Sir, I attended my first Didcot Town Council meeting on Monday, April 28. I was flabbergasted at the decision reached by the council regarding the acquisition of land at Hadden Hill.

Listening to the discussions it was impossible to see how Labour councillors could have supported such a decision. Labour councillor John Moody’s description of why he was convinced that people in the town supported the decision, had to be heard to be believed. It may best be described as tosh.

In dismissing the results of the consultation that had actually taken place, he made the case that townspeople knew the decision was Labour policy from reading their election leaflets and more than 2,000 people had voted Labour and this was an endorsement of the decision.

I did not agree with this superficial contention, nor do I think does Mr Moody. It was a case of saying something in defence of the indefensible. If I am wrong and he does believe what he said, why was our money wasted on the consultation process? Using my computer to refer to the results of the last Didcot Town Council elections in 2011, I saw no more than 2,585 people voted Labour. The figure for Conservative votes was 2,903, with 1,454 for the Liberal Democrats. For the Independents, who had only two candidates, it was 1,361 — a total of 5,718 people.

Following Mr Moody’s logic, his party’s idea was overwhelmingly rejected, so can we now expect him to call upon his Labour colleagues to reverse the decision? I was not impressed by his ideas on what consultation is, or by what my first close-up look at Didcot Town Council’s handling of our town’s business revealed.

Lilian Argrave

Cray Court

Didcot