About Wrinehill

The latest Minutes and Accounts of Betley Parish council are, as usual, both interesting and questionable. However, too few people show interest, and even fewer questions are asked. But then, given how individuals are treated who do ask questions then that might not be surprising.   When I became a Parish Councillor for Wrinehill, my first observations was that this was a council with few if any policies with which to work/operate, and spend public money.   Thus expenditure appeared whimsical and somewhat individualistic. It was difficult to separate the salary of the Clerk from any re-imbursement/expenditure claimed by the Clerk, who was, seemingly, paying invoices from his own pocket.   No account of hours worked were kept, and neither were the tasks undertaken.   Any attempts to regularise the situation were met with defensive negativity even hostility and a bad press in the Minutes for anyone asking the question or making the request. The issues of the Code...

  Last week I watched the Newcastle-under-Lyme Borough Council Mayor- making ceremony.   I also tuned in to the last one, never having witnessed one before. The only idea I had of the process was governed by some historic records which had described how the Mayor should be chosen from the best within the community (women were not included).    But these were earlier and possibly better times. By the 19 th Century the whole procedure appears to have fallen into disrepute.   It was only after a hard-won fight that Joseph Mayer of Thistleberry (whose father, Samuel, became Mayor in 1833) claimed that his father was part of a ‘new regime’.   (Unfortunately, the Minutes of meetings over which his father presided, did not seem to bear this out.) Joseph Mayer went on to produce a pamphlet in 1833   describing these mock ceremonies in unflattering and Swiftian terms, indicating that the closed system needed to change if it was to retain its credibility....