“Voters are not fools and they deserve honesty,” Nigel Farage wrote in the Daily Express last week as he hit out at Andy Burnham for his stance on Brexit. But that need for honesty seemingly does not apply to his own councillors, who are allowed to lie with impunity.
Russell Quirk, new deputy leader of Essex council and a familiar figure to GB News viewers as a political pundit, treated his social media followers to an inside view of the induction meeting held for newbie councillors in which they learn about the rigours of the job.
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He wrote: “I’m sat in my first Essex County Council meeting on Monday morning, listening to a councillor induction presentation. ‘Any questions?’ asks an officer. A hand goes up.
“‘Yes’ says a recently elected Labour member. ‘Do I get a pension as a councillor?’ His first question was about how much money he gets. Not procedure, or meeting dates or where the loos are… but how much cash he can grab. Same old Labour.”
Quirk illustrated this with an AI-generated image of a well-fed member in the council chamber asking “Where do I collect my pension cash?”.
A damning state of affairs indeed… were it true, which it isn’t. Because there are no recently elected Labour members of Essex council – just one member, Lee Scordis, and he wasn’t at the induction meeting having sat on the council for the last nine years.
“Hi Russell, considering I am the only Labour Councillor on the authority and I was not at the induction (as I have been here 9 years), this is a complete lie and a breach of standards,” he wrote on X. He added he was abroad at the time, “would not need to attend an opening ‘how-to’ meeting” and had reported Quirk to the council’s monitoring officer as a breach of its ethical code of conduct.
“Next time you have an issue, call me,” responded Quirk. “You don’t need to go telling tales and consuming officer time with tittle-tattle.”
He has since posted “to be clear, this was an affiliated Labour member and not Cllr Lee”, to which Scordis has replied: “Affiliated random Labour members do not get invited to private Councillor inductions.
“This man is a habitual liar and belongs nowhere near a leadership role. Still no retraction or apology.”
One might have thought Quirk would have dealt better with the fall-out of his fib. By day, he runs a public relations company.
Meanwhile, what was Reform’s number one priority after taking power at Essex Council, which is struggling to fund social care, has a major issue with potholes and currently boasts the worst special educational needs provision in the UK?
The first thing it did was remove the Ukrainian flag from outside County Hall in Chelmsford, with new leader Peter Harris saying it was a “proud moment”.
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