Let's face it, important people in Ledbury Town Council not telling the truth hardly counts as news these days. Even so, it's disappointing to see the old bullshit playbook getting a pleasant new cover version: it's called 'I Did It My Way'.
 
Compared to the paroxysms of recent years, this council row is like one of those small yet worrisome fracking tremors. On the Richter scale, it isn't the rupturing of the San Andreas fault and might safely be ignored, but it does remind us that deep down, Ledbury's political lithosphere is far from settled. A rumble here, a sideslip there, the movements are not earth shattering but hint at a more profound inquietude in matters of principled governance and administration.
 
Even the most virtuous individuals it seems, once given a little power, are prey to the dissembling banalities of expediency. That's a polite way of putting it.   
 
During the summer, members of the Labour Party's Ledbury branch applied to the Town Council for a Saturday pitch in November at the town centre market. Council staff sent back a brisk refusal, saying it would be against the rules set out in the town's Tudor-period market charter. Who knew there were political parties in the time of Good Queen Bess when the charter was written?
 
When challenged to back up this claim, council chairman Nina Shields shifted position and said it was 'council policy' not to let market pitches to political parties. This would be fine, were such a policy actually to exist, but it doesn't.
 
At the recent town council meeting (1/11/18) where the matter was finally discussed, Nina Shields glossed over the absence of an actual written policy to justify the prohibition, by saying it was a 'custom and practice policy', whatever that is. 
 
As if it were a good thing, she explained that many political groups had fallen foul of Ledbury's political prohibition, even recently. In the interests of being even-handed, this meant it would not be right to allow the Labour Party to have a market presence, since this would give it an unfair benefit over other rival groups which had been previously disadvantaged. Anyway, where might it end? If we were to hire to the Labour Party, how could we refuse the far-right English Defence League proselytising among the lettuces and polyanthus plugs?
 
Even when she's busking dangerously close to the edge of truth, Nina usually sounds plausible. Despite this, the restless, distant booming sound of deep earth movement was palpable. By my reckoning, the chairman uttered three creaking fallacies in as many sentences.
 
In Nina's weltenschauung, it appears to be valid to maintain an incorrect position into the future because this avoids being unfair to past victims of one's unjust errors. This is a variant of the fallacy of Sunk Costs. Ok, we've been doing this wrong for years, but we can't change now, because it would mean admitting we've mistreated many people beforehand and that would be intolerable. Instead, we carry on doing the wrong thing to ensure the pain is equitably spread; we make everyone suffer in the worst of all possible worlds.
 
Let's call this the Lord Denning fallacy: we can't admit the Birmingham Six were treated unjustly, since this would mean that the police were corrupt, and that would be an 'appalling vista' which would undermine confidence in the whole criminal justice system and that would never do. Best to let the hapless victims stay in prison therefore.
 
Going for the triple, Nina also pulled off the Appeal to Tradition fallacy: we've always done it this way, so we should carry on doing it, even if it is wrong. Then she gave the Slippery Slope fallacy an outing: where will it end? Neo-Nazis?
 
As with all the manifest errors of the previous council regime, it would have been so much more honourable - and easier - for her to say simply: we got it wrong, we're sorry.
 
The chairman did not, instead mounting a stubborn defence, even pressurising a councillor to withdraw their proposal that the ban on political market hirings be lifted. Unwilling to admit even a trivial gaffe, the council administration, including its chairman, was prepared to turn itself inside out so as to conceal its mistake and save face, sadly familiar territory to town council watchers.
 
Councillors across the spectrum - including Howells and Warmington - and the public muttered doubtingly, eying Shields in a new, less endearing light: what's with the power trip Nina?
 
As we've said before: when will they ever learn? In the past, with a supine council and an apathetic public, it was just possible for the little cryptocracy at the centre of town council affairs to make up policy as they went, to keep everything important under wraps, and be constantly economical with the actualité in the cause of maintaining its grip on power. 
 
Those days are gone. Ledbury's infamous judicial trouncing has realigned the tectonic blocks of local politics for good. They won't get away with it.  People are watching. This town has had enough ropey excuses to last a lifetime. The truth fracking has just started. Now it must stop.

Note: Nina Shields was given an opportunity but declined to respond to the contention that the Council had been overzealous or had overreached its competence. The Ledbury Reporter's tolerably accurate report is here. 

 
Lord Nolan’s Standards in Public Life came in the aftermath of the Stephen Lawrence tragedy. Not just police, but especially them, were thereafter bound by a strict ethical code centring on honesty, integrity and transparency.
 
