I have, in my hands, a leaflet from the local Lib Dems proclaiming the headline,

“THEY SHOULD HAVE BEEN SACKED!”

Well, powerful stuff. But who’s ‘they’? ‘They’ are two local councillors, one in charge of refuse, and another the ex-chair of the Health and Social Care scrutiny panel.

No, please, don’t fall asleep. It gets better.

Calderdale Metropolitan Borough Council, you see, have (probably? allegedly?) broken EU law in awarding a  £50 million bin collection contract to French rubbish giants Sita. It’s the council officials that broke these rules, and it’s believed to have cost Calderdale voters something in the region of £6 million.

The controversy comes from whether or not elected politicians – especially the Cabinet that rubber stamped the official’s decisions – should be held to account for this. Is anyone politically responsible? The Cabinet have collective responsibility, so theoretically if the buck stops somewhere, it should stop there, shouldn’t it? £6 million is not small beans. £6 million is an absolute disgrace.

The local Labour Group agreed. They’ve resigned from chairing their scrutiny panels and, on the 1st October, there was a big Council meeting, where they called for a vote of No Confidence against the Tory Cabinet.

Now, considering there’s a leaflet with, “THEY SHOULD HAVE BEEN SACKED” as the headline from the Lib Dems, you’d imagine this same Lib Dem group voted in favour of Labour’s coup attempt, calling those Tories to account for costing the local taxpayers millions.

Sadly you’d be wrong. They actually abstained, saying that both the Tories and Labour were to blame for the scandal, and therefore it would be wrong to just punish the Tories… and so they helped the Tories stay in power.

And the quote from the Lib Dem group leader explaining this masterpiece of political tactics?

We are not prepared to plunge Calderdale into civic chaos by calling for the entire cabinet to resign.

It’s important to stress here that the ‘civic chaos’ would have been the Lib Dem group taking over. As the second largest group after the Tories, they would have been asked to put together a Cabinet, such is the tradition in Calderdale. Having said that, they would then have had to work with Labour and the Independents to get anything done, in a Town Hall that renowned for a complete lack of productive working relationships between the groups.

Perhaps having everything blocked would be civic chaos, but at least they’d have tried, at least they’d have shown what they could do even in the worst possible situation – and importantly someone would have been seen to have taken the fall for robbing the local taxpayers of £6 million.

Perhaps, just perhaps, having to work with other parties to get things done is a good thing, isn’t it? Isn’t that the point of PR, after all?

The local paper that reported the sorry affair in the Town Hall is full of comments from angry locals that, no matter what the intentions or reasons for the decision, the end result is that Councillors have collectively voted themselves off the hook for responsibility for the mess (leaving it all on the unelected officials). They’re singling out the Lib Dems – here’s an example:

…it is not gratifying to say I told you so about the useless Liberals,what we have lost here, was a chance for a clear out, of all that is wrong with the corrupt system, that seems endemic at the moment in Calderdale,this was a chance for the Liberals, to resemble some sort of credible alternatives to these accusations,but they simply have no backbone of their own unfortunately.

Will Calderdale’s voters pick up on the subtle nuance of the Lib Dem’s position – “sack just those two, not the whole cabinet”? Will they appreciate that they’ve left it up to the voters to decide whether or not to boot out those individuals responsible rather than using Town Hall shenanigans to override the democratic choices people made before?

Or, like me, will normal people see the headline “THEY SHOULD BE SACKED” and gasp at what looks like hypocrisy? My immediate reaction to seeing, was “BUT YOU SAVED THEM!!” and I’m a paid up party member. What about everyone else? Perhaps it’s only because I read that particular story in the local paper that’s caused me to spot anything wrong here. Most people won’t have, and the odds of people having read (and remembered) the story in the paper and then reading the Focus leaflet are extremely low. I’m reliably informed that Lib Dem groups are advised to avoid taking over minority control, too.

Presumably this is why this sort of thing works, no matter what I happen to think about it, and so, in the end, this is why I don’t (normally) get involved on the ground.