In future, 2016 will not be remembered as just another of Ledbury Town Council's wasted years, but its time of ruin.

Mired by resignations (here and here) and recriminations, the Council has endured months of catatonic inaction interrupted only by a few colourful outbreaks of zombie-style rage. (see Buntingate and Tolerance Motion)
 
All in all, another year of squandered opportunities and thwarted hopes has slipped by in Ledbury, another £300 thousand pounds expended on itself to achieve very little except win notoriety as one of the UK's most dysfunctional town councils.
 
As the New Year beckons, what are the chances of renewal and repair?
 
An investigation into the machinations of Ledbury Town Council is approaching its grimly inevitable conclusion. Of one thing we can be certain: there will be some Ledbury Town Councillors who will face political ruin, personal humiliation, perhaps even criminal investigation.
 
For those vanquished, it will be not such a merry Christmas.  Over the flatulent dregs of the season, all the players in this tragicomedy might at least have time to reflect on their year just gone, the mistakes and misdemeanors, all the recklessness and arrogance, the deceits and distortions.

As the Ghost of Christmas Past icily observed: “No space of regret can make amends for one life's opportunity misused”.
 
But before feeling sorrow for their plight, it's as well to reprise what led to this colossal fiasco.
 
Post Truth

The inquiry by Herefordshire Council was prompted by a slew of complaints and counter claims by warring town councillors and residents, so many in fact that an independent team of investigators was enlisted, among them a retired police officer who specialised in anti-corruption and a local government solicitor.
 
At the heart of it all, lay grievances levelled by town council staff members against two councillors - Liz Harvey and Andrew Harrison - for bullying, harassment and intimidation. The Council took these complaints seriously; so much so that it decided to rip up the rule-book and organise its own novel investigation process that would guarantee the outcome it sought.
 
Protesting their innocence, Harvey and Harrison underwent a trial by fire at successive closed council meetings and panels where they were roasted and harried by their haters: Crowe, Barnes, Eager, Roberts (Noel), Fieldhouse, Baker, Francis and Yeoman. Dispensing with all semblance of due process and natural justice, they faced a jury composed of those same hostile councillors with whom they had been battling over openness since the 2015 election.
 
They were of course found guilty as charged. A letter was sent to every local club, group or society in the district denouncing them as heinous bullies. A lawyer might say that this was quite a brave move. The foregone result of the Council's 'internal investigation' was announced at Ledbury's vicious Annual Council Meeting in May 2016 when they were banned from all committees and outside bodies.
 
This has been a war about transparency, accountability, entitlement to power, resistance to change, vested interests, jealousy, political rivalries, personal scores and the fight for civilised human values. Harvey and Harrison were among the progressives, seeking to challenge the Council's habitual secrecy, and the grip of its inner circle of cynical decisionmakers.
 
In that carefree atmosphere of pre-referendum Britain when everyone was tired of  experts, at the dawn of this post-truth era, the Town Council gladly ignored the repeated advice of both Herefordshire Council's legal officer and a leading local government barrister that what they were doing was legally indefensible. Instead they left it in the hands of the Chief Executive of Herefordshire Association of Local Councils to cobble together a process. (Twelve months on, this still hasn't been written down nor adopted officially by LTC in its standing orders).  
 
Connections

It just so happens that this shadowy presence, Mrs Lynda Wilcox, is the wife of Herefordshire Council's Chairman, Cllr Brian Wilcox, freemason, and a leading Conservative and determined political opponent of Cllr Liz Harvey from It's Our County.
 
Armed with her talents, but which do not yet appear to extend to legal expertise, Mrs Wilcox likes to make herself indispensible to parish and town clerks around the county, and in return receives subscriptions to her organisation. She organises training events creatively marketed as 'Wise Owl', 'In the Hot Seat' and 'Information Corner'.
 
Much is made of HALC's 'insurance-backed' advice on its website. This could prove useful in the future if it emerges that incorrect advice has been given to any of its clients. As Mrs Wilcox says in her blurb with no hint of irony, 'Without HALC Clerk cover, your [parish council] could easily act unlawfully.'
 
Just as she could hardly be accused of originality in her marketing, so she would struggle to give the outward appearance of being wholly impartial in her dealings with Ledbury Town Council. Annual subs to HALC pay her wages, while her husband's political group is daily locked in mortal combat with Liz Harvey's. (The Tories have never forgiven Harvey for snatching one of their Ledbury Ward seats in 2010, and then another in 2015. Politics, a dirty game).
 
