Last nights Southwark Council annual constitutional assembly was full of contrasts. We had the wonderful example of public life described of the sadly deceased mayor Cllr Tayo Situ and the new mayor Cllr Lorraine Lauder.

But the meeting then went onto Labour councillors deciding to vote for money for themselves via eight more Special Responsibility Allowances. The recommendation from London Councils is that no more than half of councillors should be paid SRA’s. Tonight Southwark Labour party decided to ignore this and created another eight SRA’s – deputy cabinet members. Presumably this is to prop up their cabinet councillors.

So instead of 30 SRA’s out of 63 councillors we have 38 of which 27 are Labour councillors.

So the run rate of councillor costs has needlessly risen. This is a very weird Labour view of austerity.