Leader of Pembrokeshire County Council, Maurice Hughes, has hit back after Tenby member, Clr. Michael Williams, launched a scathing attack on the authority last week.

"Clr. Williams is making quite a reputation for himself for shooting from the hip and hitting himself in the foot more often that not," claimed Clr Hughes on Monday.

"I, in common with almost everyone in the county council, am growing tired of listening to his statements which have no basis in truth. His philosophy seems to be that if you repeat a lie often enough, it becomes truth.

"If you listened to Clr. Williams - and fortunately I don't think most people do - you would think the authority's services are on the verge of meltdown. But that's what he wants people to believe because the truth doesn't serve his political ends."

Clr Williams had delivered a highly critical report on the performance of the leadership of the county council at a meeting of the Pembrokeshire County Committee of Plaid Cymru, The Party of Wales, in Haverfordwest, last week.

In his report, he said: "The Cabinet system that has been adopted by the ruling Independent group has meant the death of democracy in this county. Even some Independent members are now recognising that the way in which most councillors are excluded from taking any meaningful part in decision-making is harming the way that the council performs.

"We have the concentration of power in the hands of a small number of people who have given no statement of policy or principles to the people of this county who elected them. The people of Pembrokeshire need to understand that the council leaders recently approved a £130 million budget without a full meeting of the council!

"This goes against all democratic principles. America had a revolution on the issue of 'taxation without representation', but how many people in this county know that there is a high chance that their own councillor is excluded from virtually all decision-making and therefore effectively stopped from properly representing them? The people of Pembrokeshire are not being represented in the way that they would expect in a fair and balanced system of local government.

"PCC has also become a cheapskate council. The Independent group are presiding over the run down of many services with their penny-pinching and mean policies and hide behind setting a low council tax as some sort of virtue. When the state of Pembrokeshire's social services was recently lambasted by an auditor, there was no debate, no discussion, no change.

"The state of PCC needs to be exposed and analysed during the run up to the 2004 county council elections. Plaid Cymru must nail the lie that PCC is an 'Independent' authority. The Independents in this council act as an undemocratic and authoritarian political party. They meet as a political group and even now they are recruiting new candidates, as any political party would."

Clr. Williams's report was accepted and endorsed by the committee. It was agreed that restoring democracy and improving council services would be at the heart of Plaid Cymru the Party of Wales' manifesto for the local elections in 2004.

However, in his response this week, council leader, Clr. Maurice Hughes, pointed out that Pembrokeshire County Council's services had undergone more independent Best Value reviews than any other authority in Wales. As a result, the Audit Commission had identified Pembrokeshire as the 'top performing authority in Wales'.

"But you will never get councillors with affiliations to political parties to acknowledge such facts, simply because it is not in their interests to do so," he said.

"Clr. Williams, for instance, is one of two Plaid Cymru members on the 60-strong council. When the electors of Pembrokeshire elect a majority of Plaid Cymru councillors, Clr. Williams can run the county council. That is the way a democratic system works.

"Democracy means that the person who gets one more vote than his opponent is the winner and Clr. Williams should well know this.

"On the matter of the council's budget, Clr. Williams appears to have a poor memory," concluded Clr. Hughes. "The budget was discussed at great length by the council before it was approved and I remember Clr. Williams made several of his usual sneering interventions during the debate."