Party Politics (Part One)

This month's meeting of Carmarthenshire County Council had very few highlights, but one of them was a very polished and funny demolition job by Cllr Emlyn Dole on the Labour and Independent groups which together run the show.

He gently mocked the gulf which separates Labour from its stated goals and what it has actually done, but his most devastating fire was reserved for Pam Palmer's raggle taggle "Independent" group, which likes to pretend that it is not a political party, but nevertheless habitually votes unanimously on everything and clings on to power, dishing out generous special responsibility allowances to its mainly geriatric boys and girls, with the middle-aged Giles Morgan being the party's youth wing.

Pam was not in a mood to be mocked, and she rose to dismiss the attack as "puerile tripe", before going to on claim on behalf of her troops that the Independents did indeed publish a manifesto, and that they did not always vote as a bloc.

Some of the Labour councillors will be too young to remember the last time any Independents voted against their party whip (which of course does not officially exist), and nobody has ever seen a manifesto explaining what the group's aims and policies are for the council.

What we get instead is personal "manifestos" issued by individual Independents for the wards where they stand for election, and those postcard sized bits of paper won't tell you much more than that they don't like dog poo, and will stand up for their communities.

Fortunately, nobody from those communities seems to have noticed that the vast majority of Independent councillors never, ever have anything to say for themselves, and the people of Llandovery may wonder what Cllr Ivor Jackson meant by standing up for his community as the bulldozers move in to Ysgol Pantycelyn.

As Pam is apparently a regular reader, Cneifiwr still hopes to be proved wrong about the manifesto, so if you'd care to send in the 2012 manifesto, Pam, it will be reproduced here.