Peter Black

The Swansea Council meeting on Thursday was in many ways typical of the genre. On the one hand there were a number of positive moments, including an award being presented to the officers responsible for remodelling the Kingsway amongst many other awards and an excellent and enlightening presentation from the Gower Society on the beautiful landscape that we, as Councillors have some responsibility for. There was also a good scrutiny of respite care proposals.

On the downside however, there was a pointless thirty minutes of questions in which opposition members focussed on imaginary external influences on the administration, accused a sick and home-confined man of spending the last two years wandering around County Hall at will calling the shots on important decisions, made deeply personal attacks on individual councillors rather than concentrating on their policy agenda and then complained that the Council was being chaired in a Stalinist manner when time ran out and questions were brought to an end without them being able to raise supplementaries on all those they had tabled.

And of course there was a debate on alleged remarks about compulsory sterilisation made in a closed seminar, in which both accused councillors deny having made the comments attributed to them even if they could have got a word in edgeways to clarify their position during the foul-mouthed rant from the leader of the opposition which I am told then ensued. The motion that was finally passed by Council was absolutely right. It made it clear that we would have no truck with such ideas or any other form of social or racial discrimination and that we will not tolerate people holding positions of authority in the Council who hold extremist views that undermine family life.

The South Wales Evening Post editorial today quite rightly points out that there were moments during this meeting that do not show up local democracy in a good light. However, they are also exercised by the fact that both I and Councillor René Kinzett sent out the occasional Twitter message telling some of the outside world at any rate, what was going on. They consider this to be disrespectful as did some Labour Councillors.

Well, I remain unrepentant at that action. Surely, the whole point of Council meetings is that in making important decisions about the future of our area we also engage with and inform those who elect us. My activity did not interrupt the debate in anyway whatsoever, even though there were times when it could have benefited from such interruption. I did not say anything out-of-order nor did I unfairly denigrate any individual. I merely informed people of some key events so that they might know what we are doing in the Council chamber. If anything was disrespectful it was the disgraceful behaviour of some Councillors at that meeting.

Council meetings are inward-looking enough as they are without stupid restrictions making them more so. In Swansea the Liberal Democrat-led Administration has tried to break out of this bubble. There is a public question time, a chance for organisations to make presentations and we have also introduced simultaneous translation in case anybody wishes to speak in Welsh. However, it is a fact that the vast majority of the public gallery consists of the usual suspects and that apart from an Evening Post reporter, who often leaves before proceedings have concluded, we are sitting in a cocoon of our own making, talking to ourselves and nobody else.

In such circumstances, there is a desperate need for people to twitter and blog their reactions to events as they unfold. We need webcasting and any other media to allow people to see what is going on. There is nothing disrespectful about Councillors sending out messages at all. Multi-tasking is an important skill in a modern politician, so is the ability to communicate and embrace new ways of doing so. The Evening Post and those Councillors who disapprove should join us in the 21st Century and learn that representative democracy is about engagement, openness and transparency and that social media forms an important part of that.

Update: as Inside Out point out public question time was introduced by a previous administration not by the current one. I had clearly misremembered though I had been campaigning for such an innovation well before.