Liz Harvey argued persuasively that Mrs 'Wise-Owl' Wilcox could not be neutral or objective since it was her contentious advice to the Town Council upon which the dispute mainly centred. Initially, the responsible Council committee accepted this conflict of interest and voted to dispense with her services. But then she was reinstated. Why?
 
Even the (Tory) MP Bill Wiggin was enlisted to the Council's cause with public accusations of bullying and harassment of 'his friend' the Clerk. Uncharitable souls might suspect a political conspiracy.
 
Foreign

Latin and legal scholars will be familiar with the concept of 'nemo judex in causa sua' (nobody should be a judge in their own cause) but such fine sentiments are sadly written in a long dead tongue as far as Ledbury Town Councillors are concerned. It would be almost as unintelligible to them as the lofty words of that most hated foreign body, the European Court of Human Rights: 'everyone is entitled to a fair and public hearing within a reasonable time by an independent and impartial tribunal established by law'. (Article 6). 
 
So where next? The signs are not encouraging.
 
Either Harvey and Harrison will be found guilty of harassment towards town council staff in which case their involvement with town politics will probably be at an end. Or, if innocent, the Town Council will descend into political meltdown.
 
Sources close to the Mayor suggest that Ledbury Town Council is minded to ignore any findings of Herefordshire Council's investigation. Councillors are already saying in the local press that they have no intention of resigning, even before the report is published. More ominously, the Council's dirty tricks machine appears once again to be cranking into life, a last gasp effort to deflect attention from its own troubles.
 
Priorities

This affair has lasted two years, cost thousands of pounds of public money and wasted prodigious amounts of time in argument and dispute. On top of the four thousand already spent, Ledbury Town Council has laid up a war chest of a further £10 thousand for future legal action, this, at a time of savage local government cutbacks. It is clear where the Council's priorities lie. Itself. 
 
There will not be any winners in this game, only losers, the hapless council tax payers of Ledbury and Herefordshire.
 
At what point will they rise up and call a halt to this madness? Might 2017 finally be the year when democratic values begin to assert themself in our sorely abused community?

 
News editors around the world are grappling with abuse and trolling in their online comment forums. These discussion threads that sit beneath a news story or opinion piece, have increasingly become places for insulting, threatening and hateful language. So serious has the problem become that some publications have shut down comments altogether.
 
Herefordshire’s local media boss takes a more relaxed view, believing that insulting language is just part of the ‘everyday knockabout’, what you would expect ‘in the pub, on the doorstep, in life.’  Peter John, is the Midlands Regional Editor for Newsquest newspapers. He oversees many local titles such as the Worcester Evening News, the Hereford Times and the Ledbury Reporter/Malvern Gazette.
 
In the wake of Liz Harvey’s sensationalist shaming by the Reporter over ‘bunting-gate’, there was a predictable blowback in social media. Enraged readers vented their feelings on Facebook and newspaper discussion threads, including The Reporter’s. I complained about a comment on their web site as it clearly violated the rules: ‘Who voted for this brain dead unpatriotic woman?’ asked “EddyR”. Newsquest’s terms and conditions say that you must not ‘post anything that is false, abusive or malicious.’
 
I was surprised to get a response from busy Mr John himself. He said: ‘While the comment is harsh, it does not seem to me to be so personally offensive that it goes beyond the bounds of the normal knockabout, hyperbolic statements you would expect in web comments. It also seems to me that the person’s right to free speech to vent their anger trumps a politician’s sensitivities.’
 
We exchanged several emails on the bounds of acceptable language, free speech, and on the destructive impact of spiteful name-calling. I also suggested that news editors should  uphold the same standards of civilised debate within their online comments forums as they do in their reporting and printed letters pages. Mr John eventually lost patience with me or ran out of time, and said he wasn’t going to read my final email. He said I was ranting. Judge for yourself: you can review the exchange here.
 
