Nobody's fooled by these bogus public consultations

I DON’T know about you, but I rather think that a public consultation ought to be about consulting the public.
It isn’t, of course, as the Hillcote parents and their severely disabled children have found to their cost.
The families fought hard to save the city’s respite centre, but I don’t suppose they were really any more surprised than I was when Wiltshire’s Clinical Commissioning Group – meeting conveniently miles away in Devizes – rubber-stamped its closure despite a petition signed by more than 5,000 supporters and pleas from Mencap, our MP and local councillors.
What would it have taken to change these people’s minds?
Answer: Nothing short of a riot. Their minds were made up before they staged a ‘public consultation’ meeting that served cruelly to raise vain hopes.
They were made up years ago, when the authorities stopped telling parents that this facility was available, so they could claim that hardly anyone used it.
The commissioners’ decision to delay the closure until next year, while specialist foster carers are supposedly recruited, merely postpones the inevitable.
When you ask people why they mistrust politicians and the quangos through which they rule our lives, and why so few bother to vote, they’ll often say: “Oh well, they’re all the same, aren’t they? Doesn’t matter what I think, they’ll do what they want.”
Er, yes ….
Which brings me to another development that ought to worry anyone who cares about social inclusion.
Wiltshire Council (“Not them again,” I hear you groan) are to hold a ‘consultation’ about cost-cutting options that include closing 24 youth centres and making 144 staff redundant.
Naturally, this was discussed and settled behind closed doors, after the public and press were excluded from a cabinet meeting.
How does it tally with the council’s promise to provide facilities for young bands including a recording studio at the new Five Rivers campus, to replace Grosvenor House when it’s flogged off for redevelopment?
That’s right, Grosvenor House, home of Bass Connection, the acclaimed music project that won its guiding light, Keith Gale, a lifetime achievement award from the Journal’s Local Hero judges in 2010.
Who’s going to be running that, then?
For ‘community campus’, read ‘cultural void’ with an economy-sized police station tacked on.
Lately I’ve been enjoying the attempts by councillor Richard Clewer to convince a sceptical public, via the ‘Comments’ facility on the Salisbury Journal website, that Wiltshire hasn’t cut any services.
In the current round of political pass-the-parcel, cllr Clewer is the council’s housing spokesman.
He must be thanking his lucky stars that when the music stopped this week, he was no longer holding the portfolio for youth.