INSIDE SUTTON: Residents at the first council meeting of the new administration walked out in disgust and dismay, rather than have to endue the ruling LibDems’ tax-payer-funded echo chamber.
BERTIE WORCESTER-PARK reports from the Civic Centre
“It didn’t work. Hey, let’s move on.”
Avoiding scrutiny: Sutton Council leader ‘Basher’ Lewis refused to answer public questions
Just seven words. That is the sum total of accountability offered by Barry Lewis, Sutton’s Liberal Democrat leader, when questioned over the multi-million-pound collapse of Throwley Yard, the council-subsidised cinema business which closed last November.
That was all that Basher Lewis was prepared to say about his part in the shambles, which saw the council dole out £3million to the Really Local Group Ltd for them to run a town-centre cinema in a public-owned building which the LibDems claimed would revive the high street.
Lewis’s shrugging off of the council’s losses – which could also include up to £100,000 in unpaid rents from the cinema operators – came at the first full council meeting of the new administration following the May elections.
With Lewis’s LibDems now holding 51 of the council’s 55 seats, Sutton has become an orange-tinted one-party borough. And as Basher’s clear contempt for questions showed last Monday, the borough could be in for four years where he and his party colleagues ride roughshod over anything resembling proper scrutiny.
A handful of residents turned up to the Civic Centre last Monday with actual questions. They weren’t there to throw rose petals at the LibDems after their landslide election victory. They wanted answers on serious issues.
Cashed out: Throwley Yard closed last November, despite receiving £3m in subsidies from the LibDem council and owing up to £100,000 in unpaid rent
That included, somewhat inconveniently for Basher Lewis and his cronies, why the council had failed so spectacularly on its flagship town centre project.
For an hour, the public gave the leadership a grilling, with Throwley Yard squarely in the crosshairs. But as soon as the clock ticked down on the public question time, the illusion of public engagement vanished. Realising they were banging their heads against a brick wall of civic stonewalling, the public gallery emptied in a mass exodus.
Residents walked out en masse, turning their backs on Lewis’s self-serving theatre of the absurd.
That’s when the real farce began. For the next two hours, the LibDums had the chamber entirely to themselves, transforming a democratic forum into a taxpayer-funded echo chamber.
Back when Throwley Yard was originally approved, the LibDems didn’t hold their current crushing supermajority. Yet they behaved as if they did. Long before the Really Local Group collapsed into administration, questions had been raised about the viability of the business case which Lewis and his LibDems had accepted. They waved away the warnings, leaving a crater in the town centre’s regeneration plans.
Basher Lewis’s administration now expects residents to trust another operator to take over the site. Except this new outfit, Globalls, is using a similar playbook to Really Local Group, setting up single-purpose vehicle (SPV) companies with zero trading history.
This is what dictatorship looks like: the 51 LibDem councillors crush any hint of opposition. And they won’t even answer questions from the public
Lewis and the LibDems have been accused to gambling with public money. Yet he was asked to publish the due diligence reports for this latest venture, Lewis refused to promise that the paperwork would see the light of day, as he took cover behind the old bureaucrat’s stand-by of “commercial confidentiality”.
“It didn’t work. Hey, let’s move on,” Lewis said.
But no one was asking him to investigate his past mistakes. They were asking how the council plans to avoid repeating the exact same errors.
Once the public had left the building, the tone in the chamber flipped from defensive to self-congratulatory. Three LibDem motions dominated the rest of the evening. First came a demand for national electoral reform.
Social media campaign: the LibDems had their digital graphics ready to roll straight after the meeting,
Given Sutton LibDems’ complete lack of any sense of irony, it must be assumed that this was moved entirely seriously.
One LibDem councillor stood up to complain that the first-past-the-post system, under which they had been elected two months ago, concentrates power and weakens democracy. The LibDems took 44% of the Sutton votes but landed 93% of council seats.
The whole performance, right down to the carefully focus-grouped title of “Fair Votes for All”, was completely choreographed.
Next was a self-absorbed pat on the back for their own neighbourhood work.
Finally, they had a grand reaffirmation of Sutton’s status as a Fairtrade borough.
All three motions were tabled by LibDems. Every opposition amendment was ruthlessly binned by LibDems. The result was never in doubt.
According to one source at the Civic Centre, “Monday night was a masterclass in what happens when a political clique is left entirely alone to mark its own homework.”
Outnumbered: Labour councillor Dave Tchil at least tried to provide some opposition
It was a slick bit of political theatre designed to show how “nice” and “fair-minded” the LibDems are, as they wept crocodile tears over an unfair voting system while tightly gripping the absolute power it gave them.
What is left of the opposition put up a disparate fight. Councillors Nick Mattey – the last independent left standing – and Dave Tchil – Labour’s lone councillor in Sutton – performed the role of an entire opposition bench by themselves.
Troublingly, in one instance council officials had appeared to conspire with their LibDem political bosses by failing even to publish one of the opposition amendments in a timely manner – and is as required under the council’s constitution.
The Tchil and Mattey amendments that were published in the meeting papers were inevitably defeated, but you could see Lewis and his cronies discomforted.
In contrast, Sutton’s very own sisters of silence, Alison Long and Janey Gould, the two Reform councillors, spent almost the entire evening looking like rabbits caught in the headlights of a oncoming LibDem juggernaut. One of them did briefly pipe up with a solitary, fleeting remark. Maybe it was to try to show they were still awake. But apart from that: nada, zilch, zero.
If Mattey and Tchil looked outnumbered, the duo from grifter Farage’s party simply looked out of their depth.
For anyone wondering who Monday night’s performance was actually staged for, the answer arrived on social media soon after the meeting ended.
Sister of silence: Reform councillor Alison Long with a bloke who thinks there’s nothing wrong in receiving millions from a convicted crook
The Sutton LibDems’ Facebook page was flooded with slick graphics, flattering digital photos and carefully curated quotes from the councillors who had spoken.
The party’s propaganda machine shifted from the chamber floor to the digital timeline without missing a beat, all carefully orchestrated.
The LibDems had turned a council meeting into a digital content generation exercise. Residents had gone home disillusioned. The internet is the only audience the LibDems care about.
Perhaps Barry Lewis’s seven-word dismissal wasn’t just about Throwley Yard. For an administration with a growing list of toxic financial questions to answer, “Hey, let’s move on”, could yet prove to be his mantra for the next four years, as all the while the taxpayer-funded allowances roll in to the LibDem coffers, to pay for future LibDem social media campaigns.
Read more: The questions Sutton leader won’t answer about Throwley Yard
Read more: Throwley Yard to close as company goes into administration
Read more: Sutton staff kept Kingdom revenue deal secret from councillors
Read more: Council hired ‘Real’ builders and dodged Grenfell grants ban
FREE ADS: Paid-up subscribers to Inside Croydon qualify for a free ad for their business, residents’ association or community group, just one of the benefits of being part of our online community. For more information about being an iC subscriber, click here for our Patreon page
PAID ADS: To advertise your services or products to our 10,000 weekday visitors to the site, as featured on Google News Showcase, email us inside.croydon@btinternet.com for our unbeatable ad rates
- If you have a news story about life in or around Croydon, or want to publicise your residents’ association or business, or if you have a local event to promote, please email us with full details at inside.croydon@btinternet.com
As featured on Google News Showcase
- Our comments section on every report provides all readers with an immediate “right of reply” on all our content. Our comments policy can be read by clicking here
Inside Croydon is a member of the Independent Community News Network
