Thursday 9 April 2009

All the right notes...

The way the ruling group in Carmarthenshire (composed of the Labour Party and the Independent Party) dealt with a motion from the Plaid group at its last meeting brought back memories of the famous Morecambe and Wise sketch with Andre Previn.

The Plaid motion was simple and straightforward – it simply asked the council to conduct a survey of the demand for Welsh-medium education before reorganising secondary schools in the county, so that any reorganisation would be founded on a factual basis. Logical, sensible, and probably something that the Assembly Government will call for shortly anyway.

But they can't be seen to agree with the opposition on anything, so the ruling groups proposed an amendment. Fair enough, in principle – except that this amendment deleted every word in the original motion and replaced it with a completely new motion which didn't even refer to the subject matter of the original motion. As Plaid Cllr Gwyn Hopkins has pointed out, the amendment contains none of the words of the original motion except those that are in common by sheer coincidence. Words like 'this', 'a', and 'the', for instance.

On second thoughts, it doesn't quite fit the Morecambe and Wise sketch. More a case of none of the right notes...

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