CHARLES BANNERMAN: Decision to abandon Town House example of party politics overriding public interest
So... when you voted for your Highland councillors in May, you thought you were choosing someone who would see your interests and the community’s as their top priority.
Dream on.
This week’s Inverness Area Committee decision to abandon the Town House for its meetings is not only downright daft, it’s also yet another egregious instance of how councillors place party political interests and one-upmanship above those of the public they are elected to serve.
I covered the basic question in a previous column, but others now also impinge on the case for retaining the traditional venue of the chamber at our magnificently and expensively refurbished Town House.
Someone tried to complain about the £82,000 allegedly needed to upgrade the Town House IT. Compared with the millions of pounds spent on the outside, this is chickenfeed and creates a useful asset. It’s also chickenfeed compared with some of the nonsense the council has already wasted cash on, with the dreaded Gathering Place front of the queue as a long-standing byword for fiscal folly.
All-up, there wasn’t much change from £300,000 there. In last week’s column I described the the Old High Church as going for “half the cost of the Gathering Place”, and a friend jokingly suggested that a “Gathering Place” could be adopted as a basic currency unit for council expenditure.
This brings this valuable IT update in at a mere “0.27 Gathering Places” which, in comparison, seems pretty good value to me.
Then Councillor Emma Knox said people with impairments would have difficulty navigating the place.
Does Cllr Knox not realise that it has been used perfectly successfully for decades as a council office? Alternatively, why did they spend millions of pounds on restoring an apparently functionally useless building rather than bulldozing it?
On, then, to the politics. The tied 11-11 vote saw one independent go each way and eight SNP councillors link up with two Green allies for meeting at the council’s Gleurquhart Road HQ, with five Lib Dems and an unholy alliance of three Conservatives and two Labour for the Town House.
SNP councillor and committee chairman Ian Brown’s casting vote then condemned local decision-making to centralisation at HQ.
So much, then, for the electorate being these councillors’ top priority. By no means for the first or the last time, every single party-affiliated councillor voted along party political lines. Interestingly, the imposition of the Gathering Place is among other decisions largely to have gone the same way.
The biggest factor was eight councillors whose political fundamental is Scottish independence all curiously also believing that Inveness area meetings should be at Glenurquhart Road.
That’s some coincidence since the only overlap I can see here is an obsessive belief in centralisation and focusing power.
It’s equally bizarre that councillors representing the other parties should also, unanimously within their groupings, happen to have identical views on this same non-political issue.
Once again it becomes blindingly obvious that local “democracy” operates on the basis of party first, with the tax-paying electorate a poor second.
