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| Frankie McCamley |
I was watching tonight's BBC One evening news bulletin and the lead story was the government's refusal to assent to (Labour) Mayor Sadiq Khan's call for independent commissioners to be appointed to run (Conservative) Kensington and Chelsea London Borough Council in the wake of the Grenfell Tower disaster.
The report by Frankie McCamley focused on the anger towards the council and included such comments from Frankie herself as this:
The Council now needs a new leader and that person will have to be elected by the Council itself, not by the people - and some residents here say they're not happy with that. They want a bigger say in who's going to be making those big decisions.
I did think on hearing that that the Council itself had been elected by the people in the first place as their representatives in council elections.
Then came a campaigner who I've been hearing and seeing on the BBC quite a bit in recent days (Yvette Williams) saying:
They cannot just impose their old boy network and their friends and their family scheme that they seem to operate elsewhere. There needs to be a proper process for the selection of those commissioners, and that has to be community-led. They cannot do that on their own. We're not going to be imposed on at state level again.
Again, that worried me. After all, the local council hadn't been imposed on the people of the borough. It had been elected by the people of the borough.
Local people had, through the ballot rather than through community-led imposition, voted for a council that consists of 40 Conservatives, 7 Labour and 3 Liberal Democrats.
The borough had a population of 158,649 according to the 2011 census. Shouldn't the fact that the overwhelming majority of voters from that population had voted for the present council be mentioned by the BBC in their reporting of this story?
It was entirely absent here.
Am I missing something?
You shouldn't be so hard on Frankie McCamley...sounds like she had a recent lobotomy and is still in recovery.
ReplyDeleteThat said, one thing you won't hear on any media in relation to K&C is the F Word and how far it is dominated by that quaint secret society. It and several other London Boroughs are completely in their pocket.