This by-election has been caused by the continuing non-appearance at council events of the Liberal Councillor for the ward, Yusuf Sidat. Mr Sidat has not attended a single council meeting since June 2009 and this means that he has failed to fulfil the minimum conditions to remain a councillor and was only a few minutes away from being formally sacked when he resigned from the Council on 24 December.
Between June and December 2009, Mr Sidat has received £3000 of public money, performed no council duties whatsoever and spent the majority of the time in India but, in truth, since he was first elected in 2004, Mr Sidat has been notorious for his failure to carry out council duties – he attended very few meetings, stayed for only a few minutes when he did attend and was never available when electors from his ward when they sought his help. He spent much of the the last 5 and half years out of Blackburn – some of it in India, some of it in Leicester and some of it in Bradford.
The real scandal, however, is that all this was known to the bosses of the Tory-led coalition that has run Blackburn with Darwen Council for the last three years when they persuaded Mr Sidat to stand again in Queen’s Park Ward in 2007. They were so desperate to cling onto power that they made a deal with him that he only needed to attend one meeting every 6 months provided he was prepared to stand against the Labour candidate, Ashley Whalley. For a short period of time, Mr Sidat carried out the agreed arrangement but eventually even this proved too much for him resulting in his recent sacking.
So, when Councillor David Foster, Liberal leader, said in the Lancashire Telegraph on Monday, December 14 that ” we have high expectations of our councillors”, he wasn’t really being serious. What he and his Tory colleagues in the coalition really mean is that they will do anything to hold their rag-bag coalition together so that they can cling onto power. The Liberals pretend to have higher standards than other political parties but, as this example shows, they are more than prepared to distort the electoral process if it means that their sorry little group can have a sniff of power.
Well, this particular episode has run its course and we would like to hope that the voters of Queen’s Park will remember how they have been treated with contempt by the Liberals and their Tory friends when the votes are cast in the by-election.