Telling off the Council!

Last night was the Full Council meeting which included our budget setting.

I'll blog more about some of that later when I have a moment.

However, I did speak at last nights meeting. I was opposing some of the suggestions made by the Green party.

But before I got on to that I felt the need to tell everybody off!

There is always a bit of background noise in the Council Chamber. And people do have to go in and out. But last night there was both an extremely noisy exodus of people plus a load of ongoing coversations which meant it was virtually impossible to hear what the Liberal and then the Green speakers were saying. Now it may well be that we were all about to vote against them anyway, but it's really not on to behave quite so rudely. It doesn't matter whether you are from a party of 100 or a party of 1, if you are an elected councillor you should be entitled to be heard. And quite frankly last night several councillors were behaving extremely rudely (among them some who have moaned about member behaviour in the past). So I started my speech by calling attention to this rudeness and generally telling people off. Actually some did seem to take notice and there was a bit more listening as a result.

I may not agree with what the opposition say, but I hope I at least make the effort to listen.