9 Minute Meeting

This morning I attended a Contract Scrutiny Committee Meeting. Total time for meeting 9 minutes. Decisions taken zero. Meeting achievements, noted two reports. Of course going along increased my meetings attended percentage and hence showed what a good Councillor I am.

I am all in favour of payment by results, but that is not the same as payment for attendance at meetings. Usually time spent in meetings is time talking about what you should be doing when you manage to escape the meeting and are able to get on with your job. I avoid meetings as much as I can since I have too much work to get on with to sit around talking about it. However, by opening the debate on attendance have the people behind the High-Tax-Hartlepool Website outed themselves?

Surely as the guardians of democracy in Hartlepool they must themselves have faced a ballot box or two themselves. It’s easy to sit on the side lines and snipe about how you think things should theoretically work in an ideal world. It gives you a lot more credibility if you are speaking from actual hands on experience. Those who can DO, those who CAN'T teach, those who CAN'T TEACH become critics!

So if the authors of High-Tax-Hartlepool are qualified by actual experience to comment on Councillors', Allowances, Councillors' Attendance, Councillors' ideas and plans then they must have at some point been Councillors. I am also certain they would not be so hypocritical as to not practice what they preach? Therefore the authors of High-Tax-Hartlepool must be amongst the list of those Councillors with 67% plus attendance. So who are the authors of High Tax Hartlepool? Would Cllrs Hall, Preece, Tumilty, Laffey, James, Fleet, London, Brash and A.Marshall care to come out of the closet.