Lonely hearts at Worst Street

join another club

Life must be a little lonely in Worst Street, as Boston Borough Council always seems to be “joining” something.
Recently the borough “joined together” (we love tautology) with all district councils in Lincolnshire to launch the first consultation of its kind with the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community.
Now, punters are told, “YOU can influence decisions” because the council has “joined up” (why can you never join down*?)  with East Midlands Empowerment Partnership and Urban Forum to run a programme called Bridging the Mismatch.
Even the title suggests that someone is having a struggle to make this sound interesting, but apparently the idea is “to assist Boston Borough Council in bringing about performance improvement to National Indicator 4 (NI4) – the percentage of people who feel that they can influence decisions in their local area – by embedding good practice in community empowerment.”
We’re sure that everyone will feel better once this objective has been achieved.
It will be done through a series of workshops where council staff will examine how they communicate the opportunities for local residents to influence decision making.
“This will be achieved by creating a sounding board made up of local residents trained as ‘communication champions’ to provide critical feedback and support. The programme seeks to identify and address any mismatch that might exist between how Boston Borough Council perceives their own efforts to give citizens a say and how local people perceive their own scope to influence,” the council tells us.
There then follows several hundred words of guffspeak which leads us to believe that most people will be unable even to understand what any of this is all about - yet alone play any meaningful role in it.
Critically, once you wade through all the waffle, you will see that there is really little if anything that will involve voters in having any real say about what the council does.
And that, of course, is the way the BBI (aka DRIP, the Distributor Road Independents Party) likes it.
Control is by a gang of eight called a cabinet, which by and large ignores the remaining ten party members except when telling them how to vote t steamroller their decisions past the opposition groups.
Look at how little business was on the agenda of last night’s full council meeting - nothing of any real importance - except a resolution to maintain the currently control mechanism with even more power to the leader after May next year.
Are we saying that any pretence at public consultation is nothing more than a meaningless cosmetic exercise?
You bet we are!

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*What's wrong with simply saying the council has "joined." The "ups" and "togethers" of it are unecessary, and also bad English