Midlands Newsquest seems to be running against the tide of informed editorial opinion on this matter. Read The Guardian’s penetrating report: The Dark Side of Guardian Comments and Tariq Moosa’s piece: Comments sections are poison: Handle with care. Martin Belam writes a good piece too in respected online portal, the Media Briefing: It’s tough below the line: the paradox of reader comments
 
Anyone patient enough to let Newsquest’s online news pages load amid the slow avalanche of banner advertising and video content, can read routinely degrading, prejudiced, sometimes hateful comment. Certain news stories are predictably prone: travellers and gypsies, Muslims and mosques, flags and other nationalist paraphernalia. In Newsquest’s Midlands newspaper ‘stable’ (an appropriate term), the brakes are off. It’s ok to call people retards, tell Muslims to get back to North Africa, make references to Zyklon B gas, and say ‘beware of gypsies everyone. they are camped near the Avoncroft museum, so lock it up or loose (sic) it.’ And of course, calling local politicians ‘brain-dead’. Apologies for this language by the way. 
 
So what effect does this brutal and ethically debased environment have? Certainly, intelligent and reasonable voices are often deterred from participating. Comments threads become skewed in favour of right-wing, loutish opinion. Like our friend EddyR, most of these contributors don’t have the courage to post under their real names. In cyber-discussion, the Yahoos are upon us.  
 
There is a more insidious effect. Rude and abusive comments alter people’s perceptions of information itself. Strongly negative online behaviour seems to harmfully distort our reading of otherwise balanced and reasoned editorial material. The downside of a situation or issue is accentuated, perceived risks and damage are heightened, while positive aspects and benefits are attenuated. The researchers who observed this, Anderson, Brossard et al (2013), called it the ‘nasty effect’. One of the study authors Dietram Scheufele said the modern media environment is like "reading the news article in the middle of the town square with people screaming in my ear what I should believe about it". An abusive environment isn’t just unpleasant; it dumbs down debate and actively promotes ignorance.
 
Not just socially pernicious, online abuse is bad for business too. In an article for Journalism.co.uk, Alastair Reid argues that ‘creating a positive environment for community and engagement to flourish gives readers a reason to come back and drives traffic, a factor that the website can use to attract commercial partners.” There is good evidence which suggests that negativity in forums is a turn-off for readers: who wouldn’t be repelled?

"It's not a great advert, if you will, for readers or web users who enjoy participating on other sites if we don't make it as welcoming as possible for them as well," said Laura Oliver, the Guardian’s Community Manager. Why, even the British National Party impose a strict code on commenters: “we have our own brand, our own image” they say. “If your post is not in keeping with our objectives or could damage our image, then your comment will be moderated or rejected.”
 
Derogatory online behaviour is not value-neutral, nor is it conducive to informed public debate. For the first time in history, the nasty minority have a mass-media platform to vent their rage and prejudices. They occupy a disproportionate amount of space. The hate fuelled views of these flotsam and jetsam are not representative of society nor should they have any place in respectable media sources. It is not your right to hurl insults at anyone you think you don't like.
 
Peter John says that such discourse is par for the course, down at the pub or in the street. He is utterly wrong. Unless you are very drunk, politically unhinged or mentally deranged you simply don’t abuse people to their faces the way some of Newsquest’s commenters are allowed to do; that’s unless you are cruising for a punch on the nose. Even if you were, that doesn’t mean that such behaviour is acceptable in a family publication that purports to offer a balanced and responsible news service.
 
If you’ve got something to say, do as the BNP helpfully suggest and don’t make sweeping generalisations but do “offer a well-reasoned critique that helps others understand the problem, together with what you think the answer is.”
 
It comes to something when you have to invoke one of Britain’s most hateful organisations to persuade an experienced news editor to rein in his attack trolls and start behaving himself.
 
He won’t of course. He's old school. Is it any wonder that journalists, along with bankers and politicians are the least trusted professions in Britain?

A hundred years ago, the early human rights lawyer Louis Brandeis (who went on to become a US Supreme Court Justice), famously said ‘sunlight is the best disinfectant’. He was referring to openness and transparency being an effective antidote to corruption and incompetence by the powerful and the privileged. 

Then as now, positive, concrete moves to make public decision-making accessible, transparent and fully accountable to voters was resisted strenuously by those more accustomed to having their own way, rather than having to expose themselves to the glare of public scrutiny.

Now in Britain for the first time, ordinary people will have the right to make video or audio recordings of the proceedings of their local council representatives.

