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Sneak preview of Labour’s media attack

An information-packed upbeat election broadcast on behalf of the Labour Party. We, the Labour Party, have worked tirelessly to look after Britain, her economy and her people. We call upon the British to keep their faith in our dream and grant us another parliamentary term so, together, we can realise that dream. Let us move forward together. Let us make this dream a reality, together. Vote Labour in 2010.

[YouTube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0O2IlzmfaF0&fmt=]

Not directed by Derek “Dolly” Draper.

Hat Tip – Don’t Vote Labour

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David and Samantha express thanks and sorrow

Iain Dale has a copy of the message of thanks that the Camerons are sending to party activists, sympathisers, and supporters and friends who expressed their sympathy over the tragic death of their son Ivan.

It’s a choker (naturally)

This too from Tim Montgomerie’s Twitter feed

Ivan Cameron’s funeral will be on Tuesday 3rd March. Media asked not to attend but will be supplied with one photograph

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South Marine Park

In respect of Thursday’s official re-opening of the South Marine Park in South Shields it is interesting to note the sort of celebrations which have been seen there in the past.

It would have been impossible yesterday to match the sort of procession which in 1890 marked the opening of the park.

It included the band of the Wellesley naval training ship, the South Shields Pilots Association, Volunteer Life Brigade, the Knights of Labour, the Ancient Order of Druids, the Ancient and United Orders of Free Gardeners, the Oddfellows Friendly Society, Royal Antediluvian Order of Buffaloes and Green’s Sailor Boys Home.

But that paled against the firework display in 1932 to mark the visit of the battleship HMS Malaya to the Tyne. The warship had been built at Elswick on the Tyne and an event was laid on at the park for the crew, including outdoor dancing to the ship’s band.

A crowd of 75,000 turned up and, according to reports “packed the park to suffocation” as police struggled to keep order and lawns and flower beds were destroyed by trampling.

The next big event was for King George V’s Silver Jubilee in 1935, when lavish costume pageants were held in the park over a week to depict 10 stages in the history of South Shields, and the town’s Unemployed Drama group staged The Merchant of Venice.

Illuminations over 17 days in 1935 also drew more than 75,000 paying customers.

From the Newcastle Journal

Can you imagine 75,000 people in the park, enough to frighten the ducks eh!

What sort of event could we dream up or arrange these days that would attract so many people – free concert by the talent free zone Girls Aloud maybe?

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Extraordinary rendition is a puss filled boil on the face of decent democracies

So John Hutton the Defence Secretary has admitted what many have suspected for quite a long time, that British forces have colluded with the Americans in the “extraordinary rendition” of terror suspects in places such as Iraq. “Extraordinary rendition” is a process involving removing someone from their abode, secretively, to another country where they are “questioned” by a variety of agents who may include the CIA, MI5, and the intelligence agency of the host country. They may then be moved to another location in another country where perhaps less civilised means are used to extract information from them, as in the case of Binyam Mohamed.

The use of torture is barbaric, arcane, and most often counter productive, these ‘people’ are either on a terrorist mission and would rather die than disclose information, or if they are less resilient will sing like a canary and make up information simply to gain release from the pain. As a tool for gathering hard evidence torture is as useful as a spoon for ploughing a field. This whole business belongs in the past, we have sophisticated technologies, we have agents on the ground, we ought to have worthwhile partnerships with friendly nations who will share intelligence without bullying the legal process, we should have no need to resort to medieval methods.

Yet we are, by our own admissions, complicit with this process Hutton’s revelation follows on from South Shields MP and Foreign Secrtary David Miliband’s recent admission that two terror suspects were processed through the British island of Diego Garcia, and it is suspected that British agents were in some way complicit with the torture of Binyam Mohamed. As each little piece of information becomes available it is apparent that this insidious practise will be seen and felt like a nasty growing boil on the face of what we like to call a liberal western democracy.

The legacy of Tony Blair’s premiership could well be written in blood and felt for years to come as he orchestrated The War Against Terror with a vengeful George W. Bush, a massively huge committment costing £billions in a James Bond caper to capture the mysterious Bin Laden and his Al Qaeda cohorts. An operation involving war on two fronts in Afghanistan and Iraq with large western forces sitting uncomfortably on either side of Iran, just as a warning, yet years later there is no peace, no fully operational democratic government in either country and an Islamic jihadist movement at home and abroad fomenting simmering discontent.

