It was a rather long and laborious full council meeting, at least we here at Debunking have the facility to skip the bits we really don’t want to sit through. Only rarely will we turn up to see what is going on for ourselves. This meeting was notable in a few ways though, it was the meeting that surprisingly saved Councillor Thomas Jay from being automatically booted from the Council for having not attended a meeting in six months. Yes he actually flew in from Brazil to attend a council meeting, aren’t we privileged dear reader? Rather than allow someone else to take the spot and be elected for next to nothing during the County Council election, it seems Jay is going to hang on to the bitter end of his term. Of course he could decide to step down anywhere between now and then and cause a by-election which would cost thousands of pounds, which his troll friend and a Labour Councillor who knew he couldn’t take the role before he was elected have done before him. Naturally it would be evident that Reform would snap up this seat especially in Belgrave Ward. So we are conflicted as to whether ‘TJ’s’ seat blocking is to ensure that doesn’t happen at least for another year.
We do feel in the best interests of democracy that the by-election should happen regardless, even if Reform do get their first Tamworth council seat, let’s hope they wouldn’t resign like one of their shiny new County Councillors in Nottingham is already doing. We wonder how many of Staffs Reform Councillors will resign their positions when they realise they’ve bitten more than they can chew. If (as we consider likely), Ian Cooper becomes leader of Staffordshire County Council on 22nd May, they may quit in droves. Not only that, but members of the friends and family party have also got to contend with the responsibility of having quite serious cabinet positions. It’s not going to end well.
Back to Tamworth, and we have a new Mayor in Councillor Chris Bain, and Deputy Mayor in Councillor Ken Norchi. Bain who will no doubt continue his patronising laid bare irritation at his party being questioned or held to account over anything is going to be our towns representative for the next year. Not to mention sounding and looking extremely bored which we can’t blame him for to be quite honest. He will no doubt be treated well, compared to outgoing Mayor Councillor Gareth Coates, the only good decision Labour have made since being in charge who we are very sad to see leave the position. Coates has truly been one of the best Mayor’s Tamworth has seen and certainly didn’t use the position to build his profile to stroke his own ego. He couldn’t be more different to a previous Mayor Kingstone who revelled in the attention. It was interesting that Bain in his incoming speech noted that his piece of paper told him ‘he had to move a vote of thanks for the outgoing Mayor’ as if it irked him to do so. Councillor Coates also nearly didn’t get chance to respond to the two ‘tributes’ given to him by his colleagues Bain and Dean, or receive the past Mayors badge, with Bain having to be prompted to let him speak by the Chief Executive who was trying to move on to the next agenda item. In his self-effacing response, Coates said he had initially seen himself as a ‘Temu Mayor’, you were far from that Gareth and we wish you all the best and thank you for doing Tamworth proud. Councillor Ken Norchi, who got his first chance of being Mayor thanks to the Tories preferring him to any of the choices in their own group, some years ago was then sworn in as Deputy Mayor.
That brings us on to Councillor Richard Kingstone presenting his petition to reverse the Sunday car parking charges agreed by Labour in their budget for this year. We have no problem with the campaign to do this as the charges are unnecessary as proven by the Tories at the budget meeting. It’s the way Kingstone rode in as a hero starting a petition off the back of others work as usual that we have an issue with. As was pointed out by Tory opposition leader Councillor Jeremy Oates, the Council if everyone had chosen to speak up on the charges issue they’d have the equivalent of 30 seconds each to do so. Unfortunately it seems the issue is going to be buried forever in a committee and Labour will push on as we knew they would. We do wonder what they need the extra revenue for this year, probably to plug gaps in their budget where savings haven’t been identified yet. Not to mention having to help pay for the disastrous reopening of Marmion House.
At least Kingstone wasn’t elected as a County Councillor off the back of his car park petition deception and his election video full of bull. He’s now cosying up to Reform, and who knows, he might even join them to stand for the unitary authority, as the call to be Chairman or Mayor of such prestige would be hard for him to ignore. He’s got a few more years of toadying before that can occur though. Kingstone makes much of not having ‘a political master’, as if Badenoch and Starmer are on the phone to their local parties every day telling them what to do. On that note, whilst Tories are actually fairly autonomous, the Labour Party and Labour Group Leader Councillor Carol Dean actually do have to adhere strictly to policy even if it doesn’t fit our towns needs.