That it has taken until 2014 for this to happen, is just about the only extraordinary thing concerning the new regulations introduced last week by Local Government Secretary, Eric Pickles.

“There is now no excuse for any council not to allow these new rights” says Pickles. “Parliament has changed the law, to allow a robust and healthy local democracy”.

No-one will be surprised that the recording ban has been vigorously applied by Ledbury Town Council hitherto.

There have of course been so many occasions when a tape-recording of the ill-informed, egregious and unwise utterances from certain Ledbury Town Councillors would have been in the public interest.

I remember the time I innocently opened my laptop to type notes at the inaugural Neigbourhood Plan working party meeting and was warned darkly by chairman Cllr Bob Barnes that the recording of meetings was strictly forbidden. Uh? As a lowly resident and community volunteer at that stage, I thought this was rather unwelcoming. Now I realise that the swipe was nothing personal, just part of the entrenched culture of covert policy-making and democratic exclusion that has pervaded council business in Ledbury over the years.

No matter, it’s all going to be different in future. It might be safely expected that now the very spoken words of elected town councillors can be played back on Youtube or Soundcloud for all to hear, there will be pause for thought in some quarters. Or can it? The nagging doubt persists that the serial offenders of crashing insensitivity, even rudeness, simply have no idea that what they say is so far from being acceptable to most ordinary people. Time will tell.

Here is the press statement issued by the Dept of Local Government:

“In a boost for local democracy and the independent free press, councils in England were brought into the 21st century today (6 August 2014) after Local Government Secretary, Eric Pickles, signed a Parliamentary order allowing press and public to film and digitally report from all public meetings of local government bodies. This ‘right to report’ updates a law passed by Margaret Thatcher as a backbench MP.

“Following the passage of both primary and secondary legislation, the move opens councils’ digital doors, covering broadcasters, national press, local press, bloggers and hyper-local journalists and the wider public. The new law aims to end active resistance amongst some councils to greater openness. Councils have even called the police to arrest people who tried to report, tweet or film council meetings, or claimed spurious ‘health and safety’ or ‘reputational risks’ to digital reporting.

“This new law builds on Margaret Thatcher’s successful Private Members’ Bill from 1960 which allowed for the written reporting of council meetings by the press. The new rules will apply to all public meetings, including town and parish councils and fire and rescue authorities.

Local Government Secretary, Eric Pickles, said:

“Half a century ago, Margaret Thatcher championed a new law to allow the press to make written reports of council meetings. We have updated her analogue law for a digital age.

Local democracy needs local journalists and bloggers to report and scrutinise the work of their council, and increasingly, people read their news via digital media. The new ‘right to report’ goes hand in hand with our work to stop unfair state competition from municipal newspapers - together defending the independent free press.

“There is now no excuse for any council not to allow these new rights. Parliament has changed the law, to allow a robust and healthy local democracy. This will change the way people see local government, and allow them to view close up the good work that councillors do.”

In recent years, Ledbury Primary School Headteacher Mrs Julie Rees, has been pioneering "Values-based" education  - educating pupils and school staff to build respect, tolerance, diversity and equality into their daily lives.

Now international expert in the field Dr Neil Hawkes is coming to  Ledbury to talk about how those values can be reflected more widely in the life of the town.

Says Julie Rees, "For many years now Ledbury Primary School has embedded Values based education and many of our parents ask how we can take these values into the community.  Dr Hawkes has encouraged us to think creatively about how we can promote our understanding of these Values in our town.

As well as listening to Dr Hawkes, who is an inspiring speaker, we now want to hear your views about how we can raise the profile of Values in our local community."

At the meeting there will be:

• Dr Neil Hawkes International Speaker and consultant speaking about Values in our community
• A free crèche for children so parents can attend
• Light refreshments
• Jon the Potter (Eastnor Pottery) and Stephen McCrae (Blacksmith) - artists involved in the project
• Cath Gardner-Fairy Door Trail

Dr. Neil Hawkes is credited for his pioneering values work as Headteacher of West Kidlington School in Oxfordshire, where he worked with the school community to develop a unique system of values-based education that has become well known throughout the world for its positive and transformational properties. Neil now works as an international education consultant, giving inspirational talks and supporting schools and other organisations to be values-based. His latest book is called, From My Heart: transforming lives through values.

The meeting is open to any community group or any person living in our local community.