Entries from November 2009 ↓

Well at last I’ve moved from Rectory Road to Belstead Avenue, I’m still in the ward though.  I’ve made a lot of friends in Rectory Road and I will miss them (in fact as I was moving out I seemed to see most of them) but I’ve already made a few friends in Belstead Avenue and as I now own a place it somehow feels a bit more permanent and that I’ve got a bit more of a stake in the place.

No doubt with the madcap parking schemes being designed by the absentee Labour councillors we will soon have plenty of Rectory Road residents coming to Belstead Avenue as there will only enough parking places for half of Rectory Road when the double yellow lines come in.

I’m just digesting the port noise FAQs that have been put up on the Ipswich Council website.  They’re not easy to find, so here’s a direct link (they are in PDF format, so you’ll have to have Adobe Acrobat).

I’m digesting them now, but here’s something that caught my eye:

The following trials have been carried out:

Now the obvious question is why isn’t Southern Cement letting people know?  If it did that it wouldn’t be so unpopular.  And surely ABP Ipswich, who are going to suffer from this unpopularity and distrust for years to come, could be telling people.

Letters have been dropping through doors in Bridge recently asking people who have expressed interest in the port noise.  The council wants to  set up a port liaison group with ABP, local residents and councillors.  However this coverage have been somewhat inevitably patchy, so if you think you would be good for the port liaison group then contact me at james@bridgeward.org.uk and I will try to pass your details on.

Just as I was losing hope that any of the big three parties had any honest men left in them.  Douglas Carswell, the Harwich MP who’s constituency is a near neighbour has called for a referendum:

I want you to know that I have begun a campaign for a referendum on the EU. All three parties promised us a referendum. Yet somehow it hasn’t happened. I think that’s wrong.

And yet they wonder why there’s no trust in politics.

North Ipswich and Mid Suffolk Tories have messed up in their refusal to name a local candidate.  One of the points that is often made about the Conservative Party is that it is more democratic in its final selection than the other parties.  This is true, but its preliminary rounds are almost (if not quite) as murky as Labour’s.  And before people say that the Tories are less corrupt than Labour, I would say the Tories should not give people the chance.

I am not much of a fan of internal party machinations, these things bore me to tears, but I have seen more than my fair share of carve ups when local candidates are ruthlessly carved out at the “paper sift” and “selection committee” levels so that a favourite son can emerge either a national party darling or, as I saw in one selection in London, a wealthy young man with only a sporadic connection to the constituency.

We expect this of Labour, distant elitism is their new clause four along with an oh-so-European dash of “favours”, but the Tories must do better because in the end thay are better.

It is a particular shame to see Sophie Stanbrook and Stephen Wells looked over.  I don’t always see eye to eye with either of them but they are talented local campaigners who would have really shaken things up.

Just a reminder that Ben Gummer will be addressing the Maidenhall Residents’ Association this Thursday 12th November at the Bowls Pavillion off Halifax Road (opposite the Bourne Vale Social Club).

The Lib Dems are a strang bunch, but this is probably odder than normal.  A Lib Dem councillor in Hampshire has seen aliens, in the local shopping centre (thanks to Paul Staines for that little gem.  Believing in aliens in your back garden is fairly odd, you’d think.

Twenty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall you’d also think that it was odd to believe that the Soviet Union was better run than Britain, but as recently released Soviet archives now show a whole swathe of senior Labour Party officials did, despite what they said at the time.  To get on in the Labour Party in the late 1970s and especially after the SDP left in the early 1980s it helped to be either pro-Soviet or ambivalent about the crushing weight on the human spirit that was expansionist communism.

So which political figures in Bridge Ward did well in the loony left early 1980s.  Why step forward Councillors Jim Powell and Phil Smart who first became councillors in 1982 and 1983 respectively, the time when the Labour Party was clinically insane (and it turns out a large chunk of its leadership, including the genial liar Michael Foot, were treating with the enemy). 

It would be interesting to know who they thought was worse, Thatcher or Brezhnev.

If you are a commuter who lives in Bridge ward (like me) then you may be interested in this facebook group.  If you are a commuter who does not live in Bridge, could you please stop parking in Rectory Road?

http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=166832928595&ref=nf

There do seem to be a quite a few people who don’t live in Ipswich who want to belong to this group, which suggests that some people have too much time on their hands.  But then there are a couple of councillors who don’t live in Bridge that suggests that they don’t think their neighbours appreciate them.

The Bell Inn had the most Labour posters (3) of any building in Bridge Ward at the County Council elections.  That’s a sad fact that I suspect a lot of people don’t know.  A sadder fact is that we had as many Tory posters up.  Two of the ward’s Labour councillors have larger houses than I do, and I’m sure they’ve put up loads of posters but as they don’t live in the ward they can’t enter this rather nerdy competition.

I wondered why this soon to be derelict pub would do that.  I still don’t know.

However this ia a more interesting fact.  The Bell Inn will be gutted and is applying to become a Sports Bar.

Bridge has Labour councillor Phil Smart on the planning committee.  It will be interesting to see if he feels that he can vote on whether one of Labour’s biggest backers in Bridge should be able to gut the oldest pub in Ipswich to provide some godawful copy of the Drum & Monkey.

Southern Cement were good for a while with very few complaints, and in the last two unloading they’ve created a racket.  And they were less than a week apart.

Apparently they’ve been chided for their use of contract labour which changes operators regularly.  Looks like they’ve chosen badly this time.  If the operator could speak English at all this time.  They don’t tend to be local, these casually employed operators.