Interesting Goings-on at Labour Group. The Revival of Democratic Centralism?
Policy for the majority group on the council is agreed at meetings of the Labour Group. Every Labour councillor is entitled and expected to attend ‘Group’.
It came as something of a surprise then to learn, that at the meeting on 12th February roughly one third of the Group were absent.
There might be a number of reasons for this, here are some that have been suggested to us.
There were those who simply could not face another couple of hours of the mayor’s droning on.
There are those who feel that there is no point any longer, Group is effectively redundant and simply exists to ratify the mayor’s decisions.
There are those who are fed up with what Labour Group and the council have become and are simply disillusioned.
There are those who will either be standing down or expect to get the chop next time round, and therefore, they have no incentive to put themselves through the experience again.
It is plausible that two or more reasons have affected some individual councillors.
The highlight of the Group meeting, if we can call it that was when the mayor sought to ‘whip’ the members of Group to vote for her budget.
In itself, this was not unusual, although it does suggest an extreme sensitivity to criticism on a body where Labour has a 10:1 majority. It suggests an inability to argue the merits of their policy.
But back to Labour Group and the mayor’s insistence on a whipped vote (to ensurethat Labour members must vote for the mayor’s proposal or risk being suspended from the party).
Prior to a council meeting the agenda and the supporting papers are published in the ‘yellow book’. It stretches credulity to believe that every member reads every page, but once it is published, those with interests in a particular topic can interrogate the papers and raise concerns or suggest changes. Of course, in order to do this, they do have to have access to the ‘yellow book’.
The mayor sought to whip the Group to support her budget. The trouble was that the ‘yellow book’, containing the budget, had not been published. She wanted to force Labour councillors to vote for a budget that they had not seen.
This is reminiscent of the old communist party and the principles of democratic centralism, where members were expected to vote for whatever the leadership decided.
A couple of councillors objected and made their views known, and here we must acknowledge the stand taken by two councillors in particular, Cllrs Gray and McAlmont. They pointed to the illogicality of supposedly independent councillors agreeing to cast their votes without seeing what they were voting for. However, when it came to the vote, they were supported by only a handful of councillors.
It appears that the majority were supine. They, it seems, are content to do as they are told.