It remains to be seen how much longer Liberal Democrat backbenchers are going to allow themselves to be humiliated by their own group leaders and Birmingham's Conservative city councillors.
The Lib Dem half of the city council's Progressive Partnership is entitled to feel it is in office, but not in power.
There are serious concerns about the single status pay and grading review and the impact of business transformation, which many feel will lead to major job losses.
Even on the smaller issues, the Lib Dems don't get their way. Would it really have hurt the Tories to have permitted one or two wheelie bin experiments in constituencies where local councillors want to set up a pilot project?
However the tipping point, when the Lib Dems who are not part of the coalition pay-roll finally rebel against Tory control-freakery and paranoia, may be the decision to block access to a website set up by council workers to discuss the impact of the pay and grading review.
Iron Angle understands that attempts from those at the top of the Liberal Democrat group to get the ban over-turned were rejected out of hand by Conservative cabinet members.
How can the Liberal Democrats continue to support such blatant censorship?
It's not liberal, and it's certainly not democratic.
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Shocking news about the imminent departure to London of the leader of Birmingham City Council.
No, not that Whitby fellow, the real council leader.
That's Whitby's chief of staff, James North, whom officials and councillors have come to fear and resent his dominance among the tight circle of advisers closest to Mike Whitby. You'll have to speak to the leader, they say sarcastically when referring to North.
His decision to go will leave a vacuum at the top of council's communications strategy.
When he arrived in Birmingham three years ago, North was seen as a bit of a buffoon, what with his 1980s braces, pink socks and an accent more fitting to a 1950s English public school. Big mistake.
North has fought a tireless and successful battle to promote the brand of Whitby in the local and national media. No council press release is issued without fulsome Whitby quotes, no newspaper editor is safe from a withering phone call demanding to know why a picture of Whitby has not been used, preferably on the front page.
These things, apparently, are important to Coun Whitby.
I suspect North's real impact will only become clear on the day after he clears his desk, when Coun Whitby realises he has no one to do his bidding with the local media.
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I don't know whether the appearance of the Business Transformation logo on a survey of users of Birmingham council day centres heralded an imaginative use of statistics, but an interpretation of the results given to the cabinet certainly challenged the laws of mathematics.
Under question one, do you agree with our vision to develop local day activities in partnership with local agencies (that is, do you want us to close your day centre?), 71 per cent apparently said yes. An impressive show of support.
Examination of the replies in detail, however, tell a very different story. Of the 352 people who took part in the survey, 203 gave no response at all to question one.
The huge vote of "support", therefore, was based on 71 per cent of the 47 per cent who actually expressed a view.
It's amazing what these Business Transformation chappies can do with statistics.
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The most mind-boggling aspect of Advantage West Midlands' 2006/07 budget was not the £30,000 the agency spent pouring champagne and lobster down the throats of "contacts" at the Mipim property fair in Cannes.
Far more questionable was the £140,673 cost of organising AWM's annual conference at the ICC – a nauseating back-slapping event when officials, councillors and MPs spend a day telling each other how well they are doing.
For that sort of money you could buy two terraced houses in North Staffordshire, an area AWM claims it is working hard to regenerate.