Entries Tagged 'Ipswich Borough Council' ↓

So the neighbourhood forums went ahead on Wednesday and Thursday and no one seemed to notice. I could not get to the South West forum on Thursday as 5.30pm is not exactly work friendly.

Kevin Algar has a good report on the South West forum, which points to a certain futility to the whole experience. Sally Wainman also writes about the North East and North West area forums although without Kevin’s rather biting style. She still thinks that this is not a game to Labour, bless her. Sally had one very good idea – monitoring public attendance.

From various reports we seemed to have the following results

• Resident participation for all four forums put together was in single figures
• The forums were held for the councillors’ rather than the residents benefit – being in the council chamber which is closer for Phil Smart or Bryony Rudkin than a drafty church hall in the middle of Bridge or Chantry (not to mention councillor’s parking)
• The meetings were far too formal
• There was no notification to people who had attended before
• As Ipswich Spy has pointed out the forums seem to have one over-riding aim now – to replicate what had gone on before

The acid test of this change – supported by the Liberal Democrats and Ipswich Spy, and with Tory abstentions – was whether it would bring more people in. It brought in less. Fingers on one hand type numbers.

There had been no attempt to see if similar changes had been tried before in other councils, no attempt to debate other changes and suggest these to neighbourhood forums. It’s a complete shambles.

Neighbourhood forums are not important to councillors and council officials but they are the closest thing to direct democracy that we have in Ipswich. They are important because they are a chance, admittedly an imperfect chance, for the people to control the agenda.

This was not simply a failure of the Labour Party in Ipswich – that David Ellesmere is an incompetent manager is hardly news – it’s a failure of the whole political class in Ipswich.

£587,957 - the amount Suffolk taxpayers pay to unions every year – fully supported by Ipswich Labour

£47,200 - the amount Ipswich Labour wishes to charge scout groups, charities and residents’ associations – closing down many of them

Now I’ll let you guess which group pays affiliation fees to David Ellesmere’s Ipswich Labour Party.

With the current Labour structure in Ipswich there is very little chance for influencing decisions unless you are within whispering range of the leadership.  However you can, and should, protest.

There are two meetings coming up which could be quite important to this part of the town.  The first is on the 10th January which is the Council Executive at a 6PM start at Grafton House on Grafton Way.  They should be discussing their plans to put voluntary groups out of business.

There is also a meeting of the South West Area Committee – Labour’s attempt to neuter local involvement (as if they weren’t neutered enough).  This will be meeting at 12th January at the work unfriendly time 5.30 at Grafton House.  Apologies for the work unfriendly time but they are holding all four committee meetings in two evenings, to get the unpleasant business of local representation over with as soon as possible.

Ipswich Spy at times seems to exist in order to parrot the Labour Party line, and today’s been no exception.  In a typical act of playing the man rather than the ball they decided to attack me, while also somehow blaming me for Paul West not turning up.  Now I’m not chuffed with Paul West’s abscence (as he knows) but I can’t be blamed for it.  However the Labour Party person who briefed Ipswich Spy certainly thinks that I can be.

However I smelt a rat on this, because the Wherstead Road Residents Association would usually be upset by something like this.  It was unusual that any objections from them had not been noted.  So I asked them.  They had not even been asked.  This is the oldest continuously functioning residents’ association in Ipswich, they’ve been around for (just) longer than I’ve been alive.  Yet on a matter that really affects their influence they weren’t even given the courtesy of a local councillor telling them what was likely to happen.

Of course two of the local councillors are now too important to represent their ward, while the third is not too enamoured of Wherstead Road – so why should they bother?

Either this is a high handed act by councillors who see local residents as an irritating irrelevance or a deliberate act of gerrymandering.  Either way, it stinks.

You have to ask, who on earth allowed this tweet to go out from the Ipswich Labour twitter account “Delighted to hear Lib Dem, Andrew Cann wants to leave Europe. Would be a good start if he left Ipswich!”

Seriously?

