Never in doubt

THE triptych, an art form popularised in the 15th century, hugely unfashionable by the 20th, has been reinvented in the 21st by Wokingham’s politicians. And it’s still an art form, in the shape of three videos spread out over three months — July, August and September.

High drama in Three Acts

The story is all about whether the borough’s recycling should continue to be collected using the black plastic boxes or switched to velcro-sealed sacks instead in an effort to keep paper and cardboard dry.

Act I depicts an ordinary shooting-party kind of a meeting. Get together, go through the motions, adopt hessian sacks. Shimple as Sean Connerywould say.

Act II takes place in the forum. It’s where Mark Antony denounces Brutus and Co, before seeing everyone off. At least, that’s what was intended.

Act III is set at the house of commons despatch box in dreamtime, where the minister gets questioned by successive members of the political public followed bymost of the opposition.

Act I – The Shooting Party

You’ll recall this was the meeting in Julywhere

a member of the public objected toWokingham Borough Council using the word hessian when it wasn’t hessian but despite an executive member’s repeated reminder to the contrary, the executive eventually voted unanimously to approve the revenue and the capital “for the purchase of hessian sacks”.

SoWBC was set to purchase hessian sacks and all was well with the world.

Act II – The Forum

But those decisions were called in and debated at an extraordinary scrutinymeeting in August where it was revealed that the wet paper problem had started back in 2019 and that July’s executive meeting had only approved the money and the purchase decision would be at the executive meeting on September 24.

Lib Dems missed their chance to refute Conservative allegations of their call-in having costWBC money.

Couldn’t they calculate the cost increase that the council had incurred with the nine-month delay since last autumn?

Hadn’t they realised that by admitting the money and purchase decisions were separate, that it was the executive who’d delayed things by two months?

Act III - The Despatch

Instead of waiting until someone spotted that it was actually officers and/or Conservatives who’d held things up until September 24, an extraordinary executive meeting was hastily arranged for September 11 with the sole focus of deciding to purchase the hessian sacks.

However, what followed lurched from farce to tragedy and back again.

At the start, we discovered that some questioners weren’t ready, so the leader asked the question on their behalf, but as the exec member for rubbish’s camera had failed that afternoon (and his microphone wasn’t working that early in the evening), the leader gave the answer as well.

If you’d thought this was going to be a democratic debate with dialogue in the form of questions and answers, you’d have been sadly mistaken. This was the John Halsall show.

But the rubbish exec member’s microphone was eventually rescued and he could answer for himself. Except that the leader developed a habit of giving supplementary answers, perhaps when he’d felt the exec member’s answerwasn’t supplementary enough.

The options report that had led to the decision for ex-hessian sacks then came in for some serious rubbishing, but before the exec member for rubbish decisions could reply, the leader stepped in and said that the question hadn’t been received in time.

So the Lib Dem councillor’s microphone was cut off leaving his mouth moving but no sound coming through.

Evidentlywe aren’t allowed to hear questions that could produce answers the leader doesn’t want, and if ‘microphone failure’ avoids scrutiny.

The last word

Despite all the questions, answers and fiction the outcome was never in the slightest doubt and the vote to pass the purchase proposal was unanimous.

SoWokingham Borough Council has decided to give its all its residents the sack.