On Sat, 14 Feb 2009, Ian Jelf wrote:

In message , Andrew Heenan
writes
Councillors, on the other hand, seem to be held to account
by this Orwellian-sounding "Council's Code of Conduct for Councillors".
That "code of conduct" sounds a bit like an employer's disciplinary
procedure to me.

What's wrong with disciplining a power-hungry ******* who has betrayed
those who bothered to vote -

That is the job of the electorate; not a non-elected body of officials.

The gaping hole in this i dea is that the electorate only get a chance to
do this every few years. Are you really saying that if an elected official
does something dreadful, then there should be no way of getting rid of
them, we should just have to wait until the next election? I think that
sounds like a really bad idea.

In some places, they have such things as recall elections, whereby if the
public are unhappy with an elected official, they can depose him before
his term expires. If we had a mechanism like that, which worked
effectively, then i'd be fairly happy with not having a bureaucratic
disciplinary procedure, since the employers (the public) could hire and
fire directly. But in the absence of such a mechanism, we need a procedure
to keep elected officials in line on our behalf.

Note that i'm not saying here that i think the process that was in action
in the case we've been discussing is a good example of this - it might or
might not be, i really don't know. And obviously i'm also not passing
comment on Colin's case either.

tom

--
never mind your fingers, i've got blisters on my brain