Kent Greens Call for Abolition of KCC

The Green Party is calling for the abolition of Kent County Council and its replacement by  six unitary councils based on the following groupings

·        Thanet and  Dover (population 245,500)

·        Canterbury and Swale (population 287,000)

·        Shepway and Ashford (population 226,000)

·        Maidstone Tonbridge and  Malling (population 289,000)

·        Dartford and Gravesham (population 199,000)

·        Sevenoaks, and Tunbridge Wells (population 230,000)

Existing Medway unitary council with a population 264,000 will remain unchanged.

The new unitary authorities  would provide education, social care, highways, planning, housing, refuse collection and many other services to populations of between 200,000 – 300,000 people.

Chair of Kent Green Party and Prospective Parliamentary Candidate for Maidstone and the Weald, Stuart Jeffrey said “the existing county council is too large and unwieldy. It lacks any real connection and accountability to the people it serves. Local government should, by definition, be based as close to its electors as possible, rather than being inaccessible to most of Kent’s residents.

Smaller unitary councils will bring together areas  of  Kent which are already closely  connected and share many common issues. They will also bring together residents, staff and politicians with an expert understanding of the areas covered by the new councils. This would place them in a stronger  position to develop  more effective policies and strategies than the current Maidstone based system”.

Green Party Thanet District Councillor Ian Driver said, “In  East Kent many of the District Councils are already working closely together. They have  successfully  shared Housing, Human Resources, IT,  Revenues, Benefits and  Audit services for several years, so why not include KCC services as well?

I believe that the new unitary councils should be elected by proportional representation so that smaller parties and independent candidates can  be represented giving a more balanced and inclusive approach to decision making. The new councils should be managed by committee systems to prevent power being concentrated into the hands of a tiny handful of cabinet members and they should be underpinned and supported by a strong system of parish and town councils which will ensure community accountability”.

The establishment of unitary authorities will form part of the Kent Green Party’s manifesto for the 2015 council elections.

Promoted by Stuart Jeffery for Kent Green Party, 82 Buckland Road, Maidstone ME16 0SD

Statement of Thanet Green Party Re Council Standards Committee meeting 21 November

Thanet Green Party condemns the shameful and unacceptable response by the two main political parties to the critical report aimed at improving Thanet councillors’ conduct.

The four independent members of the council’s Standards Committee, who produced the report, resigned immediately after the committee’s meeting on Thursday when the party leaders and councillors angrily denounced the  report’s findings.

The walk-out by the independent group followed these attacks and a decision by the committee to ask the authors to rewrite the report giving more evidence of their findings.

Green councillor Ian Driver, who attended the meeting, said: “The resignation of the four independent members was hardly surprising considering the sustained and unfair bullying and browbeating they were subjected to by Labour councillors.

“This unfortunate event will serve to strengthen the public perception that Thanet councillors do not listen to their constituents and are out of touch, unresponsive and defensive. Instead of being an opportunity for Thanet Council and its councillors to move forward and become more open and democratic, the meeting last night took a big step backwards.This was a classic case of shooting the messenger.”

The report’s authors report are non-party political and have broad range of expertise and experience in the world of  business, the public sector, management and communications. Their role is to act as “critical friends” to the council and provide advice about the development and management of ethics and conduct.

Pulling no punches, their report published earlier in the week, said that the council was seen as secretive; that councillors appeared to be out of touch; did not engage with or listen to  residents and community groups; and there was local suspicion of corruption. The report  also cited examples of councillors being rude and abusive towards each other and on occasion making threats to members of the public. The report  pointed out  that some councillors have disobeyed council rules.                    

Despite its highly critical findings, the report had intended to present and honest picture of public perceptions. Unfortunately, most of the councillors at the Standards Committee did not see it this way and were extremely angry and defensive.

Labour Leader Clive Hart, his deputy Allan Poole and Cabinet Members Iris Johnston and Michelle Fennel, attacked and verbally bullied the report authors in a quite extraordinary way. Instead of seeing the report for what it was – a starting point for an important debate and overdue change – they regarded it as personal criticism which it clearly was not.                                        

The views of Conservative Leader Councillor Bob Bayford,  who had pledged to support “steps which will change the public perception of council affairs”, were clearly not shared by his party colleagues.

Thanet Green Party noted that some councillors attempted to divert blame for the council’s poor reputation on Councillor Driver, who faces  disciplinary action for taking pictures of  council meetings— a practice allowed by most councils in Kent.

The Green Party supports Councillor Driver’s principled efforts to force more transparency and openness on to Thanet Council in his campaign to allow the public the right to film meetings.

Councillor Driver has been campaigning tirelessly against corruption, incompetence  and secrecy at Thanet Council. He was the first councillor to raise concerns about Pleasurama, the secret £3.4 million TransEuropa  debt, and the mismanagement of the Royal Pavilion lease disposal.

Councillor Driver made an audio recording of last night’s (Thursday)  Standards Committee meeting. The Thanet Green Party is happy to publish this recording. It can be heard at http://thanetgreencouncillor.blogspot.co.uk/2013/11/statement-re-thanet-council-standards.html

here it is

  ed couldn't find it there but think it is one or both of the videos belowAlthough the recoding may have been made in breach of council rules we believe that there is overwhelming public interest in making this recording publicly available. Let the people of Thanet judge for themselves how well served they are by their councillors.

Statement of the Thanet Green Party Re TDC Independent Standards Members Report

Thanet Green Party fully supports the report of the independent members of Thanet Council Standards Committee which strongly condemns the conduct of local councillors. 

