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As events unfolded last night in the chamber of Nuneaton and Bedworth Borough Council I enjoyed myself more and more. Many other councillors cannot say the same.
The meeting started normally enough and there were a few items on the agenda upon which I was looking forward to speaking as there always are. Apologies, minutes, interests and announcements all passed normally and the evacuation procedure was duly read out.
Item five was public participation. Keith Kondakar often stands for the Green Party locally and likes to appear when he thinks he might get into the newspapers to ask a question. He excelled himself last night asking a question from the public gallery which was nothing to do with Nuneaton and Bedworth Borough Council. The council leader pointed this out and that was a wasted trip for the Green Party. Not as wasted as attending count night where they are regularly drubbed by the BNP around here but on that level.
Urgent Decisions passed without much comment and we moved on to the leaders report to council and the Cabinet reports.
I asked a question about the redevelopment of the Woolworths shop in Nuneaton at taxpayers expense and asked if there were any further such deals available. It turns out that there are if businesses want to come forward and applications will be dealt with on a merit basis. I did a little YouTube clip on 1st March which I include below:
The ‘Strategic Alliance’ between Rugby council and our own was a lively debate i can tell you and quite rightly so. More on this later.
Immediately after this item on the agenda the leader of the opposing Labour group proposed a motion to suspend a couple of articles of the constitution so that a previously unannounced debate could take place on a motion to be disclosed after the vote. The way the chamber is at the moment that made it my decision and loving democracy as we do in the British National Party my hand was up supporting the motion. i had no idea what they were going to come up with but democracy in action is good for the residents is my view.
The motion was:
“This council expresses no confidence in the leader of the council Peter Gilbert and calls upon him to resign”.
Did I enjoy that? You bet I did. I made several points in my speech in the debate and voted for the motion for the leader to resign.
Shock of the night was that the only way that the leader could win the vote would be for the Mayor to use his casting vote in his favour. This is the same Mayor who only two weeks ago left the Conservative group after thirty years citing dissatisfaction with the leader and cabinet in particular as his reason. Last night though he backed the leader in the vote making a nonsense of his former claims of dissatisfaction.
You could not make this up!
The surprises were not finished either. After losing the vote because of the newly independent Mayor the Labour group left the chamber on mass. By refusing to take any further part in the meeting they were refusing to undertake the democratically elected duties which the took on at the last election. For any politician to refuse to take part in democracy is a travesty. For Labour to do it is not as surprising really but I hope the voters remember on May 6th that
when things do not go their way
Labour walks away!
The meeting continued without them leaving me as the official leader of the opposition on the council which suits me just fine. Undaunted by the responsibility, loving it in honesty, I carried on and asked several questions which I will not detail here as some of them are worthy of separate posts.
After the meeting was officially closed one of the Conservative members called out to me saying, “You will get a lot of press out of tonight Martyn”. He is quite correct that I should have done with some of the things that I said but we know that the reality will probably be quite different. Time will tell.
