Sutton Lib Dems: A Threat to Local Democracy?
When I attended the first council of the new term, I must admit I was, perhaps naively, quietly optimistic that the Lib Dem majority would do the right thing, and apply proportional representation to the Sutton Council Committee system. It was, of course, Tom Brake, who whilst penning an article back in February for Lib Dem Voices wrote, ‘Proportional Representation is in the Liberal Democrats DNA’. How truly disappointed he must now feel having witnessed the depths the local party have been prepared to stoop in order to maintain their fragile grip on power by refusing to take a simple step towards local democracy.
When the time came to discuss an amendment intended to standardise all council committees to 15, in which all opposition parties would have a voice, it saddened me that not a single member of the Lib Dems opted to vote for the amendment to introduce PR and apply it to council committee membership. Instead, prominent members of the Lib Dem council decided to make this a matter of political control, not a moral or legal issue. From a resident's perspective, I can’t reconcile how the Lib Dems lost seats on the Council, but increased their majority on Committees, taking seats off other groups who maintained their vote share or who won seats from them.
Councillor Bobby Dean clearly thinks the idea of working with Conservatives Councillors on this matter is more abhorrent than giving a potential voice to all residents of Sutton. He stated that he thought that voters in Hackbridge and St Helier would be surprised to hear that Labour were ‘stitching up backroom deals’ with the Tories. I’m not sure how Dean expects the Councillors in St Helier West, a split ward, to work on behalf of residents if they don’t occasionally work together. Indeed, how does he expect his own colleagues to operate in their split wards? Residents voted for both Labour and Conservatives candidates, not just Lib-Dem ones. Notions such as transparency and the public good are apparently also concepts foreign to the Lib Dems, a group well known for ignoring both their residents and the results of local consultations. Systematic, chronic and long-standing Lib-Dem failures to work collectively for the common good has meant that they have been able to push through projects with little to no oversight or scrutiny. Witness the scandal of the failed district heating system SDEN, which is unnecessarily costing the borough millions of pounds. Councillor Dean may want to take a closer look at his own party because the only reason the Labour Group needed to work with the Tories was due to the deafening silence from Lib Dem leader Ruth Dombey when she was approached about the opportunity to correct this aberration in the run-up to Council meeting.
Councillor Dombey instead wasted valuable time giving a brief history lesson during her response to the amendment. The Lib Dems in Sutton, she opined, took up the Committee system as soon as legislation allowed them to. Previous decisions had been made by a ‘small clique of Councillors from the leading party,’ clearly implying that we should all be supine with gratitude that the opposition should have any voice at all. What a shame that a party with a history of, and reputation for, radical and ground-breaking politics are happy to hinder progress simply because the number of opposition councillors has increased, threatening their dominance on these committees. What have the Lib-Dems in Sutton got to hide? Maybe I am naive in this respect but, I don’t see why this issue should be ‘political’. Some things are just right or wrong. You either give a voice to all residents via their elected councillors or you don’t. It seems to me that, if you are genuinely working in the best interests of residents, then you should be able to present your ideas to a cross-party committee and they would get passed, on their merit, irrespective of political ideology.
If cross-group representation on committees is such a threat to the Lib Dems, you have to wonder if they really have our best interests at heart. One can only hope that this disappointing first Council meeting does not set the tone for the rest of the term. Perhaps Sutton Lib Dems will take a lesson from Kingston, another Lib Dem Council, where a smaller minority opposition has committee places on all strategic committees, or Merton, a Labour-run Council, where the Lib Dems were given multiple vice-chair roles. But, I won’t be holding my breath as just a lowly resident.
A snippet of new Labour Councillors moving their amendment to respect the electorate. The full debate can be watched here from 30mins onwards