"IMPOSSIBLE"

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IMPOSSIBLE!

We have had an e-mail from a reader suggesting we are wrong to use the word impossible in a post dated 9^th February 2014, and that the incident could have happened the way Group B describes.

The person gave no reason as to why he thinks we’re wrong, he made no attempt to put forward an argument to support his view. If he has an argument to support his theory we do hope he will share it with us, maybe we could debate the issue, we would welcome that, so here’s our view.

This post is our honest opinion, it does not intend to portray any part as fact, that remains the domain of others. Our opinion is given here on an event we believe to be in the Public Interest.

We don’t accept the misuse of the word impossible, and these are our reasons for not accepting it;

1.     If a group of people describe the conditions they observed at a specific point in time and place as being a bright and sunny day with high temperatures ideal for sunbathing on the beach and therefore thoroughly enjoyable, we would under normal circumstances accept that as being accurate and truthful.

However, if we then have a group of people who emphatically state they were there at the same place and same point in time as the first group but they observed the conditions to be a dark night with freezing temperatures and horrendous thunderstorms and the only way to seek relief was to get under cover where it was dry and warm, this throws doubt on both statements.

In our opinion it’s impossible for them both to be correct because they are describing events that cannot have happened at the same point in time and at the same place. There is absolutely no connection or similarity between the 2 accounts, they are effectively 2 separate events, therefore they are mutually exclusive to each other and it’s therefore impossible for them both to have happened at the same point in time and at the same place.

A definition of Mutually Exclusive as taken from ‘Wikipedia’ is,

“Two events are mutually exclusive if they cannot occur at the same time. An example is tossing a coin once, which can result in either heads or tails, but not both”.

In our opinion, because of their ‘Mutually Exclusive’ nature they are also ‘Collectively Exhaustive’  because there is only 2 possible outcomes, they’re either true or they’re false. They can’t each be a little bit right at the same time as both being a little wrong because there are no similarities or connection between them, they are effectively two different events. The same applies to tossing a coin once, you either get ‘heads’ or you get ‘tails’, it isn’t possible to get a little bit of each!

It is therefore impossible for them both to have happened at the same time and in the same place.

2.   In our honest opinion, for Group B statements, to attract any misguided credibility, they were entirely dependent on none of their peers [Parish Councillors] submitting statements that contradicted them.

This would probably have resulted in a member of the public making a complaint about the behaviour of a Councillor and 4 Councillors submitting statements that directly contradicted the circumstances given by the complainant.

With 4 councillors who are deemed to be upstanding and honest members of our community, entrusted to making decisions on behalf of the Parish and who are united in their appraisal with no other dissenting opinion from their peers, they could have discredited the complainant.

Assuming the councillors were aware of the absolute need for no dissenting statements, what could have made them think there would be no dissenting statements? Was something tentatively agreed between the whole of the Parish Council in private? There were certainly a number of ‘In Camera’ [Private] meetings at that time, Council minutes show that to be the case. In our view it must have been discussed between the whole council in private because it would need agreement between the whole council to make the tactic viable.

Unfortunately [or fortunately as the case may be] it didn’t quite turn out as planned, 5 of their peers disagreed with the Councillors with vastly differing accounts of the event, which must inevitably cast a very serious doubt on the validity of the conflicting statements. That is why it must be resolved by a thorough and independent investigation.

3.   If by some psychotic aberration we accept the 4 statements to be an accurate and honest account of the incident, as the e-mailer suggests, we are still left with a big problem.

That problem is, we are then left with 5 statements from Councillors, which because of their exclusivity from the other group of 4 Councillors must by definition be untruthful.

That leaves us with an even greater problem and brings the whole of the Parish Council into question because that would raise the spectre of a conspiracy and vendetta against a member of the public by the Parish Council as well as collusion between councillors who gave statements and Councillors who refused to give statements. That’s a whole different ball game.

Whichever way you look at this it shows our Parish Council to be corrupt and it is essential that an Independent Investigation is carried out to resolve the issue and put some faith and confidence back into the collective public mind.

4.    For any sensible group who wished to mislead such an investigation it would have been, in our opinion, far better to acknowledge the correct details of the incident and put a differing magnitude and intensity on those details to lessen the impact as a tactic of mitigation. Such an approach we believe could be put down to differences in individual recollections and that would introduce a degree of doubt. It would in our opinion have introduced doubt not only to the Standards Committee but could well have put a sprinkling of doubt in the minds of other witnesses.

In our opinion, by inventing a whole new set of events it may well sway the official body to be ‘inconclusive’ but we believe it would also entrench the positions of other witnesses and particularly the complainant.

In short , and in our opinion, it implies the complainant has been dishonest along with 5 other Parish Councillors, brings the Parish Council into disrepute and Local Government is seen to be corrupt, there is no place for this kind of behaviour at any level of Local Government. 

We posted recently on a Council vacancy that has remained unfilled for about 3 months because of a lack of interest from residents. If this is the best level of behaviour the Parish Council is able to muster up, it shows the Parish Council and Local Government in general in an extremely bad light and we are not surprised in any lack of interest shown by residents.

Doing nothing is simply not an option!

If there are any residents with similar experience of the council do please contact us by comment or email. If you wish we will post on your experience without your identity being released, or not post anything if you simply want to share your experience it’s entirely up to you. We would love to hear your story, your not alone, there are a number of us, let us compare notes and grow as a group.