NOTEBOOK: I know who I won’t be voting for on Thursday

NOTEBOOK by BILL HEANEY

When the lying has to stop. The Labour candidate in West Dunbartonshire has been telling voters that I have not been banned by the Council.

Provost Douglas McAllister has been informing people he has been canvassing for their vote in Thursday’s General Election  that no ban has been placed on me. Well, the Provost is lying – and he knows it.

West Dunbartonshire Council have banned me from speaking to their handsomely paid spin doctors. If it walks like a ban, talks like a ban and looks like a ban then it’s a ban.

I am not allowed to ask the Council questions and in order to elicit answers on behalf of the voting public, I have to go down the Freedom of Information route, which takes weeks or months and has been widely discredited.

Either that or I have to join the queue in the foyer of their Church Street headquarters and wait for an answer.

According to the public who use that route, or post questions on the Council’s Facebook site, they are referred to people who might but maybe not have the answers they are looking for.

Then again, they stand no chance if they come up against the Council’s Secret Service Unit.

Many of the people using that site to complain have not even received the courtesy of a reply.

The Council have put every obstacle possible in my way to stop me covering local affairs, using the pathetic excuse that The Dumbarton Democrat requires to be a member of IPSO, an organisation which succeeded the disgraced and unfit for purpose Press Council.

Events from school prize-givings to civic receptions to council tax increases are none of our business. Nor yours. They refuse to invite us to write reports and take photographs.

All the old custom and practice traditions which existed in the days of reasonable politicians such as the late Ian Campbell MP have been consigned to the Church Street dustbin.

Pictured is Ian Campbell MP giving a post election interview to Bill Heaney, who was then editor of the award-winning Lennox Herald.

If the powder puff Provost – neither he nor any of his colleagues could lay a glove on the SNP maladmistration, which preceded Labour’s election victory two years ago – manages to get the seat in Westminster, which I doubt he will, he’ll find himself comfortably off in the company of conmen – and women, of course – and liars on the green benches of the House of Commons.

Not telling the truth is referred to in political circles these days as being “economical with the truth”.

Let’s be straight and call it out for what it is – bare-faced lying.

If being prevented from taking a place on the press bench (in truth they don’t even have one) in the £16 million plus it cost to refurbish the Burgh Hall, or to ask highly paid councillors and officials reasonable questions, is not a ban then what is it?  I think the public should be told about this – officially.

What were we told the Government’s mission statement on local government would say? Transparent, open and honest? Were these really the words?

It’s high time the Council apologised to me for wasting my time and to the community for depriving them of the completely free services of an award-winning journalist and digital news platform.

There aren’t many of us about these days, who aren’t as feart of them as they would like us to be.

We neither need nor want the money they squander on advertising in failing newspapers owned by millionaire media moguls while callously tramping on the fragile flower that is democracy.

We will continue to publish and be damned.

*****

Empowerment of the electorate is something West Dunbartonshire Council have been discussing for some time, at least that’s what is recorded in the minutes of some of their meetings.

But the public don’t have any say around here.

Evidence of this is that the Council have given their approval to the granting of planning permission by the Loch Lomond and Trossachs National Park for the Flamingo Land leisure and pleasure resort in Balloch.

No less than 100,000 people have signed a petition against that.

The Council’s basket case Health and Social Care Partnership – the one that failed to make sufficient provision for the financing of the Pavilion Cafe in Levengrove Park – sacked a Dumbarton GP in the middle of the covid pandemic.

This was despite the fact this arm’s length committee contravened employment law  and that more than 1,000 of the doctor’s dismayed patients signed a petition against that happening.

We all know how the public feel about these cock-ups and the frequent bullying cases brought by council workers against their employers. Did someone ever come up with a figure for what this has cost in compensation cash? They certainly won’t tell me.

It was only later that an Employment Tribunal judge overturned the GP sacking decision, righting a serious wrong which caused lots of local people a great deal of anxiety and some very real physical pain.

It also cost the Council – that’s us, the tax-paying public – a large legal bill to defend what turned out to be the indefensible.

Then there was Balloch Library (the protest is pictured above) and the Council’s decision to close it in one of the most deprived areas of the region. More than 1,500 residents signed a petition against that and hundreds, from nursery school children to elderly people, staged a public protest against that.

But did the Council listen? Did they care? Did they Hell?

I have just been reading a book which touches on the subject of public libraries.

It states about one of them, such as the perfectly adequate library we already have in Strathleven Place, Dumbarton: “Its staff personify why public libraries are rightly revered and must be protected from those who either through ignorance, ideology or incompetence would do them harm.”

One of the senior Labour councillors outrageously upbraided me in the corridor after the meeting when they voted to close Balloch Library. He was enraged that I was reporting what they were doing.

It was not a good look for the Council, which spends about £500,000 a year on its image.

That’s half a million pounds that would be better spent on the public services that have been slashed through budget cuts.

Does Cllr David McBride really believe that the public have no right to have a say in what happens in this community, and that the press have no right to report what is being done in their name?

Or have he and the rest of the Labour councillors who voted with him lost the run of themselves?

I don’t know who you are voting for in the election on Thursday, but I know who I will not be placing at number one in my list of choices.

Members of the council at the meeting where they refused to save Balloch library from closure.