At today’s full council meeting at County Hall I proposed a motion that the Council sign up to the 10:10 climate campaign which would see the council making a 10% cut in carbon emissions in 2010. You can sign up here: www.1010uk.org

Labour and Conservative councillors with a couple of exceptions refused to sign up to this. This once again illustrates their failure to accept that this issue is important. The cost of this proposal would have been nothing over the medium term as the savings in energy and other costs would dwarf the investment required. Given that the council will have to deal with this issue at some point in the future, it is clear that they would rather wait until it becomes prohibitively expensive to deal with.

The meeting was also marred by personal attacks on councillors by Labour members who clearly recognised that their decision was flawed and felt the only way to defend this was to use the politics of the playground.

With the council projected to be spending for example £7million pounds to pay fines for landfill, and County Hall alone costing over £300,000 to heat and power each year, the additional costs to residents will continue to rise whilst the leadership at County Hall flounders around, unsure how to manage the council.

Another sad day in County Durham. How we hope to get the 2013 City of Culture with such Dickensian attitudes is beyond comprehension.