Yesterday was a long day of meetings. We started with Transportation and Street Services Scrutiny in the morning, where typically there was a row when we got to the 'report' on the Tyburn bus lane; then we failed to get an answer as to why the Tory-Lib Dem coalition feels the need to spend £125,000 on a second feasibility report on the Underground option when they have yet to publish the findings of the first report becuase the question was deemed to be 'too political'. This was followed by full Council - our first under the new meeting structure. This meant that Mike Whitby gave his 'State of the City' Report, which principally consisted of listing
all his overseas visits.
We also had a new section for 'Issues of the Day', which allows councillors to raise topical issues. It's an odd format - the Councillor raising the issue gets five minutes (depending on the number of issues raised - it's a half hour slot, so it might be fun to see what happens if we all raised an 'Issue of the Day') to speak, and then one other member (at the discretion of the Lord Mayor) gets a chance to respond. So we had a curiously disjointed speech from Bruce Lines on the Licensing Act, a scaremongering speech from Deidre Alden on the fuel crisis that isn't (at least according to
today's news), a motion of congratulation to the England Cricket Team , and another non-answer on the Metro.
We did manage to get a motion submitted by John Hemming ruled out of order, on the grounds that a motion about Ken Livingstone's current troubles with the Standards Board was not a suitable issue for debate in Birmingham's City Council Meeting; we then lost our motion proposing the establishment of a relief fund to help to provide assistance to some of the residents who have lost their homes and businesses due to the Tornado last month. Labour members in those wards have been working with community organisations to try to establish an appeal fund, but it really does need the leadership and perhaps more importantly, the independence that an appeal headed by the Lord Mayor would have. Instead the Tories and the Lib Dems have told Birmingham residents to get on and sort it out themselves.
