Another big shout out to “L’il” Tim O’Gara, the half-trained lawyer and full time posh twit the Rees administration has made their Head of Legal and Monitoring Officer.
At the Annual Full Council meeting on 24 May, L’il Tim presented a report to councillors, ‘Allocation of Committee Seats 2022-23’. The purpose of this was to “review and approve the allocation of seats on committees in accordance with the statutory requirements concerning political balance.”
According to L’il Tim, Gary Hopkins’ whacky new political vehicle, the Knowle Community Party, were entitled to an allocation of 2.86% of seats on committees because they had two out of seventy councillors.
Hence Hopkins and his Knowle sidekick Christopher “Copper” Davies nabbed a seat on the Communities Scrutiny Commission, the Resources Scrutiny Commission and the Public Safety and Protection Committee.
All well and good except for one small detail. There’s no such thing as the ‘Knowle Community Party’ as a simple check on the Electoral Commission’s Register of Political Parties confirms. This means the Knowle duo are actually sitting as unaligned independent councillors.
They are therefore entitled to an allocation of the square root of fuck all of committee seats!
Why’s there a rolling item on the council’s Resources Scrutiny Commission agenda action sheet that never gets resolved? It’s a request from the committee for the “revised business case for Park View” and it’s been OUTSTANDING now for months.