Each person was removed by three police officers, who seemed to be on standby somewhere nearby, as each time they arrived at the scene very quickly.

In every instance, what each arrestee actually did was shout across the Council chamber in response to decisions by the Council to implement huge cuts in funding to local services.

These cuts include depriving outlying areas in Cambridgeshire of bus services, regular visits by mobile libraries (a 50% cut in visits, down to once a month), along with drastic funding reductions to support services for both young people and the elderly.

Before each arrest, proceedings in the chamber below were suspended, then resumed a few minutes later.

The justification for the arrests was "to prevent a Breach of The Peace".

George Bush style policing - pre-emptive arrests, to prevent an offence before it happens.

How Orwellian!

All afternoon people loudly heckled from the Public Gallery in response to the speeches that were being made in the chamber (all of them apparently pre-prepared and read aloud from sheets of paper), by the Councillors.

Security guards were ever present at the back of the Public Gallery, making the overall atmosphere slightly oppressive as a result - not very democratic at all, for what was supposed to be a meeting the public were allowed to attend.

In fact, it became clear to everyone present in the gallery that if you wanted to do anything more than heckle, like actually speak your mind to the chamber, you would be required to leave afterwards, or be forcibly escorted out by the police.

This is what several people did. They said their piece then left voluntarily, one person even going as far as calling what was happening below in the chamber "a sham".

It seemed that our presence was something of an inconvenience to the Councillors, and some of them even had the nerve to comment as much, one Councillor was even heard to say "great" in response someone else saying "a second citizen of Cambridge has been ejected from the public gallery by the police - how does that make you feel?" shortly after the second arrest had been made.

Earlier (about 8:30am), in the day activists blocked the entrance road to Shire Hall with Bollards and plastic cordon tape and staged a noisy protest, preventing Councillors from entering the site for a while.

Later on, pickets took place at the front entrance of Shire Hall, including shredding of paper banners (see pictures), which another photographer seemed intent on stage managing!

Look East also did several live broadcasts throughout the day, including one at lunchtime (12:30pm), which picketers turned up in force for.

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As for my own personal impressions of proceedings in the Council Chamber, it was the first time I'd been in there, and I was not impressed.

The whole event seemed to be bogged down with PROCEDURE, with very little spontaneous debate (except from the Public Gallery), and I strongly suspect that all the Councillors had already made up their minds which way they were going to vote before they even set foot in the chamber that day, and just spent the afternoon going through the motions until they got to the vote later.

DUE PROCESS.

This Council in the year of 2011 has the dubious distinction of gutting our society by not having the moral courage to take a stand against the Conservative Party's ideologically driven cuts.

They are spineless, and should be seen as traitors to all those whom voted for them in good faith last year.

We are of course fed the lie that the cuts are to reduce the National Deficit, but let us pause for a moment and consider that we have had a National Deficit since Queen Elizabeth first created it after commissioning a fleet of wooden battleships to repel The Spanish Armada.

In other words, for almost 500 years we have managed to find ways of coping with having a National Deficit, only for the Tories in 2010/11 to suddenly tell us that to reduce said debts we have to throw out many babies with our bathing water, destroying countless futures along the way.


On inspecting the figures in the enormous volume of agenda notes that was available, it became clear to me that not only are there real terms cuts happening (lots of minus numbers in some of the tables), but also a little creative accounting, as some of the projected figures quite clearly showed a freeze in funding will happen over the next four years, with figures remaining the same across table columns - in effect, cuts by proxy.

In future I'm unlikely to waste any more of my precious mortal time attending other Council meetings at Shire Hall, as it's clear to me that they have more to do with process and procedure and than actual democracy, and each time someone from the real world (i.e. a voter), tries to intervene and start a real debate, they are forced to leave the room afterwards, and considered to be a nuisance by the Councillors.

This is NOT what democracy looks like.

We will have to create that ourselves, out here in the real world, away from the DUE PROCESS SMOKESCREEN.

Is it any wonder that so many people don't vote when the self important careerist buffoons at Shire Hall carry on like this?