LETTER: Leadership will stop at nothing

Party politics, whippings, threats and the use of punishment have no place in local government - yet Mr Dawe and Mrs Croft continue to use these tactics to push through their north Horsham plans. Residents must surely now ask themselves the question: ‘why?’

Cllr Mitchell has doggedly asked difficult and probing questions over this flawed plan and the process employed by Cllrs Dawe and Croft’s leadership. This was recently shown when Cllr Mitchell writing in your paper sought answers as to why Cambridge’s place name appears in leaflets produced by HDC (WSCT, 19.6.14, ‘Concerns over Cambridge plan’,). In addition, in last week’s paper (WSCT Horsham edition, 26.6.14, p3) he asked why the Cabinet has instructed Crickmay to market Park House when Crickmay are lobbying HDC on behalf of their client Liberty to build on 800 acres in the Strategic Gap - protected by the council’s policy for the past 30 years. It’s all beginning to look a bit cosy, isn’t it?

It seems each time Cllr Mitchell pushes for more information about Liberty’s plans to build in the Strategic Gap, that the leadership uses crude and blunt attempts to stop him in his tracks with punishments.

First it was the secret court last autumn run by Cllrs Dawe and Croft; then it was stripping him of chairman elect of council when Cllr Dawe wrote to him in September 2013 telling him he’d stop him being the chairman of our council and now finally stripping him of chairman of licensing.

Why is the political leadership so determined to push through these housing plans that they have stopped at nothing to remove all opposition in council. Their goal clearly is as Cllr Burgess explained recently in this paper to ensure that not one single house is built in the ‘Deep South’ and ensure their on-going popularity in their southern wards

Maureen Bown

Gorringes Brook, Horsham