12 June (Part 1) - What do you get for forty two million?
Well
there can’t be much doubt that 2 Watling Street is all very smart and sparkling and new
and it must be a very much nicer place to work in than the old building which I
cannot imagine was smart or sparkling even when it was new. Drab is the word that
comes to mind.
Last night saw the first council meeting to be held in the new premises and
there were very many more people there than is the norm for a council meeting.
It wasn’t that Bexley people had taken a sudden interest in politics, the
numbers were swollen by former councillors and friends and relations of politicians.
A bar had been installed for those councillors who can’t go long without a drink
and almost needless to say it was provided by the Sandhu brothers, one of whom,
Avtar, is or maybe was until a day or two ago, Conservative mayor of Dartford.
A job that probably wasn’t put out to tender.
The barriers were very sensibly left open and I was advised that a table had been
provided for my use. On Day 1 I wasn’t going to argue but it had been carefully
placed where one could see very little of the proceedings. The backs of some
Conservatives, the UKIP and Labour contingent if one stood to speak and of the
top table, nothing at all. The appointed table is at the extreme left foreground in Photo 4.
The seating provided for the public appeared to be considerably less than it
was, five rows of fewer than 20 chairs in each behind me and a few more at the opposite
end of the room. There may well have been 180 people in the chamber but whatever
the true number might have been, it overwhelmed the air conditioning system.
I could see what appeared to be a wireless access point (wi-fi)
above the door in Photo 3 but no one I spoke to, including Tim MacFarlane, the News Shopper
reporter, had managed to get a connection and there was no mobile phone signal
at all inside the chamber, not on the three networks I checked anyway.
There was a camera with pan, tilt, zoom facilities in each corner, so placed
that most members of the public were excluded from view and whilst the
system would appear to be ingenious it
was not in practice wholly satisfactory.
The appropriate camera appeared to be activated by a microphone being switched
on which promptly put the speaker in frame. When the microphone was off the video
system reverted to a default shot which sometimes lasted only a fraction of a
second. The weakness is that councillors have never been good at switching on
microphones. Meeting chairmen have been known to
support councillors who do not
see the need to switch on their microphone.
When no one is speaking the result can be a silent shot. Having said that, the acoustics of
the new chamber were probably a little better than the old one and given that the audio visual
system is new and may require a little fine tuning it was a decent enough
beginning, a far cry from when councillor
Cheryl Bacon called the police
when Nicholas Dowling produced a broken Dictaphone from his pocket.
The availability of the very well indexed webcast archive is likely to change the nature of meeting
reports on Bonkers, on the other hand the statistics suggest that readers spend
four or five minutes reading the summary and watching the video archive will take an
hour or two.
Yesterday’s meeting was a game of two halves, the ceremonial and the business
and each will get the usual coverage here in due course.