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Democracy by any other name
5:10pm Wednesday 16th July 2008
Barnet's full council meetings, the latest of which took place on Wednesday evening, are not exactly a shining beacon of democracy.
That's not to suggest that any particular members or groups act in a particularly un-democratic manner, but that the whole carry on is, to the untrained eye, a little bit pointless.
The first two hours is taken up by 'debates' on various motions tabled by members and on amendments made to those motions by other members. These will commonly be along the lines that 'Barnet Council is great', if tabled by a Conservative member or 'Barnet Council is not so great', if tabled by a Labour member.
The 'Barnet Council is great' motion will be amended by a Labour member to say 'Barnet Council is not actually as great as they say', to which a Conservative member will add a further amendment saying 'actually it is great, and only because of the great efforts we've put in to lift it out of the depths of despair it fell into under the Labour-Lib Dem administration.'
Confused? Well, it is a confusing affair. Particularly when you try and decipher which amendment is being voted for and, consequently, what the 'result' of the debate is. Never fear, because you can assume that thanks to the constitution, the Conservative majority will out-vote the other parties every time and so the result will be, inevitably, that Barnet is indeed great.
As far as I can tell from my limited experience, everyone (with some rare exceptions) will always vote along party lines because that's the done thing. It seems to be a foregone conclusion that party politics supercedes personal views, which I'm sure is a great reassurance to voters.
I should clarify what I mean by 'debate'. I include the parenthesis because the word, to my mind, speaks of an open and live exchange of views. While for the most part (again, with some rare exceptions) Barnet councillors take it in turns to read from pre-prepared speeches.
And when I say 'result', what I mean is that they agree on a motion which, for all I know, floats away afterwards into the ether.
The best you can hope for is that Brian Coleman will get annoyed, like a beehive poked with a stick, or John Hart will wax lyrical on an eccentric subject.
On Wednesday, true to form, Mr Coleman shouted at Andrew McNeil for claiming that he was absent from an important London Assembly meeting on crime and had to be ticked off by the master of ceremonies, mayor John Marshall.
Mr Hart, meanwhile, secured the assurance from the cabinet that no funding is in place to turn Sanders Lane into a two-lane road. That is their mantra on the subject, but it is still very different from saying they won't try and get funding or that it won't happen. And then, happily, Mr Hart announced his hope that this spelled the end of the petrol age.
I have to hold my hands up and admit that I've never made it through to the end of a full council meeting which, judging by the agenda and the volume of hot air, would be close to midnight.
But, sometimes, there's only so much democracy one man can take.
Your Say Your Times
Rog T, Mill Hill says...
8:11pm Mon 21 Jul 08
Having spent a good part of the weekend trawling through the minutes of various council meetings, I can only agree with you. My two favourite motions were the one on the International Womens Day and the one on the Kyoto treaty. Given that for most of our councillors voting whether Maggie & the Queen did a good job without the help of an international womens day or not, is the closest they get to exercising any power for their hefty allowance, I have to ask - can I have some of my council tax back please. If I want to spend the evening talking rubbish, I go to the pub with my friends. I don't expect a £9,500 basic allowance to subsidise me. Mind you, that would be 10 pints a day and after that I guess I'd be talking complete nonsense as well.
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Don't Call Me Dave, People's Republic of Barnet says...
10:47pm Sun 20 Jul 08
The cause of the problem is twofold. First, the Local Government Act 2000 introduced the cabinet system which, for Barnet, meant that 53 out of 63 councillors effectively became redundant overnight. (in any event, most decisions are actually taken by the unelected and unaccountable officers.)
Second, scrutiny of the decision making process is given lip service and is not impartial. Whilst scrutiny Chairmen are notionally agreed by full council, the ruling party will always get its way. In turn, the ruling party will agree to wishes of the leader who can remove people from their committees (with the subsequent loss of allowances) if they don’t agree with his/her choice. In short this means that the leader of the council, who chairs the cabinet, gets to choose the chairman of the very important cabinet overview & scrutiny committee.
I propose two solutions. First, the Chairmen of all scrutiny committees should be opposition members, and scrutiny committees should be given real teeth rather than just make recommendations. The House of Lords is a revising chamber to the Commons. Give council scrutiny committees a similar role. In the Commons, key committees are always chaired by opposition MPs.
Second, decisions taken by officers under delegated powers must also be subject to call-in and scrutiny. At present, a decision taken by democratically elected councillors can be subjected to what passes for scrutiny, but unelected officers can take major decisions which cannot be called in at all. That is totally unacceptable in a democracy.