We need our government to come clean about our exact involvement with extraordinary rendition, we need to know how much was known, when, and who by, and at the end we need an apology. It was never a decent policy, and by the looks of it never produced any decent outcomes (including Guantanamo Bay). If Barack Obama is as good as his word, and we’ll have to wait a couple of years on that, then the USA will eventually extricate itself from Iraq, Afghanistan will take a whole lot longer, Guantanamo will be closed down and it’s inmates distributed around the world with strict surveillance applied. The new US administration may manage to close this dirty chapter in the book of world history and excise the faults of Blair and Bush, but to fully lance the puss filled boil of rendition will need admissions of failure and huge apologies, but they may mark the beginning of the next chapter.

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TV show starts more arguments

It was typical really, a man at a bar conversing with another moaning about the state of the nation, one blaming immigration and asylum seekers for stealing jobs, the other saying that Gordon Brown was still fighting the remnants of Thatcher’s legacy. Of course they may both have had a little too much to drink, but they both too had taken time out to see the latest Thatcher offering from the BBC the night before, which  had apparently been altered to make her look more appealing, something I did not expect the BBC to do.

However “Billy” now a retired ex Labour voter was vowing to never vote for the party again, gone soft on immigration, jobs, employment, cannot run the economy, should leave the EU, and allows too many cheap foreign imports (there’s no prizes for guessing which knuckle dragging bunch he professed support for), whilst “Bob” the self employed electrician, but former coppersmith in the shipyards, was more concerned about good socialist values still, the fight for the working classes, trade union rights (even though he is no longer a member), the loss of essential shipbuilding skills, the loss of the mines, the loss of the steel works, the gradual but wholesale destruction of all British industry under Margaret Thatcher’s premiership, stealing the milk from children, – you get the gist of it.

The argument raged for an hour taking in the Falklands War, the current wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the miners strike, secondary picketing, and how the rubbish lay piled up in the streets uncollected and bodies were filling mortuaries unburied, it was at this point that I stepped in to remind “Bob” that he’d wandered too far back in his mind and that the ‘discontent’ he was referring to was caused by “sunny Jim” Callaghan and the Labour government in 1978. To no avail, I was perfectly wrong “Bob” told me, he couldn’t be wrong he’d only just watched it on the TV the night before! Well you know how it is when two blokes have had a drink, I confessed to not having seen the BBC drama but insisted that his view of history was rather skewed and warped, and why he was like many silly socialists who just hated Thatcher because it was “the thing to do”?

Off on another long tangent encompassing oppression around the world, aids, starvation in Africa, throwing millions out of work, cosying up to the evil American Reagan, so I asked him does he regret ever becoming self employed?

“What no, it’s great man, set my own times, set my own rates, take holidays when it suits, with nobody telling me what, where, or who to work for”

No regrets at all for “Bob”, he bought his house from the council too, and I bet it was used as security for some the set up loans for his business.

“”Billy” was an ex miner, he regrets that they ever went on strike, regrets that Scargill ever became leader of the NUM and, although retired, is now happy that the bullying powers of the trades unions had been curbed “almost brought this country to it’s knees, nearly starved my family, all because Scargill wanted to have a power struggle” said Billy.

“Bob” went off on another long diatribe before I interjected again and asked him why he thought he wasn’t a shipyard worker any more?

“Well because Thatcher closed them all”

So I asked him how long he’d been a self employed electrician?

“Twenty years now, son”

“So do you earn more now than you did as a coppersmith?” I enquired

“Oh yeah much more, I guess, but it was hard at first, but what choice did I have, I had a young family to feed”

So, I put it to him that this wonderfully skilled British workforce on Tyneside might still be building ships now if they had managed to deliver on time, within budget, at costs that were competitive with the rest of the world, so long as someone else wanted to buy them.

“What do mean?” he asked.

I told him that if they hadn’t walked out of the job every couple of months, they might still have a job to walk into.

“That’s not the point, I know lads from South Shields and Jarrow who grew up with shipbuilding who knew nothing else it ran in the family” said Billy.

Times change I said, people have to be prepared to adapt to change “How many times were you out on strike, either officially or unofficially?”

“Oh well, aye, once or twice” came the reply.