Looking out on the despoiled landscape of Ledbury’s civic life, it seems that here at least, the Code is honoured more in the breach than the observance. And as with Hamlet, there also appears to be crippling lack of action in bringing justice forward, of holding the guilty to account, of the craven scruple of thinking too precisely on the event.
 
Of omission or commission, the errors have been innumerable and the true costs incalculable. People's reputations and home lives have been blighted. Confidence in local democracy is shredded. Perpetrators of heinous behaviour have laughingly walked away scot-free. Hardly anybody, apart from Liz Harvey herself, comes out of the scandal looking like they did the right thing. 
 
'Diligence and Impartiality'
 
It’s not just ex-town councillors and staff that are mired in suspicion and mistrust, but now the police also seem to be dallying in Ledbury’s unweeded garden.
 
Let’s be clear about this: at the least, there is a serious problem of accountability by our local police force, West Mercia Police.  Just like the old guard in the Council, they give the strong impression of acting with both impunity and insouciance, hardly shining exemplars of Nolan probity.
 
Despite compelling evidence being proffered, senior officers simply refuse to engage with the credible and serious allegations about the (mis)conduct of public servants in Ledbury. These include criminal maladministration, data offences, the unlawful expenditure of two hundred thousand pounds, theft and conspiracy to skew the course of justice by ex-members, and possibly staff, of Ledbury Town Council. Despite a mountain of testimony and paper evidence, the police won't even look at it.

This case centres on the recent High Court judgement (Harvey v Ledbury Town Council 2018) in which local town and county councillor Liz Harvey was unlawfully banned by fellow town councillors for unfounded allegations of bullying. After two years of being publicly abused, Liz finally sought to challenge the Council’s unjust ‘sanctions’ at judicial review. She won, comprehensively, but only after undergoing a gruelling legal battle, at great personal cost.
 
Liz’s case has attracted much interest nationally because it clarified how allegations of misconduct by locally elected members should be investigated, and dealt with (not like Ledbury Town Council did). Crime and punishment around the parishes is suddenly a very hot topic.
 
Plot.

Here in Ledbury, a small group of politically motivated town councillors quite obviously conspired to destroy Liz’s personal and political reputation. In so doing, they systematically broke the town council’s financial and governance regulations, failed to disclose three adverse barrister’s opinions which said they couldn’t win the JR, told lies to the Council and flouted its standing orders, and then systematically destroyed all the records and documentation relating to the failed legal action, in skips, bonfires and secure disposal. 
 
Upon the High Court judgement, some of the individuals in charge of the fiasco resigned as councillors but allegedly continued to raid the town council offices until it was cleaned of all material that might incriminate them personally. The police maintain there was nothing malicious in this; it was all a case of ‘incompetence’.
 
Catch 22
 
In a spectacular example of the recursive logic fallacy, Inspector James Ashton of Ledbury police says (without having looked at any of the evidence) that 'No criminal activity has been established [within Ledbury Town Council] for which the parish council may wish to hide / destroy documents'.
 
The officer's starting point is that he does not believe any criminal activity has taken place. He declines to look at any evidence which might say otherwise. Because he does not believe any criminal activity has taken place, he says that there could be no motive for anyone to remove or destroy evidence, a cover-up. This also means that no cover-up has taken place. QED.
 
In short, the reason he won't investigate is because he won't investigate.
 
I wrote to the Police and Crime Commissioner, John Campion (copied to the Chief Constable Bangham) on 2 July 2018 expressing my concerns about the lack of police responsiveness to these serious allegations bearing on local democracy and public administration. Despite chasing Campion’s office several times, I had no response, so I then wrote to Anthony Bangham. Belatedly, this was raised as an official complaint on 2 September. Since then, it has been passed round West Mercia like a lump of irradiated waste material.
 
After seven increasingly frustrating telephone calls to its Professional Standards Department throughout September and October, I finally received a communication from Herefordshire's police commander, Superintendent Sue Thomas. In explaining the police's inaction, she leant heavily on Inspector Ashton's extraordinary account which is both factually incorrect and mind-bogglingly illogical in its argumentation. The case has now, as far as I know, bounced back to West Mercia's 'professional standards department' for more weeks of wearying delay and obfuscation if past experience is gone by.
 
That there has been a cover-up of dazzling proportions by ex-Ledbury Town Councillors and staff is undeniable: you only have to read the local newspaper or attend council meetings to know this.
 
