News is coming in that at least one Bristol City Councillor has demanded an explanation and a legal view on David Bishop’s dodgy Railway Path land sale from the city solicitor Stephen McNamara.
McNamara has replied by providing no opinion whatsoever and instead invited the councillor to a mysterious and private off-the-record meeting with himself and the culprit David Bishop where – as usual with anything to do with Bishop – no minutes are intended to be taken and hence no public record kept.
This is odd. Any legal opinion to a councillor on a city council matter should be the independent product of the city solicitor, McNamara. It should not be done in cahoots with the character under investigation. Surely NcNamara needs to maintain and be seen to be maintaining his independence? Hardly the case if he’s chummily sat there next to the object of his investigation to gang up on a lone councillor.
If the councillor has any sense at all he’ll turn up with his own team to face this pair of jokers, apparently intent on doing some kind of unattributable intimidation/spin exercise job on our democratically elected representatives.
Indeed if I were the councillor I’d turn up with a tape recorder, slam it on the desk in front of these six-figure salaried self-serving bullying bastards and get them on the record where public servants belong.
See James Barlow for latest development. Ashley Fox tables questions to next full council meeting on December 2nd.
A fascinating development. I was contemplating putting questions myself but perhaps better from an elected councillor.
Looks like common purpose again to me!!!
At least Ashley Fox (chair of the Overview and Scrutiny Management Committee), is starting to ask some serious questions… hopefully he might even manage to get some answers.
Whether or not the answers that the cabinet give will make any sense remains to be seen.
As I’ve said above, the cabinet can only really back or sack Bishop.
A stream of mindless jargon in answer to the questions is equivalent to backing Bishop.
Quite why the cabinet would want to ally themselves with an officer in the middle of an extremely damaging sleaze scandal is anyone’s guess. But they’re not very clever are they?
And like I say, there’s a lot more to come, which if the cabinet support Bishop is going to be coming their way.
They need to look at this very carefully indeed, especially the language Fox is using – particularly the term impropriety.
Unfortunately mindless jargon is what they’re best at … who did their programming? I see that you can get some pretty good androids these days from Bristol Uni.
Incidentally, if you google greenspace flogging comes up in the top ten – twice!
Sorry, html errr …
googling, cabinet bristol city council, gives you “greenspace flogging” twice.
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