A video has emerged showing a man being wrestled out of a south west council meeting for apparently asking local councillors a question.
BBC Cornwall shared a video of the man, who gave his name to the BBC as Charlie Farley, being man-handled out of Penzance Town Hall, where the town’s town council is based.
It is claimed that the man arrived at the meeting late and missed a warning by the Mayor that questions should not be asked unless they had been submitted in advance of the meeting.
“Mr Councillor, could you interrupt please! I only asked a question, was I allowed to speak?!” the man can be heard to say as security guards pull him out of his chair.
“Do you call this democracy? Do you really call this democracy? I only asked a bloody question.”
An amplified woman’s voice coming from off-camera can be heard at the end of the video: “If every individual here asked a question we’d never be out of here today.”
The Cornishman local newspaper reports that former mayor Councillor Dennis Axford proposed a motion of no confidence in the town’s Mayor, David Nebesnuick, to run the meeting
Local resident Lyndsey Williams commented: “What’s the point in this [meeting] if the public can’t ask questions at the time – surely that’s the point of a public meeting?”
Penzance Town Council's acting town clerk Paul Birch told the Independent: “The video doesn’t give the whole picture and I know that the mayor has made arrangements to apologise to the gentlemen in question.”
He added that the incident was regrettable and that it had ruined what should have been a positive meeting.