 

The Party agrees with the report’s criticisms of the frequent and distasteful squabbling between councillors, the personal attacks at meetings and in the media, and the lack of respect towards the public which appear to be stock-in-trade of many of Thanet’s elected politicians. We also share the concerns of the four independent members  about the lack of transparency in the conduct of council business. These serious failings have brought the council into public disrepute and destroyed the trust between many residents and politicians.The report says: “Council has the appearance of a dysfunctional organisation whose behaviour and internal squabbles adversely affect the delivery of services, capital projects etc. to the residents of the local district”.This highly critical report also refers to councillors’ lack of respect, hostility and personal threats towards members of the public,  public suspicion of secrecy and corruption, and little evidence of changes in councillors’ behaviour.

The Green Party calls on the council to take urgent steps to transform Thanet Council into an open and accountable organisation with councillors who listen to, and engage with, local residents. Compulsory councillor training suggested in the report will be a positive step in this direction, but genuine  change will only come about when many of the current councillors step aside for new people with different more modern and progressive ideas and new ways of working. Green Party Councillor, Ian Driver, has been campaigning hard to break down the council’s unacceptable veil of secrecy.  He was the first local politician to raise  concerns about the  scandals of the  Ramsgate Pleasurama development, the secret £3.4 million TransEuropa Ferries Debt, the mismanagement of the  Royal Pavilion lease sale and the demand for the public to be able to film all council meetings. Making a principled stand on these issues has required Councillor Driver to break council rules in the public interest. He has not engaged in the party-political bully-boy antics which the independent members group have highlighted and complained about.

 

The Thanet Green Party believes in open, transparent and honest local government, with councillors committed to working in partnership with local residents. We will be campaigning in the 2015 elections on this platform.

 

Thanet Green Party

Many thanks to everyone who voted for one of Thanet Green Party’s candidates in the county elections. From a standing start (we are a new branch) we put three strong people forward in Broadstairs, Ramsgate, Margate & Cliftonville and we’d like to extend our appreciation to everyone who put a cross in one of those boxes; we beat the Liberal Democrats in all three wards.

There is a lot of work to be done going forward and we hope to do it.

Here are a few reasons why.

Our country has been turned into what the Guardian’s economics editor Larry Elliott in 2007 dubbed “One big offshore hedge fund churning speculators’ money while asset-strippers draw up plans for the few remaining factories to be turned into industrial theme parks.”

And that was before the financial crisis.

There is only so far that propping up a massive housing bubble and bad mortgage raddled banks with cheap money conjured off the printing presses can be dubbed an economic strategy and the shortsightedness of our successive governments has been unparalleled.

As maternity and mental health wards close, ambulance stations are sold off, prisons are put in the hands of private sector profiteers, young soldiers sent on repeated tours of countries where we went to war illegally, stupidly and to little long-term gain, something has to change.

UKIP like to blame immigrants and the European Union.

It was the British Government, not immigrants, that has since 2007 committed to spending over £1.162 trillion bailing out the banks, with it costing taxpayers up to £5bn a year just to service the loan that the crisis incurred.

From energy policy (incompetent fumbling negotiations over redundant nuclear technologies pilloried by everyone from the experts to Private Eye) and government equivocation over renewables that has cost us investment even here in Thanet (the owners of the Richborough Energy Park blame precisely that for a failure to progress their plans) to simpler things like opposing a ban on toxic pesticides believed to be behind mass loss of bees, our politicians keep getting it so wrong.

With the bees, it was simple: Our government was in the pocket of biotech corporations. With the banks, it is probably as straight forward.

Here is how Willem Buiter (an establishment economist with a resume that reads “Professor of European Political Economy, London School of Economics and Political Science; former chief economist of the EBRD, former external member of the MPC” etc) puts it:

I used to believe that state capture took the form of cognitive capture, rather than financial capture… But it is becoming increasingly hard to deny the possibility that the extraordinary reluctance of our governments to force unsecured creditors (and any remaining non-government shareholders) of the zombie banks to absorb the losses made by these banks, may be due to rather more primal forms of state capture…

Governments everywhere are doing the best they can to delay or prevent the lifting of the veil of uncertainty and disinformation that most banks have cast over their battered balance sheets.

The banking establishment and the financial establishment representing the beneficial owners of the institutions exposed to the banks as unsecured creditors – pension funds, insurance companies, other banks, foreign investors including sovereign wealth funds – have captured the key governments, their central banks, their regulators, supervisors and accounting standard setters to a degree never seen before.

You heard it from an expert. Our politicians have been bought.

With all the three main parties unpalatable and UKIP pointing the finger in the wrong place, the Green Party needs to raise its game. Your blogger joined the Green Party for the simple reason that this comment from Nobel Laureate and economist Robert Solow did not sound quite right…

It is very easy to substitute other factors for natural resources, then there is in principle no ‘problem.’ The world can, in effect, get along without natural resources, so exhaustion is just an event, not a catastrophe.

If you can believe that and win a Nobel prize, there is something very wrong with the world (or perhaps just economists…) And with our recent governments’ (Labour, Conservative + Liberal Democrat) string of mindbogglingly stupid wars, palpable venality and shortsighted support of rapacious developers and property speculators at the expense of affordable housing, protection of green spaces and decent public transport, we need to step up to the plate.

The Green Party, for all its “uncoolness” has actually been ahead of the curve on a lot of issues. Like all parties, it sometimes gets it wrong, but more often than not it is prescient (on a land value tax, on renewables, on biodiversity loss, on job creation through a Green New Deal – bastardised by the government).

For all those reasons and no doubt many more, we have a growing, independent-minded group of members in Thanet. And the more the merrier!

Whilst joining a political party for many is seen as passé, single issue NGOs and activism, however much they do, can only go so far. That’s why we are here and here to stay, with more people jumping on board. Please do get involved, by joining, ambling to one of our meetings or in any other way you see fit.

And thanks one more time to all those who voted.

Press release by Edward Targett, Thanet Green Party