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I’m not sure why there are such frequent interruptions with the blog, but please bear with us on this.

I don’t think there’s anything sinister here.

The first time I broke with my left wing family tradition and voted Tory was 1992.  That was the first year I joined the Tories (it would take me a few years before I would become active).  I thought the floor would open up beneath me.

I knew for years I was too economically literate to be as left wing as I tried to convince myself I was, but the party leader who convinced me that this was the case was Neil Kinnock.  There’s no way that this incompetent manque preacher could be allowed to run the country, and I had to face up to the fact – like millions of others – that I would have to vote for people I despised to save the country from this idiot. 

However the man who saved the country - and the Labour Party – from Neil Kinnock was John Major.   And John Major’s coming to Ipswich this Saturday, 6th March.  Details are below:

Venue: Corn Exchange

Date: 6 March

Time: 19:30 for 20:00

Speaker: Sir John Major KG, CH.

Tickets [GULP] : £60 (£50 for party members, £40 for Conservative Future members)

Contact: Kathy (01473-688516, kathy@keme.co.uk).

I was at the meeting yesterday with Alan Pilbeam, the managing director of First Eastern Counties, pleading the case for some sort of service to replace the Route 66.  We didn’t expect much, we didn’t get much.  Hopefully someone from First Eastern Counties will be talking to the Wherstead Road residents soon.  It would also be nice if we got Suffolk County Council to be involved, but alas I’m not the County Councillor.  Anyway there were a couple of interesting facts to come out of this:

1.  The Route 66 on Wherstead Road was axed almost as much for punctuality as it was on the grounds of cost.  This was not something that was very clear at the time.

2.  The Managing Director of First had this to say on Ipswich Buses being privatised – “First Group are a professional operation” and about Wherstead Road, “their involvement has got a good chance of sorting out this problem.”  No doubt we won’t be able to get the message round Wherstead Road, but simply put a partnership with Go Ahead could actually get them a half decent bus service.

3.  There were no councillors there.  Bryony Rudkin is understandable, after all she’s recovering from jet lag, and she’d have a problem finding Austin Street.  Phil Smart is less obvious, he doesn’t live close to the Bridge Ward Social club but he is a transport geek (I’m sure he wouldn’t mind me saying that).  As for Jim Powell, I was walking on the other side of Austin Street as I was going in to the Bridge Ward Social Club as he was going towards Vernon Street, we even waved at one another.

Both Ben Gummer and Ipswich Spy have it wrong, the problem with Gordon Brown’s visit was not the fact that it was publicly funded (well not entirely the problem), but the fact that it blended the political campaigning in a marginal seat (and marginal ward) together with an official visit.  So the speed limits being broken and the publicly funded outriders made sense when visiting the airmen but not when going campaigning and going to BBC Suffolk.

It was the blending of the two together, or at least blending them together so blatantly, which was so wrong.  But that’s been endemic at least since Chris Mole became an MP.

http://philsmartsucks.com/

It’s not about our councillor – it’s about an American second hand car dealer.

The Ipswich2006.com domain has been hijacked.  This was a great site with a lot of old photographs and memories, particularly around Old Stoke.  Now if you go to the domain it’s been hijacked by some comparison site:

http://www.ipswich2006.com/

There’s still a discussion site here:

http://www.mrsite.co.uk/uforum/default.aspx?siteid=ipswich2006com&domain=ipswich2006.com

The ownership details are here (I have no idea if they are current or historic) :

http://whois.domaintools.com/ipswich2006.com

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.

Merry Christmas to all my readers.  If you object to the term Christmas or to such an overtly Christian celebration, a doubly Merry Christmas to you as well.

We’ll be making more trouble next year.

It’s not just Belstead Avenue that isn’t gritted, but also Turin Street, Vaughan Street, etc.  If anyone is getting fed up of the impromptu ice rinks, there’s a link to an on line form here:

https://www.ipswich.gov.uk/site/scripts/xforms_form.php?formID=152

As Belstead Avenue is used as a through road by drivers who dislike the incline on Luther Road this is not acceptable. I’ve seen two near accidents in the last few days.