***There are now two links on the end of this post which, I think, make it pretty clear what happened.***
Hastings Borough Council full council meeting did not happen this week
It’s supposed to be a meeting of citizens democratically elected to represent the town, open to members of the public who get to join in by posing questions. Last night at Hastings Borough Council, the mayor closed the meeting before Full Council could get going, and the police were called.
The citizens present had come to hear a debate on a Ceasefire motion for Gaza. They weren’t pleased when they heard they weren’t going to get one.
The official reason for not having the debate is that the monitoring officer vetoed it.
So far, it’s not clear why the (Labour) mayor closed the meeting or why the police were called. No-one was asked to leave the meeting, which surely would have happened if anyone was being dangerously disruptive; nevertheless, Labour councillors are saying the meeting was forced to close by activists. Public observers and independent councillors are saying the mayor refused to continue the meeting for reasons unknown.
I can only go by my previous experience of HBC. I mainly know about the behaviour and choices made by Labour councillors, who in my day were horribly prone to letting council employees lead them by the nose – away from democracy, justice and the public’s right to see what’s going on.
How Hastings Council thwarts democracy…
A while back, when the local Green Party colluded with a disaffected Labour councillor to hound another councillor from her seat (so they could make a bid for it) that disaffected councillor moved to the Green Party to avoid facing the consequences of her actions in Labour, but was called to a council Standards Committee hearing to answer for her behaviour. She was found to have behaved unacceptably, damaging the standing of a fellow councillor to further her own agenda.
Few people know this though, because council officers – paid employees – instructed councillors that the hearing should be reported quietly and anonymously and the councillors, red, green and blue, obediently stayed silent and watched the mistreated councillor marginalized and slandered until she lost her seat.
That’s how our councillors behave, therefore I’m quite willing to believe that last night, council employees decided to stop an uncomfortable debate and councillors went along with it rather than facing public opinion. That’s not democracy, and not acceptable.
I don’t KNOW that’s what happened, so if you know different, please comment and tell me more.
***Update***
***Update 2***
Thank you, Hastings and Rye PSC for this video which makes it all pretty clear.
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Dear Reader,
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Cheers,
Kay
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Kay Green 
4 responses to “Trying to guess what happened in our council yesterday”
I look across the water to France and I would bet every penny I own no Gendarme ever said at une réunion du conseil, “Tout le monde a l’air très content.” My non-existent French, courtesy of Google. Are we doomed forever to be good little girls and boys in this green and pleasant land, the home of Empire, where ‘they’ killed democracy right under our noses?
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Maybe I should be writing a piece called ‘a very British silence’ – I’ve been taken up for most of this week trying to work out how to address this situation. It’s a phenomenon I am all too familiar with, and it is the reason I said when I left the Labour Party, it’s like finally shaking off an abusive relationship. Your point is valid but in fact in this case, it was the other way around. The mayor and officers were trying to defeat the citizens by way of a procedural silence, attempting to make an issue of the bloke ‘speaking out of turn’ when he was understandably trying to get them to say whether they were going to do what everyone had come to hear, and in the two vids, the citizens are sitting as quietly and smiley as possible because they’ve realised the mayor is aiming to stop the meeting using the excuse of feeling threatened by ‘a disorderly mob’. In fact, that’s the story the Labour Party are now touting around Hastings – nasty yobs in council prevent meeting.
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My apologies Kay, I was having flashbacks to the Thatcher years and the destruction of the youth service and apart from the very few who protested and spoke out of turn, and how very dare we, the public silence was so loud it kept me awake at night. But, of course, a complicit media will jump on the ‘disorderly mob’ narrative with fervent delight and that same silent public will suck it up and offer a ‘tut’ for the yobs. With the death of democracy, it seems to me that civil disobedience and voting with our feet are the only solution, but when wasn’t that true? As Tony Benn said, “Every generation must fight the same battles again and again. There’s no final victory and there’s no final defeat”
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You are absolutely right, and there’s no need to apologize! I just wanted to underline the fact that what to a normal person is very obviously restrained and polite behaviour has in fact been called mob rule by the local Labourr Party.
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