As seen from the cheap seats

Although accurate in content, press reports on the godawful council meeting held in Calamity Hall last week don’t really capture the fruitless and thoroughly dispiriting nature of proceedings. People notionally charged with safeguarding the city’s future, i.e. its education service, proved themselves unyielding in their prejudiced culling of facilities whilst objectors were incapable of voicing an alternative strategy.

The process of holding the administration to account is not exactly helped by a petulant opposition leadership that too often confuses political challenge with irritating pedantry.