LAST week the Morecambe Bay Independents launched a broadside against the outgoing Labour administration claiming that all was not well with the authority's finances - nothing particularly new in this, the incoming have blamed the outgoing for crippling financial legacies since politics began... Thatcher did it and Blair's been doing it for the past 18 months - it usually happens when something goes wrong.

What is interesting here though is the response from Labour's new local leader, Cllr Abbott Bryning. In his statement Cllr Bryning argues various points with the MBI and probably only time will tell who is right on a number of issues but he points out that if Labour's financial control lacked probity then officers had a fiduciary duty to ring the alarm bells - Did anybody listen to the reactions of the various political parties following the recent Euro elections? I was confused - apparently they all did magnificently and each one managed to convince me that their side had won - how do they do that?

Converted for the new archive on 14 July 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.