Despite our optimistic speculation that she was going to be replaced, Councillor Carol Dean is back as the leader of Tamworth Borough Council. Probably with much gnashing of teeth. Hilariously in his ‘endorsement’ speech, deputy leader Councillor David Foster described Dean as ‘More than adequate’. The words were out of his mouth before he could correct himself, he knew he’d messed up but it was too late. It was hardly a ringing endorsement of her leadership. Councillor Natalie Statham stood to endorse and defend Dean and chastise those ‘in the room’ that deride her. Oh sorry Councillor Statham we must have missed the bit where she actually did anything good for Tamworth or showed any signs that she was ‘more than adequate’. Unfortunately there’s no-one else in the Labour group capable of being their leader, so Tamworth is stuck with her for at least another year.
There was a brief update to answer Major Misinformation Ron Brown’s question at the last full council regarding AI and its use within the Council. We didn’t mention this question previously as it was so unhinged we just couldn’t cope with committing words to electrons. Brown of course thinks that AI is perfectly accurate and acceptable to use in Council Business despite its penchant for making things up. We actually asked one of the many AI engines about this site, and it faithfully presented the idea that the plainly obvious April Fool we wrote introducing Debunking Plus as fact. We were also sent some brilliant screenshots of Meta AI in WhatsApp telling us all about Ron Brown:
It’s nice to know that Ron gives AI a ringing endorsement even if it portrays him in this way. Presumably he agrees that this is accurate. In her answer Carol Dean mentioned she wasn’t ‘techy’ after struggling to read the words ‘Chat GPT’, and that centuries old English word ‘Bard’. We think AI is best left to the likes of making our article pictures when we’ve not got one for now. We couldn’t imagine the mess AI would cause within local government.
There was a question from a member of the public regarding telegraph poles, which had so much wrong with it that we’re going to cover it separately later. Suffice it to say that we’d never imagined hearing the words ‘Stoneydelph’ and ‘visual character’ in a sentence before. Despite thanking Councillors and appreciating seeing ‘democracy in action’ in the prelude to his question, the resident and a few others presumably with him apparently buggered off swiftly when he had received an answer regarding the only bit of local democracy he actually cared about when it affected his house price. Sigh.
On to Committee Chairmanships and Councillor Natalie Statham has been given a committee chairmanship and thousands of pounds extra of taxpayers money to preside over a pointless talking shop of no consequence. We feel she’s going to get a very hard lesson in how little she can get done through this appointment. No doubt though she’s going to be a try hard and push all kinds of her personal agenda with a blaze of TikTok publicity as Tamworth’s very own girl boss (if you’ve not seen that then be warned, you might be sick in your mouth). She will soon find out that only her cabinet colleagues have any influence on the organisation, and even saying that they do is pushing it. Only the civil service allow government or local councillors to make any real changes if they want to. Although it must be noted that Chief Executive Stephen Gabriel, the breath of fresh air that he is, is actually giving Labour the benefit of pushing the old guard of TBC directors into action (even if the decisions made by Labour are misguided at best) Previous Chief Executives of Tamworth Borough Council having worked their way up through the ranks caused it to go stale and immovable, and we can only lament at what the Tories could have done with Gabriel at the helm. Back to committees and It seems Labour have fallen out of love with the idea of a Tory Chairman and given Councillor Sam Smith the boot from the committee he chaired for the last municipal year in favour of his deputy Councillor Andrew Wells. Despite Labour insisting on their members being given chair positions when the Tories had to concede and do deals to stay in power, as it was a good way to hold the executive to account, it seems that has been entirely forgotten now in favour of looking after their own in the dying years of TBC.
Councillor Dean then moved on to dragging out the meeting by thanking everyone in the room for their part played in Labours first year in control (news to none Labour members no doubt) and expressed her belief that Labour ‘had got a lot of things done’ (again news to none Labour Councillors and indeed the rest of Tamworth). There was talk of leading from the front and plenty of meaningless words used to describe the performance of her cabinet this year who apparently ‘hit the ground running’. They unsurprisingly remain the same, was the long and short of it, and boy was her speech confirming this long, so much so our own thanks go to YouTube for making it possible to watch at 2x the speed.