Now it’s not well known that Labour councillors (and a BNP candidate) are constantly trying to get people like Ben Gummer and Paul West to try to censor blogs like this one and Kevin Algar’s.  Their excuse is because we are “rude” and dare to make fun of them (as Ben Gummer points out we can be just as rude about him).  To their credit the Lib Dems, unlike the two varieties of socialists,  have never asked for me to pipe down, despite the fact that Mark “Battersea” Dyson was apparantly highly annoyed by this particular blog by the end.

However the Ipswich Conservative Association is considerably more staid, probably boring.  They would barely say boo to a red rossetted goose.  They certainly would not call for the political cleansing of dissidents.

At one point neither would Labour, at least in public.  They may have a large dose of the intolerant, narrow-minded and nasty in private.  But letting those nutters on their twitter feed?  The Tories would never let an activist like that on their doorstep, let alone flying under their colours on the internet.  But to be fair, the Tories seem to have more choice.

(Thanks to Gavin Maclure for pointing this out)

There will be a polling district change to Bridge Ward.  While this seems quite technical it could be quite important.The Ipswich Borough polling district review says that it will “alter boundary in NA to take in a number of streets from NB”.  This rather technical little sentence means that the polling district for (essentially) Wherstead Road will be expanded.  It’s not clear which streets, but I suspect that these are the streets around Peppercorn Way.

This really means who’s going to vote in which polling station.  Currently Wherstead Road’s polling station is not actually in Wherstead Road but in a portakabin that is parked around Peppercorn Way.  This was due to the Live and Let Live pub being one of the many in Bridge to close down due to Labour’s smoking ban and so being turned into a housing development.

In the end it seems to mean that there will not be a search for a polling station that is within easy reach of someone at all ends of Wherstead Road, for example by talking to Associated British Ports, or even using either the Bowls pavillion or sports club (again out of the NA polling district.  If you are at the end next to the Orwell Yacht club then it is almost half an hour walk to the polling station.  And we all know how well the buses run on Wherstead Road since the EU decided to effectively outlaw co-operation between bus companies.

Now there may be some confusion in the Peppercorn Way end, but this will probably last only a year.  However the essential end of the half hearted search to find a polling station within an easy walk of the majority of the residents of Wherstead Road is very sad.   Richard Pope, when he stood for Bridge the year before I started, swears that Wherstead Road went back to the Tories before the more Tory areas of the Hayes and Chatsworth Crescent.  He also remembers Jim Powell being shocked when the Wherstead Road polling box was opened and indications showed that Richard was ahead (Jim Powell won quite easily overall that year).

Now the cynic in me would say that the Labour Party wouldn’t forget that.  They certainly wouldn’t forgive it.

Despite the promising headline I will keep this short.

On BBC News David Ellesmere said that David Cameron during his visit to Ipswich should not visit businessmen who create jobs but he’d have “have preferred it if he had met me and my chief executive”. 

This is stupid because David Ellesmere’s specialism is losing his job and not creating them for other people.  Ipswich needs jobs, but Ellesmere lashes out when job creators are recognised.

He hates job creators because people are less likely to vote Labour if they have jobs.  This is one of the reasons why the Council under his ledership has been so uniformly hostile to private sector job creators.  It is also why he will strain every sinew to drive away employers from Ipswich if he ever becomes our MP.   He may have hated being unnemployed, but he’d rather you were in out of work than voting Conservative.

Some things are more important than giving you a chance to become under minister of drains Mr Ellesmere.  It’s a shame you put your ego over Ipswich people’s well being.

I wasn’t there, again.  We did, for a change, have a couple of Bridge Ward councillors including Dame Bryony visiting from St Margaret’s.  We also had the irrepresible Kevin Algar.

He has a report of the event which shows the strength of the blogosphere at exposing the humbug of our rulers and betters:

There were some complaints about street lights going off at midnight during which time Former Suffolk County Council Leader, Bryony Rudkin mentioned about a street light being on during the day near her house in leafy Saint Margaret’s. (Though she didn’t mention that she lived in Saint Margaret’s) If the former leader of the Council doesn’t know what to do, who does? Except she does know what to do because someone by the name of St Margaret’s Ward Labour Party reported it here on Sunday. I wonder if the Saint Margaret’s Ward Labour party has a lot of members. Going by the amount of votes they got recently, I don’t reckon. I found the alias of Saint Margaret’s Ward Labour Party amusing, hence when I saw the street lights day burning in Elliott Street earlier, I had an idea here

Pure genius.

