you would never make a politician ...
UPDATED AGAIN - 29/9/19Erm ... I have been an elected politician for 17.5 years and have held office on all three levels of local government that existed during that time and, I have an entirely clean record at both the district council (2003-2009) and Wiltshire Council (2009- intend to stand down in 2021) despite dozens of allegations about me and more than 500 pages of so-called written evidence by mad, muddled smear campaigners who are worse than you.
If you meant that I would never be an MP, I agree but that's because I have no plans to climb the greasy pole in a party and then campaign to be one. My record is certainly clean enough to qualify.
Just to spell this out for you, I have never been found in breach of the code at either West Wiltshire District Council (which closed when the County Council absorbed its functions and became a unitary council called Wiltshire Council) or at Wiltshire Council despite many attempts by spiteful smear campaigners to throw all sorts of nonsense at me.
At the town council, I was found in breach once for not being respectful to a former councillor by saying publicly a perfectly truthful description of how he ruined the project to refurbish The Laverton when he was appointed to lead the processs of finding and obtaining grant money and then failed to obtain any money at all and then he actually blamed the project. I have signed statements by
THREE (at the time recent) former mayors which confirm that they attended the relevant meetings and saw what happened and which confirm the truth of the matter. I have another signed statement from an expert in grant funding who led the later advice for and a string of wholly successful grant applications for the re-started project (several years later) which confirms that my original advice was correct (ie. focus on heritage) and that the person who had failed to obtain grants had gone about it all in an incorrect way not least because the project I recommended would have qualified for substantial Heritage Lottery funding if it had been applied for in the way I had explained in the adopted 2006 business plan that I wrote. That business plan included a reference to a letter from the Heritage Lottery folk sent to the council in response to
a preliminary application made by me confirming the criteria to be followed by the project and
welcoming a full application.
What Ian Taylor did instead was to dismiss the business plan and say that the Heritage Lottery Fund was the wrong way to go and he proceeded to take a year to apply to the Big Lottery Fund as if the project was a new venue or public facility rather than improvements to an existing community project with many heritage merits. The Big Lottery refused his application and pointed out that the application was wrongly filled in in several ways and anyway it could not qualify for any Big Lottery grant which should be aimed at new facilities rather than old existing ones or maintenance to existing facilities.
Instead of apologising for his horrendously bad advice and wasted time (and for trashing my business plan), he proceeded to blame the project and say that he had applied to the Heritage Lottery Fund and it had been refused, which was a blatant lie. All he did to try to cover his tracks was to hurriedly send in a second preliminary application by fax (I had already properly done one, as mentioned in the 2006 adopted business plan) which described the project in a way that did not focus enough or properly on the heritage merits and also mentioned the need for maintenance expenses (which did not qualify). He also bizarrely sent a copy of the 2006 business plan which was never intended to be a document to be used for any specific grant application as it included all sorts of points that would not qualify for grants, so obviously the faxed reply to him from the Heritage Lottery Fund was a clear rejection. What a bone head! In effect, Ian Taylor lied repeatedly and stitched the result up and was wholly negligent in failing to apply for the correct grant with a full application and in a correct or reasonably professional way and then again said that the Heritage Lottery Fund was not the correct grant to apply for for reasons based on his own errors and fraudulent manipulations. In separate correspondence between me and various people involved in the project, I made it clear that
Ian Taylor was a fraud when
he put himself forward as suitable for handling substantial grant applications for a fairly complex major community project which required proper expertise not a pretentious know-all who actually knew nothing of any use about refurbishing heritage buildings and how to correctly apply for heritage-related grants. He had been recommended at the time in 2006 by the then Mayor, Pam Cox-Maidment who promptly did a disappearing act from the council at the May 2007 elections. I have never forgiven her for getting Ian Taylor involved in the project and allowing him to trash all the hard work done by me and others. It took years to overcome the damage he caused and to restart the project with a substantially new team under a new and competent chairman, Stephen Andrews, and with a highly competent project adviser whom I had recommended to the working group.
The reality of the matter is that by the time the investigation resulted in a report which dismissed allegations of bullying but found a breach for disrespect, the whole statutory standards system had been dissolved in Summer 2012 by the Localism Act. The Act closed down the judicial appeal system which meant that I was investigated under an old system and then attended a hearing under a new system which had no proper appeal available so that the hearing was just a Kangaroo Court of clowns who failed to understand the details or who just wanted to put a minor mark on my record whilst dismissing all really serious allegations made.
The stark truth is that I was entitled to say all that I said and there are plenty of case decisions that show that other councillors would have been cleared in the same circumstances mainly because a proper appeal system to a proper court was available before 2012. Now, it's just a Kangaroo Court of councillors who mostly want to get a black mark on their political opponents.
I have officially put my two fingers up to the standards system as corrupt and I have made it clear that the ex-councillor who made the allegation against me was lying, not least because I have hard written proof that what he claimed in his allegations was untrue and what I said about him ruining the project (he even got the Laverton Hall closed to the public and the refurb project suspended) was perfectly true. What I said was not disrespectful. It was plainly true and relevant.
I shall never forget the front page article in the Western Daily Press once in 2006 which had a photo of me and falsely said that I had been given a police caution. This was a totally untrue story given by Bill Braid as part of his very long smear campaign against me involving three separate bundles of allegations. In reality, I was cleared of every single allegation he made and I was never given a police caution (which means that a crime has been admitted in writing after being arrested and charged and is on the police record as a shortcut to avoid court for a first offender or similar). Indeed, I have never been arrested and have a completely clean police record.
So, you might understand that when some people make yet more allegations that lead to an investigation, I tend to publish what is happening .... especially as most complainants tend to spin endlessly to the folks that they know with false versions of the truth.
N.B. I am commenting here in my capacity as a local resident and a former town councillor (I resigned over a year ago) who was there at the relevant times and knows what happened.Any reference here to my other councillor roles (whether current or past) is simply a point of information rather than the role I am undertaking here.This subject in this post is simply about a town council project and former town councillors and is in response to other posts about the overall discussion about complaints that relate only to the town council.I.E. The town council code of conduct does not apply to me now, as I left that council over a year ago. No other code of conduct applies as I am not acting in any other relevant role here.