What is truly unfathomable is why the police are refusing, point blank, to engage with Liz Harvey or me over this affair. Their inability even to enact their own internal complaints procedure is Kafkaesque: the way the matter has been offloaded from Detective Chief Inspector to Detective Chief Inspector, three up to now, not including Supt Thomas's intervention and that of the Chief Constable’s personal team is surreally comic.  No barge-pole is too long.
 
It would of course be an 'appalling vista', as the late Lord Denning said, were it to emerge that there had been direct or indirect collusion between Ledbury’s ex-councillors, or staff, or other interested parties and the police in this matter. Could there be a Masonic connection? We may never know, such is the secrecy surrounding membership of the brotherhood, particularly within police circles, particularly it must be said, within West Mercia police circles.
 
Cui Bono?
 
Let’s consider the involvement of Cllr Brian Wilcox, chairman of Herefordshire Council, senior freemason, and whose wife is Lynda Wilcox. Mrs Wilcox was the de facto town clerk who prosecuted the investigation and banning of Liz Harvey and Andrew Harrison which led to the judicial review. Brian Wilcox has a finger in many local pies including the Police and Crime Commissioner steering group, which legally 'holds to account' the Police Commissioner, his Conservative Party colleague, John Campion. The Police Commissioner in turn directs and oversees the activities of West Mercia Police, and its chief constable, Anthony Bangham.
 
The PCC steering group comprises nominated local county and district councillors of which until June 2018, Wilcox had been chairman for several years: an influential position for a run of the mill local councillor from a small, poorly regarded local authority. Except Brian isn't. He is very well connected via his Brotherhood chums.
 
So let’s recap. Lynda Wilcox, CEO of the local parish/town council association (HALC) participates in a behind the scenes campaign to destroy one of her husband Brian’s, main political opponents on Herefordshire Council, Liz Harvey (now co-leader of the It’s Our County independent party).
 
Lynda provides legal cover and moral encouragement to ban the two councillors (Harvey and Harrison, my civil partner), and then administers the council’s hopeless defence at judicial review, knowing it to be hopeless. Three barristers’ opinions predicting the Council would lose are known to her, and suppressed, even from fellow town councillors.
 
The Council loses and the legal costs spiral over two hundred thousand pounds. Sacrosanct legal paperwork and council documentation is burned and shredded, files are trashed, hard discs are erased, email accounts purged and the CCTV system hacked.
 
Somebody was very keen to see all that material destroyed - about as keen as the police are to block an investigation. The implications of this are now assuming menacing proportions.

Here in far-flung, far-fetched Herefordshire, it is no longer outlandish to wonder whether but how often, there is involvement between important people, including some police officers and the local, political establishment. The omnipresence of the Masonic network is a fact of life in this picturesque corner of rural England. 'Here', the skeins of fealty are draped over public life like tanglesome cobwebs. You mightn't see those busy, deadly little widow spiders, but the sticky strands they weave in every dark corner of public life, are a sure sign of their unending company.
 
The offences against democracy by some former Ledbury town councillors are ruinous: the dispute has spanned four years, paralysed the town council at a time of environmental peril, and cost upwards of £220 thousand, not including staff and member time. The town council administration was, and remains in disarray. The brazenness of the subsequent cover-up is shocking. It was an organised conspiracy to mislead the public, and thwart the new Council from obtaining financial redress. Public records have been destroyed. Money has been spent unlawfully. Lives have been damaged.
 
Worse even than these infractions, is the disquieting possibility that the police have got themselves mixed up in the conspiracy. I have consistently stressed to John Campion and Anthony Bangham that I did not believe this could possibly be the case, but given the comprehensiveness of the police's seeming unconcern, I am beginning now to wonder.
 
At the very least, the police are being obstinately stupid in refusing to face up to the facts of this scandal. The alternative is that corrupt elements within their ranks are actively participating to cover it up. Either way, the situation is untenable, nor will it go away. Have they learned nothing?
 
All that we ask is that the due process of justice be followed, that officers and all public servants involved in this follow the rules, and aspire to Lord Nolan's guiding principles, in letter and spirit.
 
As it stands, we are a long way from that happy place. The police's indifferent silence, its inaction, and its crude attempts to discredit the motives of legitimate complainants, is chilling.
 
If you are concerned about this affair, and believe that we deserve better from our police, I ask you to write to West Mercia's Police and Crime Commissioner John Campion: opcc@westmercia.pnn.police.uk
and Chief Constable Anthony Bangham: 
anthony.bangham@westmercia.pnn.police.uk . 

​Feel free to copy your letter to this blog.
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