Chance was missed to stand with the Sheriff
WITH reference to Oliver Pridmore’s story about the Labour Party NEC installing Neghat Khan, Ethan Radford and Matt Shannon as the new leadership team of the Labour group running Nottingham City Council (Post, May 8), I suspect some Labour councillors are now feeling a sense of caveat emptor.
This is a similar stunt to the NEC installing a ‘pair of safe hands’ to oversee the devastating cuts in Birmingham, where they effectively imposed their man, John Cotton.
This local turn of events will no doubt create turmoil inside the Labour group, as some councillors had banked on getting a say over the new leader, to replace the outgoing David Mellen.
And it now looks like the Left dream ticket of Steve Battlemuch and Adele Williams has been well and truly scuppered by the intervention of Labour’s ruling NEC.
I suspect these two councillors in particular, might now be feeling a sense of ‘caveat emptor’ (buyer’s remorse), in voting through the cuts budget in March, which Steve had rightly said would “wreck the fabric of our city”.
Remember, these councillors had supported an amendment inside the council chamber, designed to mitigate some of the forthcoming library cuts. But this move was ruled out of order by the unelected finance officer (Ross Brown) and endorsed by the Lord Mayor (Councillor Carol Mcculloch).
This decision to reject the amendment should have acted as a “trigger point” for Steve, Adele and others to stand alongside the Sheriff of Nottingham, Councillor Shuguftah Quddoos, and vote against the cuts budget, which she said in her speech will cause immeasurable harm to our citizens.
My homemade placard, which Shuguftah held on the Save Our Services (SOS) rally on Saturday, “Less compliance, more defiance”, now seems more apt than ever.
The Nottingham SOS campaign was the main theme of the Notts TUC May Day march and rally held on Saturday, which marched from the new central library to Old Market Square and included Shuguftah’s passionate self-defence of her stance, as the main speaker.
The event also included speeches from Stephen Brown from the Musicians’ Union, defending the arts in Birmingham and Nottingham, and Christina Sanna, Nottingham branch secretary of Unison, about the devastating cuts already occurring, including the planned closure of the Greyhound Street toilet facilities.
In the end, Shuguftah was the only Labour councillor to make the difficult decision to vote against this horrendous budget, whereas all of the other Labour councillors took the easy option of going with the flow.
But that flow is now a raging torrent, heading for a cataclysmic waterfall cliff edge, taking with it jobs and services in danger of being lost forever, including the much-valued Jackdawe dementia support service.
Shuguftah will hand over her reign as Sheriff at the next full council meeting on Monday, May 20, and from then on, she will be former Sheriff of Nottingham and will go down as a local legend when the history books are eventually written.
In the meantime, and supported by Shuguftah, the SOS24 campaign is determined to fight with workers, users and residents to resist these cutbacks, wherever they are threatened.
#standwiththesheriffofnottingham
Des Conway Sherwood