clue only a short while ago at a scrutiny meeting as to what the deadline date for proposals to Government was, the fact that she stuck her fingers in her ears and presented projects that will never see fruition saying her now favourite phrase ‘the day job must go on’. Labour didn’t see this coming, neither did the rest of the Country, now Dean has to keep up appearances and make it look as though she not only agrees with her parties government, but that she is best placed and well advised on how to deliver it. Spoiler alert dear reader, she is not, and neither are her group.
Labour regain control of Tamworth Borough Council after 20 years, tell nothing but lies to get hold of it, and will now preside over the largest screw you to taxpayers Labour have ever presented, all in the name of giving voters more democracy or even more laughably as Dean stated ‘unlocking more funding and investment’. Unlocking from where exactly? Apparently the country and if you were to believe it Tamworth’s finances were ‘dire’ before Labour took over. What money Labour have to play with is already there, and we don’t need to screw up the entire country and spend vast amounts of money to reorganise something that wasn’t broken in the first place. Quite how pushing centres of decision making, up from in Tamworths’ case from circa 78,000 people up to 1.5 million people is going to make democracy ‘better’ is beyond us. Little Tamworth will be just a small administrative area of a super council with representatives who will have to shout even louder and perhaps even beg to get anything done for our area at all.
It’s not going to be pretty, worst of all there is nothing that can be done to stop it. This is Labours’ pent up aggressive steamroller policy machine in action, making sure they make our country a poor recreation of the Soviet Union, doing irresponsible irreparable damage to our proud country before the end of their term. Special mention goes to Councillor Daniels’ who would be proud of the wording we used there, if you watch the video of the meeting you will hear her patronising the Councillors who dared to try and state the situation as it is, by making inane and meaningless comparisons to her day job as a school teacher. That pretty much set the tone for the meeting, along with Councillor Bain standing in to chair the meeting due to the illness of Mayor Gareth Coates. Bain has a new trick up his sleeve to try and stifle real debate or criticism of the Labour group, and that is to throw the Nolan Principles out there. Labour being as sensitive to criticism as they are, are twisting the usage of these principles simply to shut opposition Councillors up. If you read them, you’d know that no Councillor has broken these principles in debate. Dare to tell the Labour group that their budget is ‘rubbish’ as one Councillor did at their budget meeting recently, here, have the Nolan principles thrown at you for your troubles. The aim is simply to scare opponents into silence.
We said that Labour do not have a say in Devolution at the beginning of this article. They don’t. What they do have, as we have reported before, is an opportunity to keep decisions about important Tamworth assets such as the castle and Assembly rooms to name a few, within Tamworth. In fact, if they cared, which they clearly don’t, given the meetings events, they could keep quite a large amount of Tamworths’ decisions within Tamworth. This would be achievable with Parish Councils, the best and only way of keeping real democracy in action.
As you’d expect, Labour yet again voted against a proposal to kick off the process of getting these in place, which can only be done whilst Tamworth Borough Council is in existence, and before the final proposals to wind up are due in on the 28th November this year. Their excuse? Too much work and not enough time for the work on Parishes to be done. Remember what we said earlier about the ‘work’ they actually had to do? That’s right. They’d rather spend a huge wodge of taxpayers money on meaningless useless reports that literally every other Council are having written, to come to the same conclusions. How to stop democracy being forcefully taken out of the hands of Tamworth people by creating Parish Councils is the work they could and should be doing, but our lazy incompetent defiant and uncaring controlling Labour group would rather do busy work, having realised too late that they needed to even do that. Their other excuse, is that they are looking into other ways of protecting Tamworths’ assets, such as Community Land Trusts or Community Interest Companies which completely ignore the calls to have Tamworth be able to have self determination from real democratically elected Council members on not just assets, but services delivered to Tamworth. They are quite literally putting their fingers in their ears and putting their middle fingers up at you the residents.
Rest assured though dear reader that they talk passionately about ‘taking residents with us’ on this journey, which in this case is the equivalent of bundling unwilling travellers on to a real life recreation of the Titanic’s maiden voyage. You aren’t getting a choice, you are having this happen to you whether you like it or not, and your remaining representatives who are trying to stand up for you are being silenced by threats of being labelled as ‘nasty’ and breaching public standards. Let’s hope those same representatives use whatever means possible to force Labour to deal with this, as we know there are indeed still ways to do this. We will fully back any campaign to save Tamworth, even if Councillor Richard Kingstone started it, yes you heard that right dear Reader. That’s the stakes here.
