In message . li, Tom
Anderson writes
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?

Yes.


I think that sounds like a really bad idea.

Well, as I said earlier, this is Usenet and we all tend to differ. I
would, though, like to think I do so in an affable manner! :-)


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.

The "gaping hole" in that to borrow Tom's phrase, is that "someone"
would have to decide the circumstances under which such a recall would
occur. That's where (presumably) unelected officials are able to
affect elected ones.


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.

One of the reasons I've posted so much on this (even after vowing not to
any more) is that I am much influenced by a case here in Birmingham
which has been running for some time. It was the first time I had
encountered the idea of councillors being punished by a body other than
their electorate. I didn't like it then and I don't like it now.

There are details and links at

http://www.martinmullaney.co.uk/sbe2.html

for those interested.

As a final contribution and to lighten matters somewhat, I had to clean
up after the cat last night (!) and found myself wrapping "it" in part
of the mother-in-law's Daily Mail which included an article and
photograph of Colin R!
--
Ian Jelf, MITG
Birmingham, UK

Registered Blue Badge Tourist Guide for London and the Heart of England
http://www.bluebadge.demon.co.uk