Tuesday, 20 January 2009
Child Protection: "Is Labour letting us down or is it the opposition?"
The Lib Dems and the Tories are eager to attack the council on its failures to keep our children safe, but they could get together and kick the Labour group out. Why don't they do this if they are so concerned? Is Labour letting us down or is it the opposition?
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5 comments:
See below:
http://tinyurl.com/8h3m6x
This has been brewing for quite some time. A lot of the details couldn't have been made public for obvious reasons. The JAR and CA were able to review the situation objectively and with out political prejudice.
I'm very disappointed in you Rob, you are using the death of a child (and the harm of several others) for some sort of political gain. Furthermore, you even tried send out a PR effectively doing just that. In it you state that the opposition had been standing by and not scrutinising the problem. This is far from the truth.
What needs to come out of this is that every Children of Reading is safe. That's the bottom line!
This isn't the time for political posturing. This is why a joint Lib Dem and Tory motion has been proposed on this issue for the next council.
Hello Glenn - I assume you are Lib Dem councillor Glenn Goodall. Trae-Bleu died in 2006, I was interested in what the scrutiny panel had done from then till now on this - not just in the last six months?
Also, you still haven't said why the Lib Dems don't gets together with the Tories and kick Labour out?
I've not seen your motion, but I hope it not just to replace one Labour cabinet member with another, as this would seem like the posturing you falsely accuse me of?
I'm not accusing you of posturing, I'm telling you that you are! You can't say your press release added anything new to the debate regarding child safety, and you point out in the notes you're 20 votes from victory - That's what I found most disappointing and I honestly expected better from you.
However, this new question of what has happened since 2006 is an interesting one, and is what you should have been saying all along.
NOC came in May 08, before then the chairs of scrutiny were all Labour. Come May 08 the chairs became LibDem or Tory and at that point we started to have real critical scrutiny. It should be noted that Labour has a minimal training budget for cllrs, so we are all literally learning on the job. It should also be noted that the Labour Admin tried very hard to brush all this from public and opposition view. The JAR wasn't released to other cllrs until the very last minute.
As for us join the Tory's in some joint admin, or indeed us supporting the Tory's to become a minority admin - why should I comment on your speculation? It's sort of a side issue and has very little to do with fixing the problems - and again you're trying to push the debate to your agenda.
I think you guys need to be a bit more thoughtful next time. Using the death of Trae to some-how point out all current RBC party's are bad, without all the facts is morally bankrupt.
Apologies for the ranty nature of this but I actually care about this issue a lot. Not in some fake political way. That report was awful and the coroner report even worse.
Glenn
Thanks for your comments Glenn. The bit of the press release that has upset you is part of the template. Happy to remove it from this particular one - and I promise to be more careful in future.
Rob,
it has been suggested to me that the Labour party are just waiting for you to reinvigorate them with your left-wing ideals.
The evidence does seem to suggest that you are more interested in electioneering than the issues, so perhaps you would find a welcome home there.
If you are now worried about the scrutiny of something which happened in Children's Service in 2006, you need to ask yourself what were YOU doing then?
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