IN your latest edition, one of your correspondents complains about the recent deadly silence over the appalling city council scandals which have emerged over the last year or so. He or she mentions Blobbygate as well as a number of other horrors.
Quite right. Blobbygate has gone quiet. Why? Because under the previous administration senior councillors and officers were able to use the Labour majority with the support of the Lib Dems and even, to their lasting shame and for reasons still unexplained, the Conservatives, to keep things under wraps. How? They came up with two big lies which many councillors seem to have accepted without questioning.
The first big lie was that handling the shocking affair through the District Auditor was the correct way to go. This is rubbish even though it is still repeated by some of the councillors who were taken in.
What is the truth? Well, District Audit policy emphasises that the responsibility for keeping a local authority's house in order rests in the first place fair and square with the authority itself. How can the correct route for handling a disgrace like Blobbygate depend on a single local elector having the time and patience to ferret out the truth and make an objection? No, the local elector with an objection is the last resort when the council won't clean up its own mess.
The second big lie was that the main Blobbygate objection was so sensitive that only a tiny number of councillors could see it - the so-called need to know principle. The objection was treated like a top secret document. But it isn't secret. It's an objection to the council's accounts, that's all. All the councillors are entitled to see the council's accounts. All the councillors are entitled to see objections to the council's accounts. There are restrictions on what they can reveal outside the council, but they can see the objections.
It was the Labour majority who imposed the limitations on access to the principal objection. It was the Labour majority who managed for years to prevent the obviously justified and badly needed inquiry into how the council lost £2 million. Aren't councillors curious to see what it was that the Labour leadership and officers tried so hard to keep from them? Aren't councillors keen to know what makes the principal Blobbygate objection different? Do none of them suspect any motives for keeping it under wraps? Do none of them wonder what an inquiry would turn up? Why hasn't the objection been made available to all councillors? After all, the council has had it for over a year.
Mike Ford Silverdale
Converted for the new archive on 14 July 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.
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