Lights … camera … action … brains off, mouths in gear.
This was not their finest hour, nor even their finest three hours, but it was definitely their worst 20 minutes.
If Ricky Gervais were watching, the first draft of “The Council” would be ready next week, for filming in October and on telly for Christmas.
And while the obligatory knock-off video’s already been released via YouTube, it’s not worth watching, even the part when the meeting goes to pieces near the end.
But it should be mandatory viewing for all 54 of our elected Councillors. Not only to see how they come across to the paying public, but also to mark themselves out of 10 for their contribution(s).
A meeting derailed
As is clearly visible on video, the meeting had been coming apart long before its less than graceful ending.
Marking the start of the process is tricky as the technology went ‘feet-up’ only two minutes in.
Councillors took quite a bit longer starting with the Leader interrupting the Mayor. Possibly well meant at the time, it set a poor precedent for later.
Having started at 7pm, by the time 10pm came and went, it was clear that more time was needed to finish the last two motions, so a 30-minute extension was requested.
Perhaps it’s the default Tory stance of not wanting the meeting to go on and therefore voting for an early bedtime, but two of their number woke up … and voted the wrong way. However, neither were man enough to admit their error and move on.
The Mayor was interrupted during the voting process with a “who’s running the meeting Malcolm” ? a rhetorical question from a Leader who not only should but during daytime actually does know better.
With a point of order and Officer advice added in, by the time the Leader of the Opposition was re-declaring that he’d be voting twice, any resemblance to an adult discussion had totally vanished.
There’s no discipline like self discipline
And on the night, ‘self discipline’ was probably furthest from people’s minds.
One senior politician talked of another’s “monologue of nonsense speech”, but didn’t follow his own observation. Others insisted on having their say and disrespecting as well as ignoring the Mayor’s effort to maintain order.
Indeed, many Councillors seemed to lack even the most basic self-discipline of keeping their microphone switched off.
And when a Councillor takes four minutes for a three minute speech, boring or annoying their colleagues into the bargain, then the meeting’s always going to over-run.
As one participant observed afterwards – a fellow councillor “might have the right to speak at a Working Group meeting, but they don’t have the right to interrupt”. Advice that participants would have done well to observe themselves.
Tools in competent hands
One of the upsides of remote / virtual council meetings is that votes are reviewed on screen, so you can see what your councillor voted for (or against).
While this showed that that Councillors, Staff and Guests could be kept separate (but weren’t), it also revealed that some Councillors were logged-in to the meeting two or three times while at least one other wasn’t present at all.
But all this paled into insignificance against the comedy of an Exec Member appearing sideways on screen to answer a question. It was ‘corrected’ for subsequent answers, but the public only saw a view of the EM’s nostrils, mouth and neck.
At the overall meeting level, the IT was shockingly inadequate. Councillors whose videos had to be switched off to prevent the meeting from shutting down, whose replacement photos were either missing or the inverse of ‘Dorian Gray’.
And with microphones left on, faces badly lit or totally blurred, fake backgrounds, faces disappearing, miserable audio, the overall impression was one of the wrong tools being used by complete tools.
Make no mistake, Councillors get £500 per year as an IT allowance and, to date, more than half of them have each received over £3,000 in total, so it’s not unreasonable to expect them to have headphones and microphones as a basic minimum – and to know how to use them properly.
At the same time at Shute End, staff have been kept on full pay (no 80 percenters here) so it would be instructive for the IT Manager and their Director to personally ensure that the next Full Council meeting is run with sufficient bandwidth and support that it actually works properly.
As a Borough, we need to face up to things. IT is no longer an ‘optional bolt-on’ for the council. It isn’t a back room second sub-basement function, it’s front of house and an essential part of council business for the foreseeable future.
A ray of sunshine
One of the bits not yet hacked out by the current Leader is the statements by Executive Members on their particular area(s) of responsibility within WBC.
And after all the above, while you’d be forgiven for thinking that this particular Full Council meeting was the worst of times, it had within it one exceptional speech from Charles Margetts, Exec Member for Health, Wellbeing and Adult Services.
Against a backdrop of almost total disaster from Tories on high at a national level, at a local level Cllr Margetts delivered the clearest, crispest and most well put together summary of what the Council’s done recently during the Covid-19 pandemic – warts and all.
He gave a good account without exceeding his allotted time. Respect.
Content fit for the people
Full Council is the people’s meeting with everyone’s elected representative having a chance to listen, question and debate topics of interest and concern.
At least, that’s the theory, but the practice is nothing like it.
Simply depriving Conservative backbenchers of their questions is a shabby outcome, more ‘timocracy’ than the ‘dimocracy’ that often prevails when 54 people get together to design a race horse.
If we’re going to have to live with Covid for some time (as it appears we are), then we need things to work well.
However, in stark contrast to neighbouring councils where things aren’t as good, while some democracy has re-started in our borough the process isn’t evolving, and the administration and opposition all need to up their game.
So instead of trying to solve world peace and global hunger, a focus on what WBC CAN do for residents would be welcome, along with a Full Council meeting that works for WBC Councillors and staff alike.
This isn’t about rewriting the whole constitution, but it is about reaching an acceptable compromise on what the format and content of the meeting should be.
The last word
In principle, it’s the Mayor’s job to lead the meeting, the Leaders’ job to lead the politics, while it’s the staff’s job to lead the help. Everyone has a role to play to refresh the meeting and lift the Borough’s politics from the adversarial flames that seem to gather unchecked on social media these days.
And while it’s understandable that Councillors don’t want to change unless there is political gain in it for them, looking in the mirror of the last meeting video might convince even the most hide-bound traditionalists that change is needed.
Particularly if Wokingham’s to develop an efficient and effective digital democracy – with less mouthing off and more brains in gear.
