On Friday 6th December, Wirral Council’s Leader and Chief Executive were invited onto Roger Phillips’ lunch time phone in show on BBC Radio Merseyside.  They spent an hour or so, answering calls from the Wirral public.  The message they were desperate to push was an insincere one:

1. It was all a long time ago
2. We’ve improved
3. Let’s grasp this opportunity to look to the future
4. Let’s draw a line and move on
5. “Mistakes” happen in large organisations…

I’ve selected a short, 29 second section for your listening, er… ‘pleasure…’

RT @Wirral_In_It Mistakes s s s s (Hear My #Shout + Photo) CLICK HERE FOR AUDIO

— Wirral In It 2gether (@Wirral_In_It) December 10, 2013

I don’t know about you, but if the most senior officer in the place is not prepared to accept that there was:

• deliberate abuse
• deliberate bullying
• deliberate targeting and removal of whistleblowers
• deliberate failure to appoint correctly independent investigators
• deliberate lies
• deliberate deceit
• deliberate cruelty
• deliberate shredding of documents
• deliberate minimisation and writing off of £millions in debt
• deliberate avoidance of blame
• deliberate dodging of accountability
• deliberate obfuscation
• deliberate plundering of £736,000 from bank accounts of learning disabled citizens
• deliberate protection of guilty senior officers
• deliberate interference with the contents of external reports
• deliberate obliteration of identifying names, which remains in place
• deliberate paying off of senior officers
• deliberate enabling of future abuse by giving these departing senior officers clean bills of health
• deliberate torrents of evasive and dishonest PR press releases and spin
• deliberate failure to get a grip of Freedom of Information requests
• deliberate tactic of blaming the public for “making a large number of FoI requests”
• …the fact that he’s sitting there talking to Roger Phillips; and that he took over as CEO of Wirral Council is DIRECTLY LINKED TO all of the above

…yet he is prepared to blithely gloss over this litany of failure, and present it as a case of  “not us guv; out of our control; all accidental innit?” then I personally believe we have no chance whatsoever of turning this place around.

We know there’s been no accountability.

We know that many of the crooked members and officers are still in place.

We know that they will carry on ploughing the same abusive furrow, unchecked, the way they have done for well over a decade, with no chance of any accountability.

But does HE know?  If he does, he’s not saying, so our job goes on…

Any remote chance of making councillors responsible for their crookedness was squandered by Bill Norman and AKA Associates, and continues to be to this day, courtesy of senior officers and councillors, propped up by the well remunerated “Improvement” Board.  However…

… we will continue to expose them – that’s relatively easy.

… we will continue to TRY to shame them.

But that’s  H A R D.