Until 2008 the Standards Board of England was responsible for administering the Councillors Code of Conduct. In May 2008 this responsibility passed to local council standards committees who became responsible for receiving complaints about a councillor’s conduct.

Many people were concerned that the new system would be used by ruling groups to silence the opposition, eliminate dissent, stop any criticism and that it would be for political purposes by those in power.

In South Tyneside the only effective opposition to Labour is the Independent Alliance and you’ve guessed it, the Alliance has been deliberately excluded from the Standards Committee and is not allowed to play any part in implementing the code.

Could this be because the ruling Labour group and their ‘allies’ are afraid we will find out what they really get up to?

The Standards Committee takes a secretive approach to public standards and holds all its meetings concerning the conduct of individual councillors behind closed doors. It never reports it’s finding publically and despite provision in the council’s constitution that allows any councillor cleared of misconduct to ask for a press release to be issued, they won’t.

The Monitoring Officer (the council’s solicitor, Brian T Scott, the same person responsible for the missing ballot box debacle) seems to wriggle like a maggot on the end of a hook in an effort to get out of issuing a press release in case it upsets the ruling group.

You will not be surprised to learn that since the responsibility for the code passed to South Tyneside Council, there has been a huge rise in the number of complaints and most of them involve members of the Alliance. If by challenging the ruling group, as we do, by asking searching questions, refusing to accept Labour’s deliberate and calculating manipulation of the system and by giving you an alternative view to the verbal diarrhoea and spin that emanates from the town hall, it means we get reported to the Standards Committee, then so be it.

The people of South Tyneside elected us to challenge the cosy little member’s only club and we intend to do just that!

In the past year or so these are some of the allegations made against Labour councillors: wife beating, assault, bullying disabled members of the public and council officers, victimisation, intimidation of council officers, drink driving, election fraud, financial irregularities involving multi million pound payments to 2 former directors of Newcastle Airport, failure to respect councillors, members of the public and council officers.

What action did the Standards Committee take? Absolutely nothing.

Now compare this to these allegations made against Independent Alliance Councillors: the editor of the Shields Gazette, John Szymanski lodged a complaint after his biased reporting was criticised in our newsletters. Ironically he was appointed regional chairperson of the Society of Editors whose core beliefs include recognition of the universal right to freedom of expression, the importance of the vitality of the news media in a democratic society, and the promotion of Press and broadcasting freedom and the public’s right to know. We were also reported for talking about a local political blog called http://mrmonkeysblog.wordpress.com/ which attacks the ruling group, its supporters and exposes things that the council would rather you didn’t know about. Other complaints included spreading rumours, taking part in protests, failing to respect fellow Councillors and commenting about a ‘Labour friendly’ resident’s group in a newsletter.

Guess what? The Standards Committee decided to investigate all these allegations! It seems that double standards are the order of the day when it comes the Independent Alliance.

We have recently asked for a review of the role of the Standards Committee and have made it clear that whilst we accept the need for a code of conduct its time these ‘kangaroo courts’ were stopped and that the whole process was opened up to public scrutiny to stop the cynical manipulation and political gerry mandering by the Labour party.

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