Cornwall Council leader Alec Robertson has started sending members a "media briefing" to help them recognise the previous week's heroic achievements. Prepared by the council's press office, the document is helpfully divided into lists of "positive news" and "negative news," and as long as the former outnumber the latter then Cornwall's Tribunes can rest easy, secure in the knowledge that the bosses know what they're doing.
But - gadzooks! - don't these lists look rather subjective? For example, the decision of the Secretary of State to approve the St Dennis waste incinerator is only good news if you don't actually live in St Dennis. And, er, the official policy of the council (as set out at a £1million+ public inquiry) is still to oppose the St Dennis incinerator.
There is quite a number of stories claimed as "positive" which could just as easily be described as "negative" - such as writing to the government to protest at changes to the feed-in tariff for solar electricity.
And the much shorter list of "bad news" stories seems to have missed completely the one about last Tuesday's full council meeting, which blocked Alec's plan to pay Special Responsibility Allowances to four newly-created Cabinet Support Members, which saw his coalition partners in the Independent group say they weren't convinced of the need for CSMs at all, and which has left him without a CSM for education.
I wonder if any of the council's 123 members take such official, corporate media briefings seriously. If so, they probably enjoy the ideal environmental conditions for growing mushrooms. I also wonder if such a partisan approach to "news" is an appropriate use of tax-funded resources. Readers are invited to submit their own lists of positive and negative council stories.
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