Westminster witch-hunt

The article on the Westminster City Council case (The Lawyer, 23 September) rightly predicts a comprehensive overhaul of local government procedures.

However, is this not fundamentally the greatest of modern witch-hunts, the nightmare scenario, where a single individual has statutory authority to impose a penalty of millions of pounds on hapless councillors (and request payment in 14 days), with the media baying for blood in the background and, worse still, politicians seeking to make political capital out of the situation in the Commons? It is not to be wondered at that one of the councillors committed suicide.

My late professor of law, of blessed memory, was right when he said "equity and the law go hand in hand until statute steps in to separate them."



Leslie Wolfson

Glasgow.