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Not happy with nicking my chances for a retirement out of poverty when in government Labour are now nicking my ideas now they are in opposition.  Ed Miliband talked about getting anti-social tenants out of council houses.  That was my idea.

And Red Ed’s muse, Maurice Glassman, is calling for a unilateral embargo on European immigration.  Again they’ve been nicking my ideas.  An embargo on European immigration may be going a bit far, but bringing back border controls in the same way France has would be good for the country:

• It’s becoming clear that simply talking about non-EU immigration is simply scratching the surface of the problem and in an unintentional racist way at that
• Picking a fight with Europe is never a bad thing, particularly for the Labour Party
• The Labour Party was formed to look after the working class, not as a councillor job creation scheme for white collar public sector clock watchers with too much time on their hands.  It would be a good idea if they didn’t rely on fond memories of older members of the working class and started wooing the English working class rather than sneering at it.
• It’s probably something that the coalition would not be able to follow as the Lib Dems have such an advanced stage of Europhilia

Next time I will charge for my advice.

The following roads are going to have lead pipe replacement:

• Bradley Street
• Hartley Street
• Pauline Street
• Stoke Hall Road
• Phillip Road
• Martin Road
• Belstead Avenue
• Luther Road
• Shelley Road
• Rectory Road
• Seymour Road
• Ashley Road

It will be two weeks disruption per street.

Works will be October 2011-2012, across Ipswich, although Bridge is most concentrated area.  3,000 properties in total will be affected.

You should be hearing more closer to the time.

No apologies for the reprint:

There will be an evening of live music, BBQ, auction, raffle, stalls (cakes, books, local products) in aid of the East Africa crisis appeal on 16th September from 7pm at the Brewery Tap pub in Ipswich.

If you are able to assist in any way, please contact soph.wainwright@gmail.com.

If there are any other charity events near Ipswich then please send them to me.

Dame Bryony Rudkin is the sort of person that one would expect to be soft on rioters, but in private.  Corder Road is unlikely to be unprotected when the hoodies come round.  In public you wouldn’t expect her to be anything short of hostile to a riot apologist.

So let’s go back to May of this year when the initial, ultimately fatal, public link of mass street violence with the deficit denying community. 

The flamboyantly photographed Graham White of Bury St Edmunds said :

I do not condone the violence but it was damage to property and not to peoples’ livelihoods or personal circumstances. It will not cause intense personal suffering unlike the Con-Dem cuts.

(Even using Con-Dem seems to date it, and this was in Spring.  Still it took Labour almost a year to realise that it was childish.  Focus groups do have some benefits, they really should have listened to that.)

Well he wasn’t just some Dave Spart soundalike destined to derail any Labour attempt to sound sensible.  He was also a senior teacher at one of Suffolk’s worst performing high schools, Great Cornard, and the secretary of Suffolk’s branch of the National Union of Teachers.

Now the riots have happened.  And not because of Graham White.  Or for that matter the Ipswich Labour agent John Cook, if anything a more eager proponenent of political street violence against Lib Dem MPs  (but in John Cook’s case it is probably pathetic bluster rather than any real intent – after all Nick Clegg is less overweight so could easily beat him in any fight). 

And did they do any good?  Has the economic sense of the nation turned to a mass of deficit denying  mental jelly?

No.  It’s turned into real anger against the rioters and anyone who tries to apologise for their looting and mindless violence.  And in the long term the hard line anti-cuts rhetoric is probably doomed.

I warned that this is what would happen.  I just didn’t expect it to happen so fast.

Labour activists do like a gossip.  Particularly when they know that the other person is not a Labour activist, such is the trust and good humour within the Labour group in Ipswich.  I am, of course, always happy to oblige.

So some gossip about Bryony.  Apparantly she was deselected as County candidate for Chantry after one of her opponents packed the Chantry Labour selection meeting, with eight supporters.  As my source put it, that’s not saying much for the Dame that she lost to eight supporters.

So she then put in for Bridge, but there was a problem with that in that Bridge had already selected its candidate (I wish I remember who it was) and so the selection had to be overridden so that Bryony could get the seat.

Now can you see the problem here?  She had already been elected the town councillor for Bridge the year before.  So instead of representing a ward that she was so in love with and that she just wanted to roll her sleeves up (or words to that effect) in fact we were the second choice.  It’s really odd that she didn’t go for her home ward, a place where Labour regularly comes a distant third.

I suppose in Bridge that we should be thankful for the small crumbs that the Labour leadership throw from their table.

Kevin Algar makes the point that Tony Blair has come out with the clanger that he thinks that Britain should join the Euro just as soon as they deal with Greece (whether this is before or after they deal with Ireland and Portugal is not said, nor is it said whether we should join before or after they deal with Spain, or Italy, or Belgium).  Well it’s bonkers, but the Conservative Party has to deal with its own guilty men before dealing with Labour’s (admitedly far more current myopia).

