The letter text is:
Dear Editor,
S Harvey from the local Labour Party doesn’t think the Conservative-run council is doing the kind of consultation that meets with her approval (‘No consultation’, Redditch Standard Letters, Dec 24).
It’s hardly surprising that a Labour Party candidate doesn’t agree with how the Conservatives are doing things.
However, S Harvey does seem to demonstrate a very poor understanding of how a representative democracy works, which should be alarming to anyone thinking of voting for her in a future election.
Even more alarming is that she wants to waste expensive legal officer time (and therefore taxpayers money) dealing with her politically motivated complaints.
There are 29 councillors on Redditch Borough Council, each one of them also a citizen of the town.
A huge part of our job is to be in touch with the needs and aspirations of our residents and to guide policies and plans accordingly.
People will not be surprised to learn this can be done by picking up the phone to your local councillor, sending them an email, or joining them for a coffee and a chat at a local surgery.
All of this gets fed back into the day-to-day work at the Town Hall, shaping the future of our town and the plans that get brought forward.
What S Harvey and her colleagues really want is to bypass all of this and have an expensive bureaucratic system that inherently supports socialist outcomes.
Why is that? Because only socialists have the time and inclination to sit down and complete long surveys about everything from what colour bricks they’d like to which books by Lenin and Marx they’d like to see stocked.
The rest of us have lives to be getting on with, and we expect councillors to do the job we pay them for – to be in touch, to find out what we want, then deliver it.
I think her colleagues who were successfully elected understand this – not least because they didn’t do the kind of consultation S Harvey is now demanding.
Councillor M Rouse
Redditch Conservatives
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