- Photo: Marion Dakers
It was electioneering time at the Hackney Council meeting last week.
The Labour side of the chamber was in fine voice with chants of “Ashcroft, Ashcroft” throughout the night, taunting the Conservatives over the scandal currently surrounding their party’s deputy chairman, while opposition members mocked Labour’s finance policies at every opportunity.
With councillors from all parties brandishing their agenda booklets like weapons as they shouted across the room, it was obvious to the mere ten of us upstairs in the public gallery that they really were serious.
Perhaps this Punch and Judy show is the council’s attempt to entertain. But when meetings go on for close to three and a half hours, the act wears thin. It certainly doesn’t jazz-up local democracy or make it any more relevant to ordinary people.
Seeing councillors hurling obstructive insults at each other about Christmas lights or drinking fountains – just some of the topics thought worthy of a half-hour squabble – only intimidates members of the public.
Shoreditch residents spoke at the meeting about their battle with Hackney Homes over the miserable state of their properties. They were interrogated and even booed by a few councillors while the “traffic lights” next to the Speaker, used to try and keep debates short, flashed from amber to red. Some of the residents said afterwards that the council was all talk and too-little action.
It was encouraging that the council passed its annual budget without a placard-waving crowd surrounding the building, as happened in 2000. At least the council is no longer the “basket case of local government”, as Mayor Jules Pipe described it last Wednesday.
But the pantomime antics and needless, combative heckling draw attention away from the issues at hand, and put off all but a handful of journalists from watching meetings from the safe distance of the public gallery.
very nice!
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