Bitter Basher: Sutton council leader Barry Lewis (standing) lost the plot during Tuesday night’s exchanges at the annual council meeting
How it all adds up: Sutton’s LibDems spent Tuesday evening divvying up public money among themselves
SUTTON SKETCH: This week’s council meeting to kick off the new four-year administration turned nasty as the ruling Liberal Democrats handed themselves more than £1m in special payments.
CARL SHILTON reports
If Sutton council leader Barry “Basher” Lewis thought last Tuesday’s annual council meeting would be a good-natured celebration for him and his Liberal Democrat colleagues, families and friends, he was in for a rude shock.
Following the LibDems’ near-clean sweep in the Council elections on May 7, when they won 51 of Sutton’s 55 council seats, Lewis could have approached the evening’s proceedings with humility and magnanimity. Instead, he got wound up and bodged it, as he rubber-stamped awarding more than £1million in allowances for his own party.
Basher went on to use the occasion to launch a bitter personal attack against independent councillor Nick Mattey.
Mattey had survived the election, despite the LibDems running a dirty campaign targeting him, carpeting his Beddington ward with leaflets and, it has now emerged, with Lewis holding secret meetings with Reform Ltd to try to rid themselves of the troublesome anti-incinerator campaigner.
As with most council annual meetings, Sutton’s was less about the running of council services and more about a session of mutual back-slapping, and the doling out of lucrative positions for the coming year.
LibDem councillor Muhammed Sadiq was made Sutton’s civic mayor for the third time.
Inept: Cllr Muhammed Sadiq is Sutton mayor for a third time
Rightly regarded as one of the most ineffectual mayors Sutton has ever seen, in his first term as mayor in 2015-2016, Sadiq managed to accept £15,000 for his charities, money that had already been donated to a previous mayor, Gerry Jerome, four years earlier. Jerome’s “charity” never existed. Sadiq was criticised for falsely claiming the money had come from a “former colleague and friend”.
When mayor in 2020, Sadiq outdid himself at one council meeting by congratulating a resident on being awarded a British Empire Medal “for services to genocide”.
It is hard to see how council meetings over the next 12 months can possibly go well when being chaired by someone quite so inept.
Tuesday’s meeting also showed that Basher Lewis’s administration had not managed, or even tried, to solve the council constitutional conundrum of having two opposition groups of equal size.
The four council seats that were not won by the LibDems were taken by Reform Ltd, Labour and independent Mattey. Mattey and Labour councillor Dave Tchil teamed up to form a second, two-member opposition group.
Under Sutton council rules, the leader of the official opposition receives a special responsibility allowance – or SRA – of £19,308. The two opposition groups proposed that their leaders should each receive the full amount of allowances.
The amendment received short shrift from Lewis and his LibDems, who while handing themselves lavish SRAs for even the most modest of commitments, were determined to deprive Reform, and Mattey, of any funding.
Mattey already risked conceding the moral high ground by delivering an amendment supported by the grifters from Reform Ltd. His case was not helped when his group co-leader, Tchil, didn’t even bother to show up for the meeting.
The mood of the meeting quickly took a nasty turn.
“The Liberal Democrats now have a councillor in every ward across Sutton and residents can look forward to seeing the difference a hard-working councillor can bring,” Basher said as he began a speech bristling with bitterness, deliberately belittling the work of previous councillors.
In his speech, Bitter Basher became Lying Lewis.
“We’ll offer support in the cost of living crisis, ensuring that the London Living Wage is paid to all employees and contractors’ staff.” Except there are more than 200 contractors supplying Sutton Council that do not pay the London Living Wage. These contractors operate mainly in social care and cleaning, but also at the council ’s leisure centre contractor, Everyone Active.
The best that Sutton LibDems have to offer: with 50 councillors to choose from, Basher Lewis (third from right) has opted to surround himself with a cabinet of (from the left): Jake Short, Christopher ‘CPA’ Woolmer, Gemma ‘84%’ Munday, Sunita ‘Script’ Gordon and Sam ‘Am I leader yet?’ Martin
As Lewis ought to have known, contracts were renewed in the last year without the LLW being enforced.
Lewis then claimed the LibDems would “protect our parks and green spaces from vested interests”, which is an odd position to take when the council has spent more than a decade allowing companies like Viridor and Valencia to break pretty much all of their environmental commitments to restore Beddington Farmlands, while at the same time supplying council-owned companies with energy.
When the meeting came to Mattey’s amendment, the independent had a couple of unscripted digs back at Lewis.