“Billy” moaned that that was what was wrong with the country back then, but “Bob” refused to remove the blinkers.

So I made one more telling point before the two  of them moved on to another bar. The Tories were in government for eighteen years, so essentially the British public thought they were doing something right, Margaret Thatcher had led us out of the dark ages of continual industrial disputes and set the conditions for making Britain competitive again, trade union power as used by it’s leaders was curbed, big state industries were rolled back and new enterprises grew. Following Major’s loss to Blair in 1997 we’ve had twelve years of Labour administration and even the BBC wanted to make Margaret Thatcher look appealing now. I asked them this one last question:

“If Margaret Thatcher was such an evil monster who deliberately wanted to close this country down then she must have passed some terrible laws. Now that we’ve had twelve years of Blair and Brown, can you name me just one of Thatcher’s industrial relations or trade union laws that Labour has repealed or abolished?”

Silence spoke a thousand words!

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Goodwin in stark message to UK public

Sir Fred Goodwin the architect of the biggest failure and loss in the history of British commerce at RBS is to keep his gold plated pension pot of  over £17m which will pay him £693,000 per year for life. Sir Fred is only 50 and said this about suggestions that he should surrender part of his pension in a letter to Lord Myners:

“I am told that the topic of my pension was specifically raised with you and you indicated that you were aware of my entitlement and that no further ‘gestures’ would be required”.

That’s thirty two words to make one significant gesture to the rest of us! His annual pension amounts to more than most of us would hope to earn in a lifetime of sweat and endeavour.

I want to scream with rage, as a tax payer it’s my money that is now being thrown away in fruitless efforts to prop up an economy that is on it’s knees partially as a result of Freddy Goodwin’s failure to run RBS at a profit. I really want to hurl a stream of steaming invective and abusive Anglo Saxon filth bile and animosity, interlaced with poisonous barbed words of four lettered length both prurient and obnoxious in the extreme, not at Sir Fred but at the golden nuggets who approved and authorised the package put together as the price of his failure. They failed on a grander scale!

After all it’s my money they are playing with when they “nationalised” the bank, they knew very much beforehand what the state of it’s balances were and what arrangements had been agreed to get rid of Goodwin, and now they feign anger and threaten legal action.

Hmmph!

George Osborne, the Shadow Chancellor, was even more scathing, He told GMTV that the Government’s anger at the former bank chief’s pension was “synthetic” because they knew about the package.

Mr Osborne said: “The problem for the Government, and for Lord Myners who’s a Government minister, is that they knew all along about this pension so all this synthetic anger now is just long after the horse has bolted.

“It seems to me they’re on the hook either way. They knew and they didn’t stop it and that’s what Fred Goodwin’s saying.”

Mr Osborne went on: “Gordon Brown and Alistair Darling are supposed to be looking after taxpayers’ money, they’re supposed to be looking after the interests of the British people and they were asleep on the job.”

It’s not just Tories complaining either, the attacls are coming from all sides:

Paul Kenny, general secretary of the GMB union, said that Lord Myners should resign if he either knew about Sir Fred’s pension arrangements or “even worse” did not check how much he was going to be paid. “The Government needs to take active steps to recover the bonuses paid to these bankers under false pretences.”

No, I can only direct a little of my anger at Sir Fred Goodwin, I cannot really blame him for accepting the best package he could get (I could join the public appeal to hand some back) alas my seething rage must be aimed at those who were on the former board of RBS, and those in this Labour government who gave their tacit approval and now claim to know little about it.

Incompetents and idiots of the highest magnitude

The Devil has a rather good post on the subject of contracts and laws apertaining to Sir Fred’s employment, it rather rattle Iain Dale too.

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…and other ways for councils to hang on to your money.

I managed to squeeze in some of yesterday afternoon’s meeting of South Tyneside Council in South Shields Town Hall and how tedious the whole affair was, As I expected Labour’s plans to increase our council taxes yet again were passed by a huge majority, primarily because most of the opposition parties don’t want to save your money, they’d rather carry on wasting it. The Independent Alliance, the Real Independents, the Progressives, and the Liberal Democrats came to the meeting with nothing, they hadn’t even bothered to scrutinise Labour’s budget proposals and had no alternatives of their own, it was shameful, and I guess the only reason thaqt they couldn’t be bothered to provide reasonable responsible opposition is because they aren’t facing any elections this year.

