A pioneering agreement in Oxford may be able to offer hope to people on Wherstead Road.  Wherstead Road is plagued by sporadic bus services, which would be far more tolerable if they were properly spaced out.  Under typically stupid European Union rules this cannot be changed because there are a number of different operators on the route they cannot get together to redraw the timetable to space out their bus times, the authorities prefering that they bunched up their services to make them “competitive”.  Why Europe needs to get involved in bus services that don’t even cross a county border, let alone an international border, is typically left unexplained.

This has meant that there is an almost two hour gap between buses in the evening on the route out of the town centre, and this starts almost exactly when the first commuter train comes in from London.  Thanks Brussels. 

Oxford has moved to stop their version of this needless, mandated competitive inefficiency by getting an agreement between the bus operating companies.  Hopefully we won’t have some European under-secretary for buses deciding that this won’t work.

In fact the minister who could decide on this would be Chris Mole.  I know that he doesn’t keep an eye on local media any more, but a couple of his tax paid staff do (even this humble site), so perhaps they can pass on the message that if he blocks the Oxford deal it will play badly on the Wherstead Road.  We’ll make sure of it.

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.

Churchill insurance – which is a decent sized Ipswich employer – is going to be forcibly sold by RBS on the orders of the European Commission.  Hopefully no one in Ipswich will lose their job as a result of this.

The problem is not the breakup as such – it’s just that it is made by a foreign official with no democratic accountability.  The EU is having a greater effect on the lives of the people in Bridge. 

Here’s some of the ways in which EU rules have made life less pleasant in Bridge:

- Competition laws stop bus operators picking up the phone to talk to each other to get Wherstead Road covered by a regular service
- The Post Office in Austin Street had to be shut down in order after an EU mandated programme to liberalise delivery services made this Post Office marginal
- The stupid, stupid, stupid seperation of train and track with the consequent lack of accountability for track problems which does so much to make train journeys long and was done in order to comply with a daft EU directive to open up train services to – well it’s never quite clear
- Open tendering rules which mean that the London Olympics could only look at price and could not look into environmental effects when awarding the cement importing contract to Southern Cement
- The Eastern European influx which even the Conservatives are not intending to control which has driven up rents and driven down wages across a whole swathe of Bridge

Some people claim that membership of the EU has given Britain “incalculable benefits”, which could simply mean don’t bother to tot up the costs and benefits.  Some say that the only problem with Europe is that there’s a “democratic deficit” which is true as there’s no bloody demos and never will be.

This is not a rant to say that we should not learn from how some European countries do things, that would be stupid.  It’s just a reminder that ratifying the Constitution of Europe, now renamed the Lisbon Treaty, will mean more decisions taken by people who don’t understand us and whom we have no mecahnism to recall. 

Just the sort of thing an absentee Labour councillor accustomed to a safe seat would love.

Look East has an article on how Ipswich is going to be asked by the government to choose a street in which they will flatter or bully the residents into recycling more and undoubtedly foist on them more and more bins.

Don’t they see the inconvenience that the current policy is forcing on anyone without substantial gardens.  It’s no surprise that most councillors, of all parties, have spacious and well appointed gardens.  Three bins are not filling up a good proportion of their back garden.  If you live on a terrace in Rectory Road then it’s a different story.

It’s no surprise that the original policy originated in Brussels, another one size fits all European law, Directive 75/442/EEC.