Thursday, December 07, 2006

Clarke's hypocrisy on local government freedom

The EDP has an interesting piece today about Charles Clarke's new call for a spirit of freedom to enter local government. In particular he picks out the increased use of referenda as one way of increasing participation and accountability.

So when Norwich City Council had a chance to vote on a referendum on Unitary, the single biggest issue facing the council, which political party voted against?

Mr Clarke's very own Labour Party.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

On this basis, we would not have Unitary Status, an Incinerator, an NDR, and we would have a First Class bus service, First Class recycling service, First class educational achievement, and not a N&N Hospital millions in debt with high PFI payments.

Anonymous said...

To be fair to him (and oh how it pains me to be fair to Mr Clarke), he's not in charge of the City Council's Labour people. He was just voicing his opinion.

Speaking of which your A level class might like 'The Rise of Political Lying' by Peter Oborne. It's both entertaining (in that you can't believe that people took these politicians at their word) and both highly sobering to realise that so much of this deceit has happened in a country which is currently trying to export liberal democracy all over the world.