Have they learned anything at all?

One fundamental lesson that should be learned though is that when you are representing the public it is folly to ignore what they have to say. Clearly the voters were disenchanted with the direction being taken on a number of important local issues by councillors and now they have elected a new batch. The present members would do well to learn from the mistakes of their predecessors so before they get their slippers cozily under the highly-polished town hall tables perhaps they should bear the following in mind.

Having your mobile phone bill paid for, trips to the city's twin towns, Royal visits etc are all very nice and form part of public life for some elected members and officials - but that's not why they were voted in. Councillors have been blessed with the trust of the people to make sure that services are improved, that controversial development schemes are not steamrollered through, to provide real accountability on where our money goes and to protect the more vulnerable members of our community. The last lot got voted out because they refused to listen or accept what the people were saying to them (maybe they read the wrong papers) and those concerns haven't gone away. We still need to know why officer advice given during the Blobby fiasco flew in the face of the facts and resulted in such a costly mess. We still need to know why we had to pay John Burrows a huge amount of money to leave his post and keep his mouth shut about it (incidentally one former senior councillor strongly suggested to me that Mr Burrows himself had requested the gagging order barring him from talking about why the council parted company with him - poppycock!) We need to know why councillors and officers can't find it in themselves to say sorry when they drop a clanger - it's not much to ask is it? Councillors also need to apply firm pressure with officers who are there to implement policies of the elected members and not the other way round! Incidentally congratulations to the Greens who recently pressed officers on more than 20 points at a recent planning meeting - despite the barracking of the depleted Labour ranks who complained feebly that this wasn't the way things were done... well maybe not in the past anyway!

And last, but by no means least, a word or two for the elected member for Lancaster and Wyre who works hard for his constituents but who also badly missed the target when he suggested that some subtle form of racist campaign resulted in such a heavy Labour loss recently. This was clearly not the case and the voters and readers of this paper told him so, in no uncertain terms. Not content with this he writes again this week to the Citizen and states that the issues are obviously too subtle and complex for some to get their poor, thick-heads round... pardon us for being so dim Mr Dawson but maybe we couldn't see it because it simply wasn't there. The final line in his letter (see Page 13) is a killer and a prime example of the kind of nonsensical expression mastered by the spin-doctors. "...by allowing one person in particular that privacy that the electorate have so recently conferred." That's New Labour speak for saying 'leave him alone folks he got booted out' and one is compelled to ask, Mr Dawson, who created most of the fuss in the first place? The readers and voters know the answer to that. Not that an MP would or should take advice from Citizen Smith, (God knows, Dame Elaine Kellet-Bowman never did!) but Mr Dawson would do well to get back to fighting for cash and jobs in his constituency, backing this paper in its fight for the truth and accountability on how your Council Tax is spent and taking the line of his parliamentary neighbour Geraldine Smith, who has managed to accept that some local councillors lost their seats because they refused to listen to the public - hardly surprising and no big deal.

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