Just back from our first holiday in two years, which meant I missed the first ‘real’ meeting of the new Town Council. However, I won’t have long to wait, as the next meeting is a week today.

It’ll be interesting to see how things work in our ‘one party state’. Where a council has political parties involved, it is common practice for the party groups to meet in private in advance of the public council meetings to agree a common approach to the items up for discussion. This avoids the groups arguing among themselves in public, and being accused by their political opponents of being a disorganised rabble. When the various groups put their cases forward in council, the public can hear the arguments, and hopefully see democracy in action.

However, I wonder how this approach works when all the members of a council are members of the same political party? Having spoken to many of my fellow councillors, I have no doubt that we do represent the diversity of views held by the good people of Kendal who have voted for us. But we need to be able to demonstrate that in public, and show how we weighed all the arguments before reaching a reasoned decision … without appearing to be the disorganised rabble mentioned above.

A nice challenge to have I suppose?

This entry was posted on Monday, June 28th, 2010 at 7:16 pm and is filed under Kendal Town Council. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.