Mattey described the recent election in Beddington as “grotesque”.
It was, Mattey said, “one of the most disgusting campaigns of misinformation I’ve ever experienced in all my life”.
Lying leaflet: LibDem claims about candidate Sue Ebanks, who lives in Oaklands Way, Wallington, are demonstrably false
He described how one LibDem leaflet claimed candidate (now councillor) Sue Ebanks lived in Beddington and was an active member of the community. Trouble is, that’s untrue. Ebanks candidate declaration gave her address as 12, Oaklands Way in Wallington.
Ebanks told at least one voter on the doorstep that there weren’t any independent candidates standing. Not true again. Twelve votes separated independent councillor Tim Foster from being re-elected. But lying in election literature is not illegal.
Mattey brandished a huge wodge of similarly dodgy LibDem leaflets delivered to just one household in Beddington.
And then Mattey dropped a bombshell.
Mattey accused Lewis of holding a secret strategy meeting with Reform Ltd’s branch leader, effectively seeking an electoral pact to dislodge the independents in Beddington.
The leader of Nigel Farage’s party in Sutton lives in Lewis’s Wallington North ward, and he wished Basher good luck in getting rid of the hard-working independent candidates. “This told me everything I needed to know about the toxic culture we were up against,” Mattey said.
Documentary evidence: Cllr Nick Mattey produced a wodge of deceptive LibDem leaflets
When Mattey’s five minutes were up, new mayor Sadiq pettily wouldn’t allow him a few extra seconds to wrap up his speech. The scene was set. The LibDems’ hatred of Mattey was palpable. Even council officials are known to wish him gone. None of them wants him around because he has repeatedly exposed wrongdoing, corruption and fraud by the council and the LibDems.
Reform’s leader Alison Long then spoke. She argued that both opposition groups should be properly recognised and resourced.
Lewis rose to close the debate. He didn’t look happy. Mattey’s blusterings had rattled him.
Significantly, Lewis failed to deny Mattey’s accusations around his secret meeting with Farage’s party officials.
“We need an effective opposition, says councillor Mattey. Shame we haven’t got one,” Basher said, erring on the side of snide. “I say to my members, it’s our job to be the opposition.”
Oddly, Lewis topped short of claiming the official opposition allowances for his own party.
Where your money is going
The full account: Sutton’s Liberal Democrats will receive more than £1m in tax-payers’ money over the next 12 months, after divvying up various special allowances between themselves. An estimated £100,000 of that sum will go straight into their party’s campaign coffers in a scandalous public subsidy of a political party
Mattey, Lewis said, “voted unfailingly with the Conservative opposition through the last term. Now he’s got into bed with Labour”.
The meeting’s invited VIP audience, mostly of senior LibDem party figures, could be seen to look increasingly uncomfortable as the council leader lost the plot.
“I do hope to see all opposition members turn up to the committees that they’ve been allocated to,” Lewis said.
“That includes you, Councillor Mattey. I would just point out that your attendance last term was 81%. That means you missed four out of five meetings. My attendance last term was 96%,’” bragged Lewis, 65, who receives £65,637 a year to top up his pension pot.
Mattey, meanwhile, at 73, receives £13,346.
Mattey’s attendance rate is similar to that of Councillor Gemma Munday, the wife of MP Bobby Dean. Apparently unconcerned about LibDem absenteeism, Basher has promoted her to the role of chair of the people committee, with an allowance of £36,121.
As Mattey continued to complain about Lewis being allowed to lie, the new mayor cemented his credentials as being thoroughly useless. “There’s nobody slandering you,” Sadiq told Mattey, at a stroke demonstrating that he has no understanding of the law of defamation. “Let me listen to the leader of the council,” the puppet mayor said.
The LibDems have made themselves busy over the past 12 years, concocting serial complaints about Mattey’s behaviour, with little cause and even less effect. After the 2022 elections, under Lewis’s predecessor Ruth Dombey, they filed a dozen complaints about Mattey. None were upheld.
Tuesday’s vote on the committee appointments and allowances went as expected. Sutton’s LibDems voted to award themselves £1,074,902 in annual allowances.
They denied an additional £19,308 to the official opposition parties, leaving Mattey to reflect on the ill-judgement of taking on an inevitable losing battle alongside Reform.
Read more: With 51 councillors, ‘Basher’ Lewis faces a fight for his survival
Read more: Sutton’s Simpson show can’t account for £2m SDEN subsidy
Read more: Charity for elderly at centre of fraud is forced to close down
Read more: LibDem Taylor rattled as questions of religion won’t go away
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