Loving the spin that the IWCA put on the Dovecote affair over at their place:

In response to the IWCA motion, Labour councillor and Executive Board member, Antonia Bance, proposed an amendment to an Executive Board decision pulling out an extra £20,000, seemingly from nowhere, for the Dovecote.[...]
Needless to say, when the IWCA motion to cut the ‘ethnic minority champions’ project came up, Cllr Bance said pointedly, ‘Well there’s no need for this motion now is there.’
This only helps to confirm suspicions that it is only when Labour’s key concerns—such as divisive multicultural schemes—come under threat that they are prepared to come up with funding for important social projects aimed at the whole community.

Coupla points in response:
The IWCA, despite being represented on the council for more than three years now, still haven’t understood the basics of how to get things done. Putting posturing motions trying to cut money from services funded through extra grants from central government that can’t be spent on other things is just silly. I’ve a history of standing up for social inclusion, and I found a way to get the money for the project. The fact that the Lib Dems are poor losers who can’t recognise when they’ve been outwitted and have called in the cash for further consideration means that it’ll take a bit longer to get there, but we’ll sort it out. I did enjoy, at that vote, one of the IWCA councillors coming running in when they realised that we were talking about BBL, and I enjoyed even more their faces when they realised they’d have to vote for a Labour motion.

As I recall (and am willing to be corrected if wrong), it was a Labour councillor (me) who led the shouting at south-east area committee and at executive board about the allocation of grants in the south-east of the city. As I recall, I wrote SEAC’s proposed reallocation of grants cutting cash from central Oxford arts organisations and allocating them to projects in BBL and the rest of the south-east, which the executive board rejected out-of-hand. (As it happens, this isn’t an isolated example: at one area committee last autumn, I was the only councillor present - we were about three down - who had read and realised the importance of the paper on playgrounds. There aren’t any proposals to close play areas in my bit of the city, but if I hadn’t read the paper and started shouting about closing playgrounds on Blackbird Leys and Greater Leys, then none of the IWCA councillors would have picked up on it.)

Oh, and I’m proud to stand up for supporting black, Pakistani and Bangladeshi people, some of the poorest in our city, to get involved in politics and community activism. That’s the “divisive multicultural scheme” they’re talking about.