Oxfordshire councillors wage war of words over motions

The Labour and Conservative groups on Cherwell District Council have been criticised for several motions proposed at a meeting last week.

Green and Liberal Democrat councillors claimed the motions were unnecessary and intended only as “fodder for press releases and campaign leaflets.”

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In response to the scathing attacks, Labour and Tory leaders called their opposition councillors “hypocritical” and “unserious”.

The criticised motions - two from Labour and one from the Tories - were made at a full council meeting on Monday (October 16).

One of the Labour motions called for the council to set up a one-off community forum to address the climate crisis.

The other called for council-owned houses to be retrofitted to meet net zero targets, and asked for the council to develop an action plan to do this.

Ian Middleton said Labour and the Tories were “playing at politics…and wasting time.” (Image: Ed Nix.)

But speaking after the meeting, Green councillor Ian Middleton said Labour had given an "unrealistic" timescale for its first motion and had not provided detail in its second motion about how it could be achieved and where funding would come from.

He continued his attacks when it came to the Tory motion, which listed seven ongoing projects to do with sports facilities and requested future briefing on the projects.

Mr Middleton said it was a “to-do list of projects the council was already involved in with a request for a briefing tagged on at the end to justify it as a motion.”

He said all three motions could have been dealt with internally and accused councillors of “playing at politics…and wasting time.”

POG leader David Hingley (Lib Dem) added that Labour and the Tories were seeking to “belittle debate” and claimed the parties were “two sides of the same old coin.”

Despite the criticism, all three motions were passed unanimously.

Tory leader Barry Wood said the attacks were hypocritical (Image: CDC)

Tory leader Barry Wood and Labour leader Sean Woodcock questioned why Lib Dem and Green councillors voted for the motions if they were opposed to them.

Mr Wood said: “For the Lib Dems to accuse us of ‘playing politics’ is hypocritical to say the least.

“If they didn’t support the work to fight climate change and improve sport and leisure facilities that these motions supported then why did they vote for them.”

Labour leader Sean Woodcock said the criticism of his party's motions was genuinely astonishing (Image: CDC)

Mr Woodcock added: "To hear action to tackle the cost-of-living and address climate change described as 'wasting time', I find genuinely astonishing from so-called 'Progressive Oxfordshire'…

“It is particularly incredible to read this statement when these were motions that the Liberal Democrats and Greens actually supported without any proposed amendments.

“One is tempted to conclude that they possibly just did not read the council papers before the meeting, so panicked when voting only to suddenly find something in them that they don't like afterwards.”