My week ahead 16 - 22 June 2014

Monday – 16 June, 4pm – Culture Portfolio meting,
6pm –Labour Group campaigning session

Tuesday – 17 June, 6pm – Ipswich Borough Council – Executive Meeting, Grafton House

Wednesday – 18 June, 10am - Ipswich ‘Angle’ Board meeting, Grafton House

Saturday - 21 June, 10am, Labour campaigning, South East Ipswich
2pm – Suffolk Pride Festival

Tuesday may give her us an early warning on how the opposition are going to go about council business over the next 12 months. The Tory Leader, Cllr Cenci will be attending her first Executive meeting as an opposition member.

We have offered the Tory group a place on the Executive since we took back control of the council but up to this point they have always refused. We only thought it was right to offer them a place as we had attempted to have our leader elected as a member of the executive when we were in opposition and even when we were the largest group the Tories and Lib Dems still refused to allow us to be represented.

When it comes to Scrutiny committees, ‘Best Practice’ is to allow the opposition to chair the committee, again the Tories and Lib Dems refused probably leading to the disastrous way such topics as the Kiln Meadow were handled. Once we were in power we have had both the Tories and Lib Dems chair Scrutiny, both have not (in my opinion) been the best chairs we have ever seen but we still believe it should be an opposition member who is chair and I am sure Cllr Harsant will make a far better chair than the last two holders of the post.

Tory run Suffolk County Council do not seem to wish to have any opposition when it comes to Scrutiny, they do not offer to opposition the chair on any of their scrutiny bodies, and their leader Mark Bee seems now to not wish to have any Tories chair Scrutiny if they are not 100% loyal to him.

The latest Suffolk Cabinet meeting indicated again that Mark Bee is now spending most of his time attempting to hold onto power and crush his own rebels. Time that should be better spent trying to sort out the mess that the Tories have made of education in the county.