Muhammed Butt Moves in Mysterious Ways His Wonders to Perform

After presiding and indeed creating something of a shambles with the proposed ward boundary changes in Brent, Cllr Muhammed Butt appears to be set on a repeat performance.  He appears to have decided to sign off any comments that Brent Council makes to the LGCBE at a General Purposes Committee meeting at 4.30pm on Tuesday 19th March.  In other words he wants Brent Council to put its views to the LGCBE much earlier than it needs to (The deadline is 15th April, so he could quite easily have made any decision later), and through a forum that has as little participation by Brent Councillors as possible.  It also means that the Council's response will have been signed off some days before the Labour Party has finished its own internal consultations on the subject.

This is for once a radically unconventional approach to pursuing this kind of issue.  Most politicians, including all those I have worked with on various other exercises of this kind, want to draw their colleagues into a discussion to reach a consensus.  They then get "buy in" from the people they have consulted and everyone can be supportive of whatever they have agreed to.

Cllr Butt seems to work with a small number of unelected Council officers and perhaps some random cronies behind closed doors, cook something up, and then present it as a fait accompli to the rest of the Labour Group, Brent Labour Party and indeed the public at large.  He has form on this and other issues of using these techniques.

The result has been frankly chaotic.  I think it was very strange that Councillors didn't seem to realise the obvious implications of their decision at full Council to cut councillor numbers from 63 to 57.  When challenging some of them, I was told that Cllr Butt had simply assured them that changes would be minimal, which is something that a little bit of common sense should have shown them was obviously untrue.

When they did wake up, all sorts of odd options were put forward by individuals in a completely unco-ordinated way with Labour councillors apparently failing to discuss these things with each other, let alone anyone else.

This really is no way to run a local authority