As usual all the running was made by the Opposition parties (well that's us (Labour) and the Conservative'). Retiring to his previous idleness and indolence, the Brilliant Comrade, the so-called’ Leader of The Care in the Community Group’, hit on the clever expeditious wheeze of saying that he would have said what Rene K and I said , but as we’d said it first, he wouldn’t repeat it! Too idle even to bother to plagiarise. He even had the effrontery to describe RK and myself as his “fellow Leaders” (Oh, the shame. I'm not his fellow anything). He tried to explain the absence of an amendment by saying he didn’t know what figures to ask for, so didn’t know what to change – or something like that. To be honest it didn’t make a great deal of sense. But then he rarely does (and didn’t even when a member of our Group, or perhaps that should be, especially when he was a member of our Group!). I did like RK’s riposte when the GC said that he wasn’t a Conservative, “No, but you look like one!”
The Admin lot just sat there like a load of over-stuffed (with the SRA sauce) lemons. Not a bleat out of any of them. But the intellectual wing still found it hard to take. The ex-lefty, nationalist ‘two-dinners’ Morgan, stormed out of the Chamber at one point screaming, “I’m not staying here to listen to that crap!” – and went off for a nice restful cup of tea and a couple of kilos of biscuits. After all he had to get his energy up for his usual “I move the question be put” intervention – which sadly never actually came.
(It’s going to be interesting when the 1st April comes and all the vice-Chair SRAs disappear – whilst the Sage of Cwmbrwla goes up by £10k a year to £57k (I think),whilst his Cabinet colleagues trouser an additional £4k. My SRA goes down by £17 (no ‘k’) a year. I’m not jealous, really I’m not. (Even though I do more work than most of the Cabinet – and seem to take more responsibility than they are prepared to do.) But I’m sure that there might be a bit more competition for the SRAs that remain).
I thought the quality of the contributions from the Opposition was very high. I know that we in Labour had put in a tremendous amount of time and energy into researching the budget lines and working on our amendments. We did at least get a credit from Mike Day, who said we get a good job of being an Opposition. Thanks, Mike, much appreciated.
Nice Stuart Rice floundered about trying to find an excuse for their financial mismanagement. He never refuted any of the figures that I had put forward – he couldn’t as he knew where I’d got them from and that they were correct. (Even Wackie Blackie (that’s a reference to his being a Scouser like me, rather than any recreational substance) couldn’t do it on his blog. Although I confess that I gave up halfway through out of sheer boredom). Nice Rice made me laugh, when he said that there was some good news and then announced that the Budget balanced! This provoked The Sage to cry out that it didn’t need to…which will probably be news to the Finance Director and the District Auditor.
Nicey Ricey then started out on some wander around the UK, pointing out Authorities that were in deeper financial doo-doo than here – which prompted one wag to point out that they were nearly all run by Liberal Democrats! However, the best crack of the night came in response to a further traipse around the world by the Council Leader, who when he arrived at Canada, waving a picture of the Lord Mayor and myself at some Haiti fundraiser (no, I don’t either) prompted my, normally quiet, ward colleague Barbara Hynes to shout out “this is about Swansea not Canada”. Himself had the grace to look abashed and quickly moved on.
He and his cronies must have been shocked by the vehemence of the opposition from the public benches, which prompted one to retort, “I’m not going to vote for you lot again”. Let’s hope so.
With the ‘named votes’ (how councillors vote is recorded by name) we got, it will impossible for any of the Administration to hide behind some excuse or other. Save for Audrey Clement who left the meeting early – and our Dennis James who was ill.
Now the game continues with this information finding its way into our leaflets etc. Never seems to end. Ah well, I shouldn’t have joined, should I?
No comments:
Post a Comment