Barnet Council votes to gag residents and reject a climate emergency

2010 Conservative Election Laeflet

Last May, Barnet Council re-elected the Conservatives with a much increased majority in the council chamber. Popular leader, Richard Cornelius proposed a whole slate of policies that appealed to the Barnet public and the public responded by putting their 'X' in the Conservative box. Although many readers of this blog are not fans of Mr Cornelius, it has top be acknowledged that he was always prepared to be open and transparent. He attended a question time event staged by the Barnet Alliance for public services, taking open questions from the floor. Whilst his answers were not necessarily to the taste of many present, he was more than prepared to take them and answer them as well as he could.

At last years council election, under his leadership, whole bunch of new, young Conservative councillors were elected in places such as West Hendon that had not previously been Tory. The Tories had widely been expected to lose control of Barnet Council. This blog was almost alone in stating that we thought the wind was blowing the other way. Not because we agreed with Mr Cornelius or the Tories, but because we recognised that for ordinary Barnet voters, the Tories election message was working. This centred around the threat of Jeremy Corbyn taking over. The idea that a 'Marxist' would be in charge of Barnet Council was most unappealing to the majority of ordinary voters. The tactic worked spectacularly well and Mr Cornelius romped home.

Sadly for Mr Cornelius, in his hour of greatest triumph, his sidekick, Councillor Daniel Thomas saw an opportunity. Thomas has long had ambitions, some would say they far exceed his talents. He started a charm offensive with the new Councillors, and having managed to get several long standing Cornelius allies deselected before the May elections (Joan Scannell, Sury Khatri, Maureen Braun), he had the votes in the bag to tell Mr Cornelius to pack his bags. Mr Cornelius stood down in May and Dan Thomas became leader, unopposed. The new councillors were lead to believe that Dan Thomas would be a new broom and transform Barnet from being a rather fuddy-duddy, pedestrian organisation, to a dynamic, driven council, inspired by the ghost of Lady Thatcher, who looms large over all things Barnet. This was dramatically shown in a tweet from Councillor Gabriel Rozenberg this week.

Cllr Cornelius called for a sculpture of Margaret Thatcher which would be a great plan. There are many women we could and should celebrate. More suggestions welcome! https://t.co/RnxibhyRrL

— Gabriel Rozenberg (@rozgab) July 30, 2019

They were in for a bit of a shock. The very first policy initiative of Dan Thomas was one which, rather ironically, was straight from the "How to run a Marxist Council" textbook. A motion was raised to restrict public interaction with the council. An arbitrary limit of 100 words per question was adopted, along with strict limits on the number of questions that members of the public can ask. It is worth pointing out that this was never mentioned in the Conservative manifesto. Bloggers like myself, Mr Reasonable, Mrs Angry and Mr Mustard have managed to save Barnet Council millions of pounds worth of taxpayers money by uncovering waste and asking questions. The most spectacular of these was the Metpro scandal. The net savings of this are in the region of £2.5 million since 2012.

We have also used the questions to expose cases where the council was actually breaking the law, such as the Freedom Pass debacle, where the council illegally withdrew Freedom Passes from disabled people.

Statue of Lady Thatcher

The spurious justification for the changes was to save £42,000 from the budget. Anyone reading the council papers will know that this is a complete red herring. £42,000 is the equivalent of the cost of a member of staff for one year. There was no mention of deleting a member of the team. They know full well that all that will happen is the officers will just work a bit less hard and a few less savings will be uncovered. It is strange that the money for a statue of Lady Thatcher can be found (cost of approx £100,000) but public questions which can save money and ensure a well run, open council cannot be afforded.

Several of the new councillors contacted me privately. They were horrified by the proposal. They stated that they believed it was not what a Conservative Council should be doing. They told me that there divisions in the group. Mrs Angry contacted Lord Pickles, a former Local Government minister, who also agreed that transparency should be paramount. Sadly none of this counted for anything. The Conservative group on Barnet Council voted through the changes on Tuesday. What saddens me is that the new councillors, who privately told me that they were opposed to the scheme fell into line. It seems that they have put party allegiance and the promise of a job in the future before the people who elected them and pay their allowances. Who needs Labour Marxists, who slavishly follow a bad leader, when you have Tory ones?

Perhaps even sadder was the rejection of the proposal to declare a climate emergency in Barnet. The Labour group had proposed this, but the Tories, again displaying an almost Marxist zeal towards politiking, inserted clauses attacking Sadiq Khan, Mayor of London. The motion fell. The Barnet Conservatives posted this tweet. Does this strike you as sensible politics by grown ups?

Labour just voted down their own motion to declare a climate emergency, simply because they won't accept any criticism of the Mayor of London.

While Conservatives take action on the environment, Labour tonight proved their claims are little more than hot air.

— Barnet Conservatives (@BarnetTories) July 30, 2019

What really disturbs me is that we've seen two cases of Mayor Khan giving Barnet Council a punishment beating for its motions criticising him. The first was when the Mayor passed the NIMR development and the second was last week when the Pentavia Retail park development was passed. in both cases, the Mayors team took great delight in pointing out the many failings of Barnet Council. It would be laughable if it wasn't serious. Climate change needs to be addressed and across the planet, local authorities need to take local action. Instead they are 'fiddling whilst Rome burns'.

Do you remember the cry from the Tories "We're all in this together". It is true. But some of us are on the good ship planet Earth in first class and some are in steerage. What the local Conservatives don't seem to appreciate is that when you are on the Titanic, headed towards an Iceberg, it doesn't matter if you are in the first or third class cabins, you will be just as dead when the ship sinks.

Once more, the Barnet Eye finds itself having to write blogs that should never have to be written in a democratic society. When we started writing blogs, back in 2008 on the Barnet Times website, we had a blog removed for pointing out the Stalinist tendency of then Tory Leader Mike Freer. David Miller, former chair of the Chipping Conservatives leapt to our defence.

Under the leadership of Richard Cornelius, there was a degree of openness and so the Stalinist/Marksist label was clearly not appropriate, but Dan Thomas has clearly dug out the manuals on how to control a council and the subjugation of all opposition is in full swing (well at least until the next election).

The thing that saddens me the most is that from my private conversations with some of the new Tory Councillors, I know they are better than this. They have been fed the line that voting against your own party is akin to treachery. It is nothing of the sort. Over the last eleven years that I've written blogs, there have been several notable cases where Tory councillors broke the whip. They did this to save the Mapledown School respite care service, most notably. The Councillor who voted against the whip stated "If we are not here to protect people such as the parents of disabled children, what are we here for?". I ask all of the new Conservative Councillors to ask themselves "what are you here for?". I know if I'd been elected, I would have known the answer. "To serve the best interests of the people of Barnet".

I invite any Conservative Councillor who has the guts to write a guest blog explaining how either of the decisions taken on Tuesday has best served the interests of the people of Barnet". Let's see if any can.