There has been an incessant campaign from a number of high profile Labour people, including Alasdair Ross, to silence this blog – as well as Kevin Algar’s Riverside View.  This has been through a constant stream of complaints about “personal insults”.  For example this juvenile whining:

I do not understand how the Ipswich Conservatives have not stopped him or Spencer from printing their insults.

This was after calling Liberal Democrats “rats” – something which is in my opinion lessindicative of an intolerant mindset but a very poor class of insult.  Surely he can do better than that.  How about “lower than vermin” as that traitor, Soviet agent and piece of excrement Aneurin Bevan once used against grassroots supporters of Her Majesty’s Opposition.  That’s a far more descritptive insult, if a bit revealing of the National Socialist mindset.

So what’s this from IpswichLabour’s twitter feed, maintained John Cook? 

I see Benedict’s Uncle Peter is in the news tonight. Time for him to stop having a go at unions and give a bit more attention to lobbyists?

“Benedict”.  Is that a go at Mr Gummer’s undoubted poshness?  Or the “Uncle Peter”?  Why point this out? 

Personally I have no problem with playing the person rather than the ball – Ben’s big* and ugly** enough to  look after himself.  However if you want to censor blogs and tweets, then you shouldn’t be indulging in the same behaviour.  Of course they want to censor Kevin and myself because we are Tories not because we play as roughly as they do.

But this isn’t fair, I hear.  Alasdair Ross, the putative chief inquisitor of the Ipsswich blogging scene, hasn’t been fingered with anything.  How about this?

We are all in this together! Cameron pays £137,000 for a new garden from @ben4ipswich ‘s Uncle – not sure many of us could afford that!

Rather sadly it seems that they got together when they saw the connection.  But it also show rank and arrant hypocrisy.  Or total stupidity.  I’m not calling Ross a hypocrite.

But this “do as we say, not as we do” attitude permeates Ipswich Labour.  Simply put they believe that they are so superior to the rest of us that the rules don’t seem to apply to them.

For example there is a police surgery.  Something that is so apolitical I advertised it.  However not Ipswich Labour.  They put out a leaflet in effect claiming that the Police were supporting a Labour surgery and Labour leaflet – a surgery to which the Conservative councillor does not seem to have been invited (something I’m trying to ascertain). 

The rules are that the police are above party politics.  Labour don’t believe that the rules apply to them.

Then we have the Co-Op, where the Ipswich Labour Party campaign one day to stop potential competition to the major Labour backer the East of Englan Co-Operative (even going to the extent of misrepresenting the proposed shop as a Tesco) and the next minute most of their councillors vote against competition against their financial backer – including two “Labour and Co-Operative” councillors.

Once again the rules apply to everyone, apart from Labour.

It is a very dangerous state of affairs when a big part of our political community believe that rules don’t apply to them because they are the secular saved and so can be trusted from their innate goodness.  They ain’t good, they’re deluded.

*Figuratively  **Literally

I promised I would not say anything about the Golden Keys as it didn’t affect Bridge Ward directly.  This is a local blog for local issues, and besides there seems to be a bit of a scandal brewing all on its own. 

However what if it does affect Bridge?  What if there was a supermarket chain that could knock the Co-Ops claim of being “good with food” out of the water.  Unlike Tesco they are probably more expensive than the Co-Op but they certainly have a good reputation for quality.  And they aren’t currently in Ipswich.  And they are called Waitrose.

What if further there were a Labour and Co-Operative councillor who was making noises about how bad Waitrose was.  What if she were not just a Bridge ward councillor but also a portfolio holder.  What if she were using her position as portfolio holder to make life worse for a direct competitor to her political sponsor?  

It’s that grey area of prejudicial interest where she’s been caught before.