CHIEF EXECUTIVE WON’T BE SELECTED UNTIL AFTER THE COUNCIL ELECTIONS

NOTEBOOK by Bill Heaney

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West Dunbartonshire Council is not as uninteresting a body as might be thought by most of the local electorate who seldom bother to get off the sofa and go down to the polling stations to cast their vote.

Why should local people care when so many of them are excluded from witnessing what is being said in meetings about contentious projects embarked on in their name, and off the wall projects – chopping the bottoms of doors of classrooms in schools to improve ventilation, for example.

There have been lots of other daft suggestions such as putting the new Our Lady and St Patrick’s High School down the Shore in Posties Park and allowing grass and weeds to grow unabated in parks and public spaces which was promoted by the dossers in the Burgh Hall.

Thankfully the voice of sanity has intruded at times on the hubristic subservience and  unswerving loyalty of Jonathan McColl, pictured,  and his council croneys to Nicola Sturgeon and the SNP government in Edinburgh.

Still, however, the SNP administration cannot shake off the “basket case” scorn and criticism that has been so rightly foisted on them.

They claim they cannot get the coverage to reach out to the electorate. That their wise words fail to be heard by the majority of the population here.

The truth of the matter is not just that the electorate ignore them because they have no interest in anything they have to say.

It’s that the council refuse to grasp the nettle and accept that the press and public are doubly handicapped by the fact that meetings in public have been banned during the pandemic, which is perfectly excusable.

And that the council are themselves to blame because they haven’t done enough to connect the elderly and others who are not familiar with the internet to give them access via the cash it takes to access it and education to use it.

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Everyone seems to be on their high horse these days about the language we use in our daily lives. So much of it has been deemed not to be politically correct.

Eyebrows shoot up – and often the police are called out – when someone says something even  in a private conversation, or includes something in an article or report which they find insulting to people of colour or women gay or trans people.

Now, I know we should not do it, but occasionally even the most vigilant of us slips up, but the reaction we receive is too often away over the top.

Do you remember the old saying that sticks and stones would break your bones but names would never hurt you?

That saying may have gone to the knackers yard for words that are past their sell-by date.

A clear example this week which had nothing to do with racism or women happened in Clydebank where the ugly face of sectarianism, which the authorities say has gone away but clearly hasn’t, reared its head in the form of offensive graffiti.

Councillor John Mooney raised a motion for emergency graffiti removal. It seems that you can’t even get a vaccination for Covid without being slagged off.

And he had this motion passed by the members: Council is very concerned about the recent spate of sectarian graffiti in the area. The recent conflation with anti-vax sentiment at the Hub in Clydebank, which is a vaccination centre, is particularly worrying. The Council has a responsibility to remove such offensive graffiti as quickly as possible.

Council thanks our Roads & Greenspace Team and Y-Sort-It for the removal next day of the graffiti on the Hub. In order to facilitate speedy removal in future, Council agrees to allocate £15, 000 from free reserves to the Anti-social behaviour (ASB) budget for emergency removal of offensive graffiti in the evenings and at weekends. Council also agrees that these funds be used to cover the costs of any additional call-out
charges.

£15, 000 then from public funds. No wonder the Council Tax is going to spiral out of control. Isn’t it time to stop walking past on the other side of the street when we see these things happening?

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