Debate on the Budget at today’s Council meeting was abruptly cut short by the administration, seemingly because the Deputy Leader wanted to have his lunch.

Having sat in near silence through the discussion of the proposals put forward by his own department (he briefly stood up to be needlessly rude to Cllr Edwina Hannaford) he moved that the vote be taken while at least fifteen councillors from all parties were still waiting to ask questions about the implications of the Cabinet’s proposals.

As a result, there are still a large number of unanswered questions about, for example, whether any libraries will be closed, what the Cabinet’s plans are for fortnightly rubbish collections, how they propose to fund repairs to the road network after the recent freeze and so on.

And they still keep repeating the same joke about openness and transparency…