Vulture gets in a flap over how the subject of the new library is being dealt with by the council's own newspaper...

It seems there's nothing quite like getting your hands on power to change your perspective on things, to judge from the amusing case of Birmingham's ruling Conservative-Lib Dem coalition and the council's free newspaper.

In the bad old days under Labour they used to claim it was a propaganda sheet for their rivals - a misuse of council taxpayers' money which they would scrap if elected.

What they actually did at the end of last year was to change the title of the newspaper from The Voice to Forward. Otherwise it's difficult to see what has changed, and the propaganda continues unabated, albeit now to the benefit of different parties.

Take the lead story in the current issue, which brings the glad tidings of council leader Mike Whitby's brilliant idea of dividing up the central library between two sites on different sides of the city centre.

Under the headline "Key Areas Boosted by Library Plans" it proudly declares: "The new Library of Birmingham is set to be developed on two city centre sites - boosting the regeneration of key areas..."

The idea that further public investment was needed to regenerate the west side of the city centre around Centenary Square was comprehensively dismissed by consultants Gardiner & Theobald, who the Tories and Lib Dems themselves commissioned last year to review all possible options for the future of the central library.

They wrote: "...the soundings taken in producing this report have noted the view that the private sector is ready, willing and able to regenerate ' Westside' without the need for a public 'pump primer'. This factor will not only deter potential funders but it might be seen that the library serves as an impediment to private sector initiatives [my italics]."

The consultants also dismissed the concept of splitting the library's functions on different sites, concluding: "Very seldom do people only use archival material without using material from elsewhere in the library. Splitting the library means that there would no longer be a central library."

Naturally, not a word of this appears in the fulsome article in Forward which has been distributed free of charge (some might even say compulsorily) to 300,000 households across the city.

As was recently revealed in The Birmingham Post, the Theobald & Gardiner report was rigorously suppressed when it was delivered in February because it concluded that the best value-for-money option - and by far the cheapest for the council - was to continue with Labour's project for a new state- of- the- art library in Eastside.

Leaders of the Labour group were threatened with dire consequences if they breathed a word of this to council taxpayers, nearly £180,000 of whose money had been blown on the unwelcome report.