Friday 4 February 2011

Vindication or Vindictive?

The battle over cuts is getting personal.

Police are investigating a 'public order incident' which occurred in Redland ward's Kendrick Road last Saturday afternoon.

Former Labour councillor for Battle ward and Unison honcho Tony Jones airily describes the scene on his blog:
"Walking with my family into town today I came across Cllrs Bayes and Goodall distributing a newsletter from the LibDems."

He describes several points of content in their political leaflet as 'potentially libellous' (although he doesn't give any details), and was clearly more than upset that "they didn't want to stop and discuss these and other issues."

An obvious admission.

Jane Griffiths uses her intimate knowledge of her ex-party colleague to fill in several of the gaps in her own inimitable style.

She notes that the leaflet referred to the blog of Labour's candidate in Redlands, Jan Gavin (find it here), in a critical manner. The former MP then goes on to ask several further questions about the dubious, underhand and possibly criminal past behaviour of the longstanding Labour member.

The 'other issues' Mr Jones refers to are less explicit.

Meanwhile, in not altogether separate news, leader of the opposition Labour group on RBC Jo Lovelock has referred coalition councillors Warren Swaine and Richard Willis to the council standards committee.

She alleges they brought the whole council into disrepute and are resorting to 'unfounded personal attacks' by calling 'corrupt' the facilities agreement which saw hundreds of thousands of pounds pay for trade unions officials and seeking to remove this cost from the taxpayer.

Cllr Willis voiced his disquiet at Labour's 'misuse' of official processes 'to put up a smokescreen around their discomfort' over past abuses of power.

And Cllr Swaine responded immediately to stand up to what he describes as Labour's bullying behaviour (something Tony Jones complained about during his hiatus from Labour).

He argues the Labour leadership is wasting more public money by 'using the standards committee for political purposes' as a means to silence the efforts of the new coalition to reform the council administration by  covering up the facts that they were not open or transparent about the deal signed in 1998 - either at the time or at any point since - something Labour will now have to demonstrate was not the case in order to make their charges stick.


Oranjepan asks: Labour thinks it is the coalition who are making personal attacks, so why are the Police investigating Labour members?

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