The Hypocrisy & Stupidity of our Elected Councillors
shepwayvox
They talk the talk but don’t walk the walk our Cllrs. In the May elections all of the opposition parties Green, Lib Dem and Labour campaigned on a platform of transparency and openness. Yet now we discover that today at 10am the new Otterpool Park Working Group will convene at the Civic Centre
This hypocrisy by these newly elected opposition Cllrs is quite outstanding and unprecedented. Cllr Jim Martin, Cllr Lesley Whybrow and Cllr John Wing, all Green Cllrs, all wanted more transparency, more openness and more democracy, and yet two of them will hide behind closed doors today at 10am. Those election promises have clearly been broken
On Sept 15th 2019, the Shepwayvox Team informed you 20 Councillors failed to disclose their election expenses. This as we said in the blog post is a criminal offence. We note that after this blog post eleven Cllrs rushed to the Folkestone & Hythe District Council monitoring officer – Amandeep Khroud (who doesn’t monitor) – to change their Register of Interest and declare who paid their election expenses, as is legally required by ALL Cllrs. The Cllrs who did so were:
This means the following Councillors continue to sit in the Council Chamber and vote on decisions while committing a criminal offence and the Monitoring Officer – Amandeep Khroud (pictured) does nothing – is she scared of losing her job if she reports them? As a lawyer the law must come first surely Mrs Khroud.
The Shepwayvox Team at their own expense sought legal advice on this matter. We were informed by two senior QC’s of different leading London chambers in Local Government law:
“Cllrs namedare committing a criminal offence. None of the decisions they may have voted on could be determined as being legal, those decisions would have no legal validity in law.”
That to us is unequivocal and we tend NOT to argue with the legal opinion of a Queen’s Counsel, do you? As such this means the Climate & Ecological emergency declared by Folkestone & Hythe District Council is more likely than not legally binding as 20 of the Councillors were NOT compliant with the law at the time the decision was taken, including the Cllr who brought the motion, Cllr Georgina Treloar. This too would go for the decision made to buy Westenhanger Castle, as this would need the approval of Cllr David Monk who has NOT declared his election expenses as he must. Also it applies to Princes Parade as Cllrs on the Planning Committee who voted it through were committing a criminal offence while sitting as a councillor.
Our Councillors hypocrisy regarding transparency and openness demonstrates they are prepared to tell the voters anything to get elected. We add to this the fact that Cllrs are hiding behind fake identities on Facebook which is a violation of their terms and conditions and would ask that you report them.
Finally, for their institutional stupidity regarding their election expenses, this demonstrates that there IS one law for them and another for us. Is it any wonder then that there is a growing disconnect between those elected and the voters, when Cllrs say one thing and do another? We’ll leave you to decide that.
