Our petition for a seventh scrutiny committee is almost closed. If you live, work or study within Manchester City Council’s boundaries, you can sign it here.
We’ve run online campaigns, we’ve been at Grub and market stalls, we’ve had stalwart volunteers collecting (when safe) outside supermarkets. We’ve done beer mats, interviews with journalists and lots of leafletting.
Probably the last leafletting has been by Hannah Jewell, in Burnage.
What next? After we take the physical signatures to the Town Hall, well, in the short-term, the core group and petition taskforce will have a much needed one week holiday from Climate Emergency Manchester.
But then we will be back in the saddle.
We will keep campaigning for a seventh scrutiny committee because, even though we haven’t got the 4000 signatures we needed to force a debate in full Council, we STILL believe it is the single best way of getting real scrutiny and real action, of breaking the cycle of promises getting made and then ignored when inconvenient. The endless cycle must end.
We will be speaking – at some point – at a Neighbourhoods and Environment Scrutiny Committee meeting (because we got well over the 1000 threshold, when you add the 800 or so signatures we collected on paper).
We will be lobbying political parties to see if they are willing to include a seventh scrutiny committee in their election manifestos.
We will be conducting our own scrutiny of the Council.
We will be building our skills and knowledge, protecting our morale and trying to support other groups (using the Active Citizenship Toolkit we are developing).
Above all, we will be working with all the wonderful people (Hannah and so many others) who have pitched in and worked so hard on this campaign. We will be working with new people who get involved. We will respect their skills and knowledge, and the limits of their time and knowledge. We will give them opportunities to do meaningful work, to learn new skills (if they want).