TAMESIDE COUNCIL: A PROPAGANDA FACTORY?
Tameside Conservatives have blasted Labour’s plans for ‘a year of propaganda’ on the rates.
In the lead up to next year’s local elections, the Labour council intend to increase the budget for Marketing & Communications by a whopping £160,000.
This will be in addition to the £49,000 earmarked for the Tameside Citizen newspaper, and £47,000 for the council’s own television channel, Tameside TV.
At Tuesday’s council budget meeting, Cllr. John Bell, the Tameside Conservative Leader, said, “We will not support ‘propaganda on the rates’. At best, the publicity coming out of Tameside Council has been brazen, and at worst – as we saw with the information about the EU Treaty on the website 18 months ago – illegal.
“The Tameside Citizen has become nothing more than political rag for the controlling group. As we have also seen in the past, it has been distributed at election time with photos of Labour councillors up for election, and carries no mention of opposition councillors.
“More importantly, it costs a fortune. Other local authorities, like Hammersmith & Fulham, make a profit on their publications. So should we.”
At the meeting the Conservatives proposed rejecting the £160,000 increase in the marketing budget, scrapping the budgets for the Citizen newspaper and the internal newsletter, The Wire, which is now produced electronically, as well scrapping Tameside TV and the State of the Area Address.
These proposals alone would have saved council taxpayers over £287,000.
Cllr. Bell said, “The Tameside Citizen should only be produced on a profitable basis, and if it can’t be then it should be scrapped.”
However, Labour, in their desperate scramble for publicity, rejected the proposals and within 48-hours, two four-page, wrap-around advertisements were distributed with Tameside’s two weekly local papers, at an estimated cost of £9,000.