So it fell to Cllr. David Potts and the small Conservative group to propose the only amendment to Labour’s plans with their scheme to freeze council tax as revealed here yesterday. It was a worthy plan which received some “sympathy” but not wholehearted support from sections of the council, including Progressive leader Cllr. Jim Capstick and Labour leader Cllr. Iain Malcolm, who were both happy to consign parts of the Tory plans to committees with promises of consideration and an earlier start in formulating next years budget – wow!

However, it was the bumbling, stumbling, waffling nonsense from some on the Labour benches which caught the attention in what had the potential to turn into an ugly bad tempered debate, but I guess the fuse was damp. Cllr. Ed Malcolm Labour’s chairman of the finance committee, or whatever fancy title it goes by these days, was pathetic and embarrassing with his Kosygin like ability to pick a hundred words and fail to put them together with any coherance, he clearly has no command of his brief, and sideways glances to a council officer every now and then to recieve an approving nod betrayed his inability to present the case effectively. The people of Houghton and Washington East will sleep easily in their beds with the knowledge that there is no danger of him performing on their behalf in the House of Commons.

There were two main sets of proposals in the Conservative amendment which rankled the dinosaurs within our councl, the first set primarily was to save a small fortune on printing, stationery, publicity, and distribution costs, something which inevitable would not hurt service users, and the second was to make savings in the roles of trades union officials which turned out to be a red rag to the bull of Labour’s sensibilities.

There are a few important points for the council to consider as it moves towards it’s next elections in 2010 and what level of council tax it sets then, the first we should look at is the council’s propaganda pamphlet magazine “on View” which costs us around £80,000 per year. They have a legal and statutory duty to inform and consult with the borough’s residents, but that need not get in the way of looking for cheaper or more effective ways of doing it. “On View” could be reduced to two editions per year without anyone complaining, it could be printed on cheaper paper of a poorer quality without affecting it’s content, it could be self financing if they could persuade enough local businesses to advertise in it, or it could be abolished altogether. We have a well staffed propapganda press office in the town hall who are very adept at spinning Labour’s words, they could carry on preaching the gospel to local newspapers and radio stations, as well as filling the council’s website with news articles, they also have that pretty mundane and awful, ST Central TV service squawking away in public buildings, as another outlet for council information. Conclusion, consultation and information could be provided effectively at a much reduced cost.

The move towards a paperless office just isn’t going to happen according to Cllrs. Ed Malcolm and Jim Perry, but why should we take their words for it? I’d hate to think how many forests are destroyed and how much CO2 is emitted in the production of the mountains of paper needed JUST to service councillors. In this modern technological age, when private companies are being almost forced to reduce paper and waste, why our council cannot go down the same route is an absolute mystery. All council reports, minutes, agendas, and papers for the Members Library could be provided exclusively online via the website, with a PVN server for members to log in to view restricted information, and they could then decide, at home, to print only those parts which they considered to be totally necessary. Cllr. Perry has already decided that he needs the three thousand odd pieces of paper that the council’s courier service delivers to his door five nights a week, he should be taken outside and forced to break stones or do other hard labour as a punishment for his extravagant waste of resources.

We, the tax payer, provide expensive and comprehensive training for our councillors to utilise technology, we provide them with laptops and Blackberries at our expense, we connect their homes at our expense. If Cllr. Perry and his Labour colleagues prefer to carry on using dinosaur methods on reams of paper then we should remove the laptops and Blackberries, they are obviously NOT using them! How much money would that save? The Conservative plan would produce savings of £1.4m per year, not to be sniffed at.

Finally, the thorny problem of trade union representatives employed at our expense. Yes they are needed, yes they are elected by their members to represent their interests, yes they provide an excellent means of effective two way communication and consultation and employee protection, BUT, as I was discussing with a former factory manager last night, they are less than productive for the organisation when much of their time is consumed by trades union duties. Their unions levy subscriptions from their membership which garners £millions annually, a fair bit of which ends up in the Labour Party’s coffers by the way, and so we should feel no guilt in allowing them to continue providing their services but request that the trades unions pay (pro rata) the wages of the council employees who have been elected as union officials. I see no reason at all why South Tyneside’s council tax payers should foot the bill for work which is not directly producing results on our behalf, work done on behalf of the union should be paid for by the union. Hey this is 2009 not 1909!

