Letter: I Did Not ‘Play the Man…’ But Glad That the Record Has Been Set Straight

Published on: 27 Aug, 2025
Updated on: 27 Aug, 2025

Simon Higgins speaking at the full council meeting.

From George Potter

Lib Dem borough councillor for Burpham

In response to: I Was Not Being Cynical, GBC Should Treat Members of the Public Fairly

Bernard Quoroll says: “On reflection, I think there is a more fundamental question. Does the GBC’s constitution, and the difficulty of navigating it in its present form, really amount to the kind of engagement with citizens that a council seeking renewal should want to achieve?”

If he had said this in his previous letter then I would have agreed with him that the answer is probably “yes”. However, instead he chose to intimate (despite, as his letter shows, clearly knowing better) that the GBC constitution lacks a mechanism by which a member of the public can both ask a question and respond to the reply which they are given in the council chamber, and asked for such a mechanism to be added to the constitution along with a, yes, cynical suggestion that he knew in advance what the answer would be.

Clearly Mr Quoroll is highly capable of looking at the constitution as it currently exists and diagnosing an actual issue (namely that public speaking procedures are difficult for members of the public to understand), so given that is his case I remain perplexed as to why, instead of honing in on that, in his last letter, and giving readers the benefit of his knowledge of how to navigate the mechanisms that already exist.

There is a genuine problem, nationwide, that government at all levels is hard to navigate and engage with as an ordinary citizen, and Mr Quoroll undoubtedly has many things of value to add to that debate. That is precisely why I wish he had actually focused on that debate in his last letter instead of making misleading statements about the GBC constitution which were more likely to leave readers with an incorrect understanding of what rights members of the public have than it was to inform them.

As for playing the man rather than the ball, I was taught that playing the man is when you choose to denigrate the person rather than engaging with their argument. I think the record shows that I did engage with Mr Quoroll’s argument in my letter, and it was his misleading characterisation of the GBC constitution that I described as cynical, not the man himself.

It is, of course, a convenient fig leaf to cry that you have been personally attacked in order to cover up the fact that what you said has received valid criticism, and that appears to be precisely what Mr Quorrol has done.

The argument he sets out in his most recent letter, with regards to GBC, is factually accurate, informative and insightful. If the argument in his previous letter had had those virtues then I wouldn’t have commented.

So, regardless of his indignation at being challenged, I am glad to see that Mr Quoroll has set the record straight on what the GBC constitution actually says.