So to a matter from last week when a number of Tory MPs voted against not only the party whip but also against a manifesto promise (a constitutional no-no for the Lords) and voted against letting the British people having a say on the ceding of further power to Brussels.  That Gordon Brown and the Liberal Democrats shamefully broke a manifesto promise to vote for the Lisbon treaty is not, by the way an excuse for Conservatives to vote against this manifesto promise.

I would have kept my response on Kevin’s blog, but this line in particular stood out:

He was joined by ex-Tory Chancellor Lord Geoffrey Howe and ex-Tory Cabinet Minister John Gummer, now Lord Deben.

Now this is quite important.  Is Ben Gummer with his father and the Labour Party on this issue or is he with his constituents and the Conservative Party?

Is he prepared to disown his father on this issue? I will give him a platform on this blog to do so.  I don’t want a “I will vote to reinstate the referendum lock” as that is the equivalent of saying that he will not rebel, which is not really a great promise.  He can always tell his father

So Ben, who’s right on this issue, your intelligent and cultured father or a knuckle dragging Neanderthal such as myself?  (I won’t mention the rest of the constituency party.  Oh dear, I just did).

Labour are big fans of joined up government, one of the reasons for taking out the locality budgets was to stop the money being spent on “prosperous” wards like Bridge and to put the money into Gipping all in the name of central control. 

So there is a perfectly foreseeable catastrophe which Labour councillors can only be held responsible.

Firstly there is a parking plan which will mean that half the parking spaces in the already congested areas around Rectory Road, Philip Road and even the top bit of Wherstead Road will in effect be halved.  This will have knock on effects in all the surrounding streets, including Pauline Street, Turin Street, Kenyon Street, Vaughan Street, Hartley Street, Ashley Street and Bradley Street. 

People will in effect have to walk three streets to get to their car. 

Now the effect of this is, as the sponsor of this anti-car scheme Phil Smart would be fully aware, to get people out of their cars and on to their feet.  It has certainly done that in places such as Bolton Lane where there are residents with parking permits who only use their cars once a week due to the nightmare of getting a parking space again.

There is a problem here, and that is that Bridge is not Bolton Lane.  It is in fact Bridge, as a councillor who lived in the ward would be able to tell you.

There is another problem (which is why I mentioned Pauline Street, Turin Street and the rest) and that is that many of the streets in Old Stoke are very narrow by the standards of Severn Road, the place on the other side of town where Phil Smart actually lives.

This means that these streets are already under lit by the standard brightness of the current street lighting.  They actually need to have the brightness, or frequency of street lamps,  increased to deal with the narrow streets in that particular area.  (Kevin Algar has a very good dissection as to why Ipswich Labour favour this service cut over a payroll cut)

So Labour’s plans to switch off street lamps will have a bigger effect here than they will in wider streets.  This will be compounded by the fact that we suddenly will have people who will have their cars three or four streets away.  So instead of driving to your street and walking a fairly short distance to your door you will have to walk three or four narrow, ill lit (or even unlit) streets. 

This is almost designed to help increase crime.  It is certainly foreseeable.

We now have two absentee Labour councillors who are both as portfolio holders in a position to stop this.  It is forgivable that they do not know the local circumstances, as they don’t live anywhere near here, but it is not forgivable that they continue to pander to their Unison friends in the full knowledge that they are putting some of their poorest constituents in physical danger. 

The question is whether the safety of their constituents ranks above their politcal careers.  They can stop the muggers alleys, but will they?

Between 12.30pm Saturday 18th and 3.15am Sunday 19th June on Cardiff Avenue, Ipswich offenders have entered a property via an insecure rear door, an Acer laptop computer and a torch were taken from within.

Were you in the area at the time, did you see anything suspicious? Do you know the name of the offender or offenders? If you have any information please contact Suffolk Police on 01473 613500 quoting reference IW/11/2781.

From yesterday, so it’s a day out of date

Today saw the official launch of Maritime Ipswich (20th & 21st August). More details on our website www.waterfrontaction.co.uk

This Ipswich Waterfront Maritime Festival offers a fantastic programme of activities is going to be around with Re-enactments – Wet-Side Activities – Food – Festival – Beer Festival and so much more. Check out the programme!

Or go straight to http://www.waterfrontaction.co.uk/MaritimeIpswich/default.html There are still a few stalls left for businesses wishing to promote themselves and their products.

If you want to rent a stall, send the enquiry to me I’ll send it on.

For connoisseurs of the demented fascist stalker missives, this particular one from Dennis “Botha” Bloater is a bit more scatological than usual:

I bet your good wife doesn’t know she married an [expletive deleted],you see,I spent 20yrs running my own pubs and,I could tell an [expletive deleted] when they walked through the doors,you don’t have to smell them,as they all small the same.So you insist on calling me bloater,I shall now call you [expletive deleted] if we have any more communication.By the way,I will be looking into HATE crimes with your description of how I look and,you know how the Police like them.

It may be a total coincidence but it was, like the first one that he sent me, sent between 7pm and 8pm.  It’s a bit early to start drinking, isn’t it?