[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=APj_-6HUg1s]
Fine sport at yesterday evening’s highly entertaining 14 minute marathon cabinet meeting as our morally challenged snob of a new leader, Babs Janke, treated us to a remarkable lesson in relativism as she defended her racist councillor, Shirley Marshall (Blogger Passim).
You can view the whole sordid episode above but the thrust of Babs’ argument is that a straightforward Tory budget amendment proposing to reform the administrative structure of the council to save money is as offensive as hurling racist abuse across the council chamber at Asian councillors.
Not sure many people will really buy this. Especially as Babs has a bit of form in defending the indefensible among her own councillors. Remember this is the woman who declined to state publicly and on the record that she had no knowledge of John Astley’s paedophile activities prior to his arrest.
“Your children: safe in Lib Dem hands unless it interferes with Barbara Janke’s leadership ambitions.”
However, for many of us, the revelation of the evening was newbie cabinet member, Councillor Tim Kent, the latest in a long line of pompous twits handed a position of power in this city.
He decided – for convoluted reasons that needn’t concern anyone in the slightest bit sane – that the Tories asking questions about his racist nutjob colleague calling Tory councillor Jay Jethwa a coconut was in fact “defamatory”.
And – this is the best bit – he asked council legal boss, Stephen McNamara, for advice on the matter and McNamara sagely agreed.
Surely this isn’t the same council defamation expert, Stephen McNamara, who along with his close colleague PR girl Simon Caplan threatened legal action against day care campaigners in 2005 because, “placards bearing the names of individual social services workers in the FACS review team were displayed in public.”
“If necessary,” thundered the great legal brain, “the council will take legal action through the courts to prevent any such activity.”
Naturally such activity continued and McNamara was immediately provided with names and addresses for servicing of his writs and – four years later – we still await that sensational trial …
McNamara’s just the man for quality legal advice on defamation then Tim. Please do let us know what he tells you so we can all piss ourselves laughing.
In fairness to McNamara, he doesn’t agree with the defamation claim but deftly ducks out of getting involved. It’s our Gary who goes along with it.
To be fair to her, Babs does realise that Tim and Gary are heading down a blind alley. Odd character, Kent. I’m surprised his ego fits in the same room as Gazza Hopkins’.
Was Tim privately educated?
Stop all this bickering and get on and do some fucking work! We are paying you to run the city – NOT have slagging matches with each other!
who knows? But it wouldn’t be a huge surprise. He has the right self confidence versus actual ability ratio.
“the thrust of Babs’ argument is that a straightforward Tory budget amendment proposing to reform the administrative structure of the council to save money is as offensive as hurling racist abuse across the council chamber at Asian councillors.”
I don’t see how you can make that claim, seeing as Cllr Jethwa at one point suggests exactly that, and Cllr Janke rejects it wholeheartedly, describing the budget amendment as merely ‘offensive’, whilst Cllr Brown’s remarks were ‘unacceptable’, for which she has ‘unreservedly apologised’ – if Cllr Janke had asked for the same kind of apology about the tory budget amendment, you’d have a point, but she didn’t (and it would be batshit insane if she had)