On 2 Jun, 21:43, Tom Barry wrote:

Paul Harley wrote:

On Mon, 02 Jun 2008 18:56:00, Tom Barry
wrote:
The issue of replacing Cooke was raised - the Tories didn't want the
Deputy taking over (she's a Labour councillor!) so there's going to be
an open invitation to current members to put themselves forward as an
interim until September, when a new one would be appointed anyway.

The Transport Committee did have the option of giving Brian Cooke
three months notice of termination of contract, which would have
carried TravelWatch over (almost) until the new appointee took up
his/her post, but they chose the most severe action open to them.

(snip)

Watching it on the live feed, the decision was made by taking a vote on
the severest action first, and continuing down the scale until a
majority decision was reached. As it happened, on the first vote the
Chair, the other two Labour members and the Lib Dem put their hand up
for instant dismissal, the three Tories voted against and the Green
(Jenny Jones) abstained, so that was that. I think Jones would have
preferred a lesser punishment, from her comments, which ironically would
have meant it was her choice as the swing vote if the fourth Tory had
attended. The Tories had a hard time accepting that he'd done anything
wrong at all (a 'technical breach') was about the hardest line they took.


Thanks Tom, you've answered some of my questions about that, including
who is was who abstained from the vote - having looked up the
composition of the committee I couldn't work out who it might be, and
I'm a bit surprised and disappointed to hear it was Jenny Jones
(though maybe I should read or listen to the arguments before I reach
that judgement). Maybe she'd built up a rapport with him over
transport issues, I dunno. At least it's not as bad as it might look
at first glance - she seemingly wasn't against punishing him, just not
punishing him so severely. Any idea who the Conservative AM who didn't
turn up was and why?

I think I will try and find time to look at the papers properly, read
the minutes when they come out and even watch the webcast. I don't
like this talk coming from the Tories of 'technical breaches' one bit
- flagrant breaches more like. It sits rather ill with their apparent
stand against cronyism and maladministration.


P.S. Paul Harley's post (the first of those quoted above) won't have
appeared in uk.transport.london coz for some reason he removed the
follow-up.