Complaints against former Whitehaven Mayor dismissed

Councils need a standards or ethics code to encourage good and ethical conduct but sadly where such a code exists one potential problem is that it will be abused. There is always going to be a risk that unscrupulous politicians - whether members of a political party or not - will make malicious or unjustified complaints against their opponents to gain political advantage.

Copeland is, I regret to say, one of the places where there has been a culture of just such behaviour.

Councillors who I believe to have been completely innocent, in each part of the political spectrum - specifically, Conservative, Labour, and Independent - have been the target of complaints which were malicious, politically motivated, based on a complete misunderstanding, or all three.

One of the many reasons to regret the culture of trivial or malicious complaints is that they have made genuine complaints against real misconduct - and there have been some of these, though in my opinion they have been a small minority - less likely to be distinguished from the chaff and taken as seriously as they deserved.

I was pleased to read in the Whitehaven News (from which the inset panel below is reproduced) that six particularly unreasonable complaints against the previous Mayor of Whitehaven, Councillor Brian O'Kane, have been unanimously dismissed.


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