Entries from January 2010 ↓

Due to my activity on the Souther Cement I’ve been asked to attend the port focus group.

I will put in a more full account later, but the important piece of news is that the council think that the reason why the noise has reduced is that Southern Cement have installed a silencer.  In the Noise Action Group we are cautiously optimistic but fully aware that last winter the noise was very low as well.

So thank you Southern Cement for the silencer, but we may still have words in April.

The bus trade press have a rather dry piece on the sell off, without mentioning the crucial part played by Chris Mole.  Apart from that it is the same old stuff, John Carnell saying that Ipswich Buses is too small and David Ellesmere saying that Ipsiwch Buses should never be sold off and anyway its too soon.  I’ve harped on about Ipswich Labour’s three-faced view on the sell off but there seems to be another problem in that the Tory-Liberal view is simply that “There Is No Alternative”, and David Ellesmere is playing to this by his confused response.

Surely a case can be made for a small bus service.  Then the case can be made for it to be locally owned.  The “people own it” will not work, and Labour obviously know this – hence their policy-by-committee.

If you grew up in a left wing (or Guardian reading) household during the 1970s and 1980s you could sense the desperation as your parents knew that there was, actually, no plausible alternative.  The magic of Blair and Brown, at least at first was that they gave an alternative, and if you were a Tory activist in that time you could sense the relief as people who voted for you while hating you suddenly could indulge themselves by voting Labour.  Now Brown has bankrupted the country he’s also bankrupted Labour self confidence.

For the moment there is no alternative.  ”The people of Ipswich” are not the Council, they just pay for it.  A case needs to be made by Labour for a small, independent bus service, and for a potentially wasteful public authority that will (if Phil Smart gets in) give bus routes to its mates and cut off routes to the other bits.

In the short term Labour could stop bus privatisation dead by a phone call to the local MP and minister in charge of selling off bus services, both offices residing in Chris Mole.  However it will go through in some form in a couple of years, probably under worse terms unless someone makes a convincing case that small is beautiful.

Nothing seems to go right for our poor under-secretary of state for roads, trains and drains.  When news of his announcement as minister of railways was given the good Lord showed what He thought by smiting Ipswich station with lightening.  Now he’s on the hook for the lack of rock salt.

It seems that there was a phenomenally poor prediction and calculation of the rock salt needed. While I could get out Hayek and talk about how this failure is bound to happen, why not look at something less controversial, how rubbish the Met Office proved to be?

They are continually erring on the warm side of any medium term predictions and while this is merely annoying when they predict a “barbecue summer”, people are dying because of their poor predictions this month.  Piers Corbyn, left of Labour activist and brother of ultra left wing MP Jeremy Corbyn, says that he has predicted the cold snap with far greater accuracy far in advance.

His contention is that the Met Office didn’t just believe in global warming, they really, really believed it and were prepared to predict on the basis of it.  And that’s why people are dying on the roads and we don’t know whether we’ll have to ration gas through the cold snap.

This is not to say that global warming is nonsense.  As the BBC and the government (or did I repeat myself?) have been telling us for the last week the weather is not the same as the climate.  A pity the Met Office seems to have forgotten.

(Just to cheer you all up, Piers Corbyn reckons that the cold snap will prove more than a snap and despite a couple of warm spells go well into February.)

Thank you to Andrew Coates for pointing out the Labour Party’s response.  They’re still saying “we’re against the sell off, but it’s not the right time”.  I wonder if there were heated discussions before that equivocation came up.  They must think they’ve got a chance of winning next year if they are saying “not yet” because they are going to have to do something very similar, although doubtless it will be packaged in a different way.

Let’s face it, if Labour councillors were really serious about stopping this sale they could do it with one phone call.  The junior transport minister is Chris Mole, who is in charge of encouraging councils to sell off buses.  Councils like Plymouth, Reading … and Ipswich.  Ipswich can not be won without the work of the Labour councillors. They could simply say “Look Chris, we are not going to do a lick of work for you in any safe Labour ward and instead concentrate on winning the marginal wards in Ipswich Council unless you veto this bus sell off.” He’d almost certainly lose if Labour were out canvassing in Bridge rather than Gipping, and he knows it.  And Labour could possibly win the council in May.

Instead Labour are not actually going to stop the sale, they’re going to use it to get the disgruntled and ambivalent to rally round the flag.  And it’s working well.  And then they will sell the buses off.

Due to my activity with the Noise Action Group, Ipswich Council has invited me and a few other people concerned with the noise to join a newly formed focus group “focus group” made up of residents, councilors and council officers.