Perhaps the wording of the Conservative amendment was ill thought out (cease to employ staff to be trade union officials), legally this cannot be achieved, but cost savings can be achieved, it’s a tough decision of course and may seem hard nosed, but the council has to be seen to run itself in a business like manner.

I thought there was much to commend in the Conservatives budget plan as it would produce the savings needed to ensure NO RISE AT ALL in council tax and would result in no loss of services, no school closures, no change to community centres, adult learning, street cleaning, etc. etc. Just a simple and effective way of saving money that pours easily away without being noticed. Just a shame that others didn’t seem keen on change and prefer to continue with wasteful policies, the other opposition parties should be ashamed that they brought no proposals of their own, and that they appear willing to carry on burning our money on Labour’s bonfire of vanities.

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Interesting listings

Voidstar has a feed aggregator UK Poliblogs which lists all most of  the political bloggers active in the UK , one needs to submit your blog to have it listed and it does provide a little extra traffic from time to time. I listed this blog four years ago and have not been disappointed with the results, Mr. Peter Shaw listed The Northern Herald blog soon after he started it, I’m sure he didn’t regret that decision either.

Bloggers need to be “in the know” to benefit from this traffic.

A recent look at the list in the left hand column shows only three political blogs that I know of in South Tyneside, and I’ve already mentioned two of them

Care to guess what the third one is?

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from Iain Dale’s Twitter feed

“I like to think that Wendy Richard is already in heaven playing with Mrs Slocombe’s pussy.”

Cough, splutter!

Sad news, all the same.

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South Shields park officially re-opened

There is nothing I like better than promoting my home town South Shields and what it has to offer it’s visitors, and today we can be proud of what has been achieved in transforming the South Marine Park and restoring some of it’s Victorian splendour. Today the Mayor of South Tyneside, Cllr. Alex Donaldson along with representatives from the Heritage Lottery Fund, the Friends of the South and North Marine Parks, and local schoolchildren, celebrated the completion of grant aided works which have seen the original Victorian bandstand reconstructed, a new station for the Lakeshore railroad 9″ gauge train, restored terracing and balustrades, the “nymphs” looking splendid in their original colours, a new children’s play area with state of the art equipment, the boating lake cleaned out and relined, new refreshment and toilet facilities, new pathways and original Victorian seating and styled lighting, new beds and shrubbery, and the water features at the Seafield Terrace end will shortly be in working order too.

The park truly looks magnificent and a large crowd this morning enjoyed music from the Harton and Westoe Brass Band as those in period costume danced away, one can now only hope that the thousands of visitors that we will receive over the summer months will love the place as much as we do, and that the Park Rangers now employed can help prevent any incidents of vandalism from that small section who tend to spoil others’ enjoyment.

A fantastic family fun day and light festival is scheduled to take place on Saturday, 18 April, it will be fascinating to see this bandstand fully illuminated with the array of lighting installed on it’s structure.

Having spent four years posting in this blog cajoling and pressuring our Labour controlled council to bring our sea front and parks up to the standards seen elsewhere, I can now see that the results have vindicated the means, tourism is a major factor in our local economy and brings much needed income, and now they must press ahead with other plans and carry the momentum forward. We are soon to see fresh new private developments at the Ocean Beach Amusement Park, in addition to what they have just completed, but the proposal to build a hotel at Gypsies Green appears right now to be stuck in the mud, we also await news of developments planned for the “golden triangle” around the pier head area and the much hoped for swimming facility that Cllr. Iain Malcolm enthused over. Perhaps it is time too to start considering proposals to overhaul the North Marine Park and put in place mechanisms to source funding for a major project there. I once offered the idea, through this blog, of a large glasshouse on the scale of Sunderland’s Winter Gardens filled with specimen plants in a secure heavy plate glass environment which could also provide facilities for local schools to participate with their own “patches”. This could be privately managed or operated in a partnership arrangement. It really needs to be built here.

We can build our imagination and grow our ambitions, we can do these things, we just need to want to!

Would it float your boat folks?

Here are some more pictures of this morning’s opening ceremony including the Mayor cutting the ribbons, click the thumbnails to enlarge.

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