Richard Thomas' Statement to Shaftesbury Town Council

home

TUES 6 Nov 2007

Good evening Mr Mayor, councillors, ladies & gentlemen...

I will not be sitting with you tonight because last Friday, 2 Nov, at approx 3.30pm the Standards Committee of NDDC, acting for the Standards Board for England, suspended me from acting as a town councillor for six weeks - until 14 Dec. This was as a result of 15 complaints brought against me by Cllr Dibben alleging that I had breached the councillors code of conduct that we have all had to sign. Eight of the allegations were dismissed as groundless - but seven were upheld and hence the position I find myself in today.

I do not intend to go into the details of those complaints because a public notice about it all is to be posted in the local press next week if not this, and a reporter from the Western Gazette was present at the hearing, in Blandford, and so no doubt you will all be able to read about it on Thursday. If I have anything further to say it will be after the public notice is published.

The latest complaints bring the total of complaints against me by past and present members of this council to 27 since the code of conduct was made compulsory for all councillors in November 2001 - that is, nearly 5 a year. I gather this is by no means a national record but it is close.

I wish to make a brief comment about the system that has produced this unhappy state of affairs, a system that I believe to be deeply flawed and counter to all that used to be good about British democracy, but first I would like to say that the present situation is particularly ironic, if not even tragic, in that Cllr Dibben and I, who have 'enjoyed' many differences over the years, had agreed to enter into a conciliation process to try and overcome these differences for the wider benefit of the people and community of Shaftesbury as a whole. That conciliation is being arranged and paid for by NDDC, the very body whose Standards Committee has now come close to estranging us once again.

I wish to make it clear that I have no intention of letting it do so and hereby affirm my intention of continuing with the process, if circumstances will permit. This will not be easy because Cllr Dibben is himself the subject of a complaint from me to be heard by the same Standards Committee next month (December). Nevertheless I intend to try because I think the people of Shaftesbury would expect it of us, and they certainly deserve us to.

And so, a final comment about the system that has produced this state of affairs: The code of conduct was introduced by a Labour government concerned at perceived corruption in large inner city councils whose members were and are effectively fulltime professional politicians paid substantial allowances for their time and effort. This is not the case in rural areas like Dorset, and it is even less so in small town and parish councils like Shaftesbury. Here, and I believe in Dorset as a whole, the code that was introduced was not only a sledge-hammer to crack a nut but also has actually begun to destroy the principles of self-regulated honesty and trust in small communities on which British democracy has successfully relied for centuries by turning member against member in a way that I find despicable and contemptible. It has been described as a 'snoops charter' and it is exactly that. But it is worse than that: it provides a licence for the mean, petty, vindictive, vexatious, and malicious to wage vendettas against people they dont like or disagree with and who dare to challenge them. It so frightens some existing members that they no longer dare speak their minds as once they would. And it so frightens off some people from wanting to stand for their local council that local democracy itself is threatened. In short it does nothing but bring local government, local councils and ultimately democracy into disrepute. It is therefore the Standards Board for England that should be in the dock, not volunteer members of councils trying to do their best against mounting odds and rising tides of public apathy and cynicism - negative forces that in my opinion the code of conduct ironically reinforces rather than removes.

To my mind I have [done] nothing wrong other than to try to represent the best interests of the people of Shaftesbury without fear or favour, no matter who they are. And I am therefore bound now to ask how many more volunteers' reputations have to be dragged unjustly through the mud, and at what obscene cost to the taxpayer, before our national politicians see sense and abandon this counter-productive and utterly wasteful piece of Stalinist legislation?
 

Richard Thomas Shaftesbury

6 November 2007


 

northdorset.net aims to encourage residents and visitors to North Dorset to do more locally - find good food and drink locally, source services locally, support local enterprises, make like-minded contacts locally, be entertained locally.