While this group will have no power it can help the council form its responses to the various issues arising from the port.  We should try to make this work.  Please could you pass me and concerns you have about the noise from the port or about any other issue that concern the port, and I will pass these concerns on.

My email is james@bridgeward.org.uk

At last the Tories respond on the potential sale of the stake in Ipswich Buses to the Go-Ahead group.  Obviously it’s partisan, mercilessly mocking Labour on their three positions on bus privatisation (nationally for, locally both adamantly against and saying maybe but not yet).  That’s to be expected, after all with Chris Mole as the transport minister Labour can’t make much of the running on this unless Chris Mole were to veto or delay this measure.  And if he were to do that in his backyard then there would be wild fires in all these areas such as Plymouth where he’s helped to push through bus sell offs.  Expect a lot of Conservative canvassers to point out the role of the undersecretary of transport and MP for Ipswich in the bus sell off.

Labour’s best local issue has for some time been the buses, but their MP has been instrumental in the municipal sell offs.  If I were a local councillor I would be furious to see my best gun spiked.  And after the hospital.

A left of Labour candidate could clean up, although in Ipswich there’s no real action on the ground apart from a couple of blogs (Andrew Coates has written nothing since his “utter numpty” post, instead talking about the attitude of the Irish Greens on blasphemy laws, the socialist leanings of David Tenant.  No really, I didn’t make either of these two up.

Will the Greens move in with a full throated cry for municipal ownership of the buses, with public transport, anti-commercialism and local ownership it should be made for them.  If they do would they be able to get their message through to the large Estates on the outskirts where the issue could catch fire?  Even if they weren’t pushing all their troops into Norwich South at the General Election, this is probably not something they could do even if they wanted to.

I still think this is going to get the Labour vote out and could lose the Tories a knife edge seat (like Bridge) but it could have been so, so much bigger.  Oh Mr Mole, what have you done?

I’ve become quite attuned to very local blogs and I’ll always try to point out Ipswich based local blogs, and the Brommhill Pool blog has just come to my attention:

http://sallywainman.blogspot.com/

It’s about reopening Broomhill pool.

Well, it’s actually on an Irish transport forum:

http://garaiste.yuku.com/topic/10119/t/And-now-Ipswich-.html

What’s striking about all of these comments from outside Ipswich is the sense of inevitability of stand alone operators being subsumed and the advantages of taking advantage of the expertise and capital of a larger group.

It would still be a shame if we lost the local control that means that anyone in Ipswich can get a decent answer out of the head of Ipswich Buses within a couple of days.  If we could keep that then it would be the best of both worlds.

It’s easy to ignore what the Ipswich Labour group thinks as they do tend to have a knee-jerk reaction to anything these days.  It’s like a headless chicken, just because it runs around it does not mean that it’s thinking.  However they are the biggest party in Ipswich and could always get back in control of the council.

Alistair Ross has put the reaction on his blog and, he’s against it.  I’m not going to quote him verbatim, and instead link to his post.

His arguments are:

1.  It’s been owned by the “people of Ipswich” for more than 100 years

Well, it’s been owned by Ipswich Council, which is hardly the same thing. However public influence does not need to be done through 100% ownership.   If we’re getting rid of any influence that Ipswich council has over this then it will be a problem.

2.  Profit’s bad

No it’s not. Profit means that food can be provided far more effectively than it was in Poland or East Germany, for one example.  Profit means that services are provided more efficient, investments are made that couldn’t be done through the public sector and there is more incentive to change. To take the profit’s bad idea to its logical conclusion would be to nationalise all opticians and Ipswich Grammar school.  Andrew Coates may approve of that, but the Labour Party did not even agree with that in the 1983 election.

The question is whether profit will get in the way of providing a service more than a cash strapped council will.  There are arguments on both sides, but “profit is bad” is not one of them.

3.  Higher fares will mean higher concessionary bus fares

If there are higher fares.  However council subsidised fares will be more expensive at whatever price point.  It may be a price that we are prepared to pay, but there really should not be the one sided equations that are presented here.

4.  It’s the wrong time – as it’s too cheap

This is a decent argument, as it points to the fact that Labour will reach a very similar deal if they get elected in May, with one or two cosmetic adjustments.

However councils are having the cash taken away from them now, not when the economy recovers from Gordon Brown’s recession in five years’ time.  Councils of all stripes need the cash now and they need to keep the costs down in the next three or so years.

5.  Total opposition to privatisation

Leaving aside that it’s a hostage to fortune, the Labour government have instructed councils to sell assets and Ipswich Labour MP Chris Mole has said that Councils should decide  on bus company sales and joint ventures.  Is the Ipswich Labour Party declaring UDI from the Labour government and their own MP?