A councillor for Mill Hill ward, Khatri has been engaged in a ding-dong email exchange with Matthew Offord over Barnet Council's One Barnet programme.
It seems that Offord, who was a member of Barnet's Tory Cabinet before, inexplicably, being elected MP for Hendon in 2010, has been brought in to stamp down on the arguments Tory Councillors are having among themselves. (One could hardly expect them to conduct in public a debate about the future of Barnet Council services.)
Some of those emails have been leaked to the press, to the Barnet Press at first, I think.
Whoops, however did that happen?
Anyway, the news has spread and this evening makes it into the Guardian.
Some surprising things have happened this week.
Barnet residents have found their parochial struggles a focus of national media interest as the world remembers again that the Council is about to hand over control of the vast bulk of its services and £1 billion to a handful of multinationals.
The Daily Mirror , "The guerrilla library: as cuts close 8 libraries per month, we visit one that rose again", focused on Friern Barnet Library; the Guardian, "Barnet's outsourcing easyCouncil faces taxpayers' revolt", on the Barnet Alliance public meeting on 8 November.
And we find out now that another Barnet Tory has listened to what we have been saying, but which publicly the Tories continue to deny: that they have no mandate for the One Barnet programme.
Here are some of Khatri's email comments to Offord:
The Conservative Party did not campaign on this basis and we do not have a mandate.Khatri wasn't at the BAPS public meeting, but it looks as though he has watched the videos!
None of the literature we distributed prior to the election mentioned one iota of this.
The local people do not want this and have not been consulted, hence the vociferous reaction by residents.
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1 comment:
Barnet's brainiest Tory? Hmm. I suspect the bar for that is not awfully high, Citizen Barnet. And I would be more impressed if he expressed these views in public, and at any one of the council meetings he has attended over the last few years.
We know that many, probably the majority, of our Tory councillors are equally concerned about the viability of the One Barnet scheme. It is only through their own laziness that they have not bothered to inform themselves as we have of the detail of the plans they continue to support. They are panicking now only because at last they realise what an impact there will be on their own electoral viability. If they act courageously now, and do the right thing, there might be just enough time for some of the marginal Tories to save themselves: if not - they are toast, and so are we.
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