Kirklees Council meeting branded 'farcical' after time wasted on a vote to see if councillors should vote on an issue

A debate on taking responsibility for council decisions descended into a farce.

Councillors rounded on a motion for an all-party shared administration.

The proposer of the idea, Clr Andrew Cooper, was not allowed a right to reply after being heckled by the Tories who had called his Green Party the ‘rump of the council’.

And councillors never got to vote for or against the shared rule idea – but were given time to vote to see if they should vote on the motion.

Clr Andrew Cooper, Green and Valley Independent leader, had called on opposition colleagues to unite to form an all-party shared administration, saying: “When we all stand for election there are two expectations people can reasonably have if they voted for us.

“One is that we’ll work in the wards we represent to do the best we can for people.

“The second is, if we get the opportunity to make changes on Kirklees Council we use the trust they place in us to do as much as we can to help the administration.”

He said no-one should “criticise from the comfort of the sidelines” while others make tough decisions, including making cuts of £69m which poses a threat to services and council jobs.

He said it’s not the time for a minority administration and called on the Labour, Conservative and Liberal Democrat members to “open discussions” on sharing power.

But he was rounded on, first by Clr Andrew Palfreeman, Conservative, who branded the Greens “naive” and “the rump of the council” who should “get to the back of the queue where they’ve always belonged.”

He said the Greens and Valley Independents had kept an “incompetent” Labour Party in power.

With two minutes to go to the 9pm deadline, instead of a vote being taken councillors were instead asked to vote on whether they should vote. By the time they had done that, the meeting was closed and the motion fell.

After the meeting, Clr Cooper said if the Tories felt Labour were incompetent they should have taken the opportunity to do something about it at the meeting.

He concluded: “My right to reply, which would have taken less than two minutes, was denied and the time taken to vote to decide whether to vote could have been the actual vote itself, which is farcical.”