After repeatedly changing the Council's committee system in recent months, Labour have again moved this week to marginalise opposition councillors. 

• Until May we had a Policy & Resources Committee with 29 members including one each from the 4 opposition parties. At that time the ten opposition councillors also had seats on all the service committees with the Leader of the Opposition being ex officio on every one.
  
• In June this changed to an Executive Committee with 16 Labour councillors and no opposition.
• By August two of the four opposition parties had been allowed back on while still being able to sit on the scrutiny committees.
• Now in September a further change is being proposed to remove the opposition's two most experienced councillors from these ten scrutiny committees. 

Our first comment is that the Executive Committee (Cabinet) system is fundamentally flawed and none of this tinkering has changed that. We are still ending up with a system whereby most councillors (Labour and opposition) are excluded from decision making committees. The Executive Committee will make all the decisions in about one hour per fortnight, while the scrutiny committees will spend hours and hours discussing issues and visiting projects but not making any decisions.

Secondly, there was no real consultation before the changes were introduced in the first place and the subsequent changes indicate it was not properly thought through and the Labour administration are now making policy on the hoof.

Thirdly, it has been widely accepted that there was something wrong with an electoral system which gave Labour 69 seats on the Council from 50% of the vote whereas the combined opposition (also with 50% of the vote) only had 10 seats. For that reason proportional representation is being introduced into Council elections in May 2007. However, far from accepting the spirit of this new PR system, Labour in Glasgow are going in exactly the opposite direction by seeking to reduce the opposition's involvement. We consider this to be a serious abuse of power. One of the signs of a strong democracy is how well minorities are treated. These changes indicate that democracy in Glasgow is being weakened in order to protect Labour's total control of the system.

The SNP's John Mason said, "Perhaps the main point to come out of all this is how feart Labour are of next year's Council elections. They are falling over themselves to try and protect their position. They seem to be deliberately weakening the scrutiny committees which are all chaired by Labour councillors and have huge Labour majorities."