An injury to one is an injury to all

Following Brian Coleman's outburst at Tuesday night's council meeting, the Chair of the Barnet Council Unison branch has written this letter to members. It is worth bearing in mind, Barnet Conservatives, that one of the favourite sayings of the trade union movement is "an injury to one is an injury to all".

It is unprecedented for a Councillor to name a Council Officer (an employee of the Council) in a disparaging way in public. Why? Because a Council officer has no public right of reply. So when the employee being attacked is the branch secretary of the biggest Council union, namely our John Burgess, it is particularly offensive. The same Councillor uses sexist, denigrating language to people sitting in the public gallery.  

“Ah, but that’s Brian Coleman for you,” I hear you say, “The Councillor who just lost his GLA seat and seat on the Cabinet”. I do not much care for speculation about whether he was there to provoke or not etc. I do know this: He was asked/allowed to make a key speech for the ruling Conservative Group on a key issue facing our workforce – the One Barnet Programme. That group and the leader of that group allowed him to be their public face. Rightly or wrongly he was chosen.  

During the whole debate (and I was there throughout) Cllr Coleman made no apology. His leader, Cllr Cornelius, did not distance himself from the comments made by Cllr Coleman or insist on an apology, instead he smiles and nods approvingly. The Mayor does not choose to make any kind of statement regarding conduct expected from Councillors serving in public office but only addresses his comments to members of the public, many of them women incensed at having been insulted, nor does he choose to remind Councillors about protocols around naming employees of the Council. Cllr Harper (portfolio for Children’s Services) is clearly seen smiling when his colleague uses sexist language to residents of Barnet. What does this say about our Council’s ability to conduct Equality Impact Assessments?  

I hope you would agree with me that we think our Branch Secretary should continue writing emails on behalf of our members to the Councillors. If they think this is “increasingly desperate”, that is their problem.  

We elect our Branch Secretary precisely to represent us, amongst other things by telling the Council when we think they have got it wrong. The fact the leading Conservative Group refuses to debate with us (and we have offered many, many times over) on the detail of the One Barnet Programme, but can only resort to name calling is a critical sign of weakness in their case. Nonetheless they think they can get away with it. We must show them otherwise.  

Listen to the speech, listen to the way the Councillors express their views via Cllr Brian Coleman about you as a workforce. They just do not care about you. Now what was that about Barnet’s Values...? Who do you stand by? Come to branch meeting 25^th September.

Councillor Coleman One Barnet speech

http://youtu.be/jiGOM0LbfdA

Bite size clips of the above speech

· Councillor Coleman attacks Barnet Alliance residents in public gallery

· http://youtu.be/ViiB-RDG5kE

· Councillor Coleman calls residents old hags

· http://youtu.be/G3HeXtOWWyo

· Councillor Coleman says staff don't matter

· http://youtu.be/8uPHxKhKoKw

·  Councillor Coleman attacks staff and UNISON Branch Secretary
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3yofl1HfI8c

· Councillor Coleman and Leader share private joke

· http://youtu.be/LREDmOdnafI

Civilisation

My cheeks are burning, I am a shy person but I behaved uncharacteristically badly on Monday evening, heckling the Barnet council cabinet meeting.

It was just intolerable sitting there spectating, while the Tory cabinet droned and intoned their way through 600pp worth of business, all of it bad news. £54.4 million cuts which, she tells us, it pains council leader Lynne Hillan to inflict on us - but she and her cabinet still manage to find justifications and excuses for every last measure.

So putting up charges for social services - cutting social services - is repackaged as 'fairer charging'; abolishing the youth service is 'freeing up volunteers from bureaucracy so that they can get more involved in providing positive activities... for the young people of Barnet'; and so on.

There were many different groups there representing people using services which are suffering direct cuts or rises in charges. They included a large and lively contingent of children, parents and staff from the schools that are having their crossing patrols cut; and the residents who are being forced to pay much more for having the temerity to live in a Controlled Parking Zone and own a car - or be visited by someone in a car, such as a volunteer befriender coming to check on an elderly person, perhaps.

At the end of the evening, I think, Yvonne Hossack, the lawyer for many sheltered housing residents in Barnet, was planning to serve papers on the council legally challenging Barnet's second attempt to remove the sheltered housing wardens.

I left the meeting quite late on as Daniel Thomas, Cabinet member for Resources and Performance, was toiling through his preamble to the budget plans proper, on why the cuts are necessary. On my way out I toyed with the idea of smoking a cigarette in the ladies' loo to trigger the fire alarm and thus, potentially, delay the fateful decision to another day - but I don't smoke. The Cabinet was going to pass its cuts budget.

That isn't the end of the story. The budget will be ratified at the council meeting on Tuesday 1 March. Anti-cuts protesters will have a lobby outside Hendon Town Hall from 6pm.

I am already ideologically opposed to Barnet's Tories, but, above and beyond that, seeing them in action always reveals one or two purely distasteful moments. The first tonight was when Andrew Harper detailed how £1 million saving would be achieved by charging more disabled Barnet residents for the social services they need to lead decent lives. Basically, taking £1 million away from vulnerable people. The second was the way the cabinet ganged up to grill Gillian Gear, who is the archivist at Barnet Museum and has volunteered there for 30 years.

Dr Gear is the sort of person that, two or three years ago, Tory councillors would have liked to shake hands with, maybe, posing for a snap in the local paper, while they extolled the virtues of volunteering and keeping open a valued cultural feature of a successful suburb.

Tonight, the political demands of the time have changed, and so they set out to humiliate and belittle Dr Gear. How many hours is the museum open? asked Brian Coleman, in a tone that implied that the volunteers who run the museum were not giving a very good service (actually, it is quite likely that the council just wants to sell the building). Why, asked Andrew Harper, trying to be hard-nosed but just making himself look deeply unpleasant, should all Barnet residents pay to keep the museum open?

Why, Mr Harper? Well, because we are a civilised people who value knowing something of our history, where we came from. I didn't always behave in a very civilised fashion yesterday evening, but I do understand that a country that closes its museums is a civilisation in decay. Barnet's Tories don't seem to have clocked that.

More information: Barnet Museum, currently battling for its life; and Church Farmhouse Museum, similiarly imperilled.

P.S. It's only right to acknowledge that the staff of the council's governance and democracy department did a great job preparing for this meeting and working to keep it on track. Sorry we were such a pain.

Will Hillan be finished off by Shooter or Harpoon?

So, Lynne Hillan won the vote at the Tory group tonight (I'm only reading this on the Times website and on the other blogs - I've no inside knowledge!). But the vote was close. The high vote for Brian Schama as chairman of the party (he lost 18:19 to Wendy Prentice) after he wrote the rudest possible email to Hillan shows how deeply divided Barnet Tories are.

And Rog T reckons that Andrew Harper will step in to unite the two sides and emerge the real winner in a few weeks time. Rog knows more about, er, most things than me; he must have good information to make him say that.

So the saga goes on to next Tuesday and the confidence vote at the council meeting. I really can't see Shooter's supporters not voting against Hillan in that vote, now that the situation in the party is revealed as so rancorous. I don't know what the real Barnet Conservative grassroots thinks, but I'm sure they'd just rather it was all over soon than caring how!

P.S. Yes, that is the unkindest headline I've ever written. I'm ashamed of myself, but inside every journalist lurks a tabloid journalist. As one woman to another, Lynne, I don't mean it quite as bad as it sounds.