Ben Gummer’s column for the Evening Star can now be found on his blog. The last four entries were:

Thank you – 21st May
Getting Started – 28th May
Never Give In – 4th June
Honouring the Hospital – 11th June

Ben Gummer writes a weekly column for the Evening Star every Friday. Go on the Evening Star website and you won’t find it. If you search the website you’ll find an article about the one joke Blinky Ben column. But no column.

And Ipswich Spy bemoan the lack of an online presence from Ben, ignoring his weekly offline column. Perhaps they don’t get the Star.

Hopefully the Star is sorting this out. If they aren’t they should. This column is probably more of a public service than the Evening Star’s Weird and Wacky column, although we could all nominate a couple of Labour councillors for that spot/

To state the bleeding obvious, the BBC is not a direct rival to me.  It also should not be a direct rival to the East Anglian Daily Press or the Ipswich Evening Star, but the growth of its licence funded Suffolk presence has made it a great rival.  We may have many problems with these papers, Paul Geater will never win a prize for seeing all sides to a political story for example.  But these are locally rooted and locally staffed media which are being attacked for market share by a broadcaster that can put you in prison if you don’t pay their subscriptions.  Even Pravda didn’t have that power.

So could the coming drawing in of the BBC’s horns be a good thing for the local media scene in Suffolk?

I was rather angry at the environment portfolio holder Louise Gooch’s comments that the Noise Action Group wanted to shut down Southern Cement.  We’ve always been quite clear that this is not what we wanted. I emailed her to let her know that I was angry.

And a miracle occurred.

A politician changed their mind.  The presentation put on by the Noise Action Group convinced her that we wanted to be good neighbours (a phrase we keep on using).  It does seem that the councillors really, really resent Southern Cement for putting them in the position that they are in.

Other news, the Evening Star have put out a piece on the internet about the Council executive meeting, here.

Well the meeting was cancelled, and now I’ve been told by both the Evening Star and one of the councillors that the meeting between the council and the Noise Action Group is back on.

There will also be a meeting between Southern Cement and councillors.  Of course what would be best for both sides would be to meet directly, Southern Cement and the Noise Action Group.

So Uniland / Southern Cement, if you want to meet us then you can reach us at james@bridgeward.org.uk or through your usual channels of communication.  Email us, even if you’re not ready yet, even if you want to explain us why you’re not ready yet.

We’re quite nice really, especially when we’ve had a night’s sleep.

I got a call this afternoon from the Evening Star about the Southern Cement fiasco.  They’ve got wind of the council officers’ proposed climbdown and wanted to know what the Noise Action Group thought.  They actually sounded angry, I suppose they got a promise out of Steve Rock who saw fit to cancel the meeting as soon as he thought that no one was looking.

It’s not the refusal of a couple of council officials to meet us that rankles, councillors from both parties are keeping us up to date and the Council Officials will have to meet with residents soon in some form. What rankles is the refusal of Uniland/Southern Cement’s Ipswich manager, Barry Neale, to even talk to us.

This seems more like commercial suicide than anything else.  Who would want to deal with a company that is constantly at risk of being shut down by a private court action, council enforcement or public protest?

What better way to calm down angry residents than meeting them?

We now know that Chris Mole channels £500 a month to the Ipswich Labour Party for a service which the council ould do for free, but there is a smaller but still odd anomalies.

If we go back to the money we pay to the Ipswich Labour Party:

http://mpsallowances.parliament.uk/mpslordsandoffices/hocallowances/allowances-by-mp/chris-mole/Chris_Mole_0708_IEP.pdf#page=[115]

…we see a line (you may have to go to page 115 manually, depending on your browser) :

Newspapers EADT/Evening Star Online editions       £195

Was the online access to the Evening Star used by any of the Labour staff in the building?  For example, Councillor John Cook the Labour Party agent (who us taxpayers don’t pay for, officially) is very, very fond of commenting on stories some political, some not.

If true it’s a tiny problem, but there really does not seem to be enough care for the seperation of the public and the party political from Mr Mole.

if you are interested then here are the published expenses for Chris Mole (here are the ones on his site).  I’m going through the expenses now and although Chris Mole has been claiming that he is “underspending” there are some very interesting claims in there.

I will be going through these over the next few days.  The Evening Star and the East Anglian Daily Times have done some work and focussed on the cost of his home and some of the expensive tastes (such as £70 headphones and £1000 TVs), but there seem to be a couple of very interesting stories hidden in this which don’t seem to have been touched.  More to follow…

The evening star forums have a set of posts about what I think could be the noise from Southern Cement.  How many more people are suffering and thinking it’s just them?

If you are suffering then please contact me on james@bridgeward.org.uk and I will put you in touch with campaigners who need to find out just what the extent of this problem is.