Curly's Corner Shop, the blog!

Cllr. Malcolm

Parkin received an additional £2m bonus

The ongoing secrecy over the severance deal and bonuses paid to former Newcastle International Airport bodd John Parkin is doing nothing to enhance the integrity and accountability of local council leaders, it has now reached stage where even local Labour laeders are demanding more openness.

Coun Nick Forbes, leader of the opposition Labour group on Newcastle City Council, said:

“If a settlement has been reached, with multi-million pound bonuses still being paid out and a large legal bill run-up in the process, the public has a right to know how and when this was allowed to happen.”

Newcastle’s Lib-Dem council leader John Shipley said:

“The public will rightly be concerned by this news, even though over £4.7m has been clawed back by the airport. There has been a review of governance arrangements and I understand the airport board will have these in place by May or June. To prevent this happening again it is essential that this is done.”

North East minister and MP for Newcastle East and Wallsend Nick Brown called for an investigation into the matter and Peter Atkinson, Conservative MP for Hexham, has called for details to be made public of how the original bonus deal was agreed.

It is time for South Tyneside Council Leader Iain Malcolm to make a public statement outlining all of the facts in this business and explain exactly what has happened with our money and offer some explanation as to why Mr. Parkin deserved such generous payments. We need to know why the airport has said the dealings of its remuneration committee remain confidential, and why he will keep £2m in the out-of-court settlement – 10 times his salary at the airport.

When dealing with our cash, council leaders who have agreed to these secretive deals owe us the favour of being honest and up front about them!

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South Tyneside wasting it’s time

It will take more than the metropolitan borough of South Tyneside, population 152,000, to solve global warming. Even if a billion people turn off their lights this Saturday, the entire event will be equivalent to switching off China’s emissions for six short seconds. In economic terms, the environmental and humanitarian benefits from the efforts of the entire developed world would add up to just $21,000.

And it gets worse: the event could cause higher overall pollution than if we just left our lights on. When asked to extinguish electricity, people turn to candlelight. Candles seem natural, but are almost 100 times less efficient than incandescent light globes, and more than 300 times less efficient than fluorescent lights. If you use one candle for each extinguished globe, you’re essentially not cutting CO2 at all, and with two candles you’ll emit more CO2. Moreover, candles produce indoor air pollution 10 to 100 times the level of pollution caused by all cars, industry and electricity production.

Bjorn Lomborg in The Australian

Well, it’s nice to know that we are being thought about by our antipodean cousins, let me know if there’s a run on candles at Asda won’t you. In the meantime I’ll be switching the lights out closing the door behind me and going to the pub where i won’t be sitting in darkness and enjoying the sport on someone else’s gigantic plasma monster!

Well, I may not be totally convinced by the so called scientific arguments yet, I’m still sceptical and think it’s a huge leftist plot to extort even more taxes for redistribution, but you cannot say I ain’t doin’ my bit.

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Debt to rocket again

According to the Daily Mail (where’s that pinch of salt?)

Britain will borrow more money in the next two years than the country borrowed in the 306 years leading up to Labour’s 1997 election win, it has been revealed.

The big question has to be “where will he get it from?”

Did I hear the word “prudence” somewhere in the past?

Update

Forget that pinch of salt and get me some valium instead, the Speccy reveals that the figure came from Chris Giles at the Financial Times, we really are in (very) deep doodoo!

Normally, Prime Ministers who do not lead their party to an election victory and serve only part of a Parliament are mere footnotes in history. Brown will avoid that fate. But he will go down in history as one of the worst Prime Ministers this country has had since the second Reform Act

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Things would never have been the same without you.

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Cabinet Ministers looking to the future

At PMQs this week Hattie Harperson failed to respond to William Hague’s charge that Cabinet ministers are positioning themselves to take over the leadership of the Labour Party after Brown’s demise, and let’s face it, this is a job with a potentially long tenure!

Ed Balls position? Well he’s concentrating on educating the nation’s children isn’t he?

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Jeff Randall in The Daily Telegraph

Mr Brown’s trite wittering about “doing nothing not being an option” will be exposed for what it is: a vacuous soundbite from a leader of a party that began with a golden legacy and turned it into a dunghill.

It took Labour 18 years in the wilderness to recover from its last debacle. Unless David Cameron does something really stupid, it could be heading that way again. With an election due next June, I envisage a faceless Conservative in a secret location preparing a final coded message for Harriet: “Agent Harman. Mission accomplished. Return to base.”

In a cleverly constructed article supposing that Harriet Harperson is really a Tory mole in Nulab’s ranks!

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I am being challenged in another local blog about my silence regarding certain allegations (which will not be repeated here at this time).

If the author has indeed been away for several days conducting an ‘investigation’ and believes that what he has found has veracity and credibility, then surely the right thing to do with that evidence would be to place it in the hands of Northumbria Police. One would not expect to see such evidence trawled around on a tawdry website.

That is all (for now).

Emergency resolution amended at Council meeting.

After Cllr. George Elsom (Real Independent) introduced his motion there followed a mainly good debate in South Shields Town Hall, during which two amendments to the resolution were tabled and eventually agreed upon unanimously. This means that all three of the borough’s Territorial Army battalions will be honoured and recognised for the parts that they have played in the two ongoing conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, moves will now be undertaken to arrange a service of thanksgiving, a home coming parade, and a civic reception at an appropriate time. This is appropriate, and creates an opportunity for the whole borough and community to come together to mark the service given by our troops in the arduous tasks that they have been charged with in the service of their country.

However, what should have been  polite proposals were pincered by some rather prickly and picky partisan comments from two former Labour Party colleagues, the dignity of the occasion was lost, it was a bit embarrassing and unnecessary to be honest.

What else happened at the meeting?

Oh yes, Councillors voted to give themselves a 2.4% increase in their allowances in defiance of the independent panel’s recommendation of a 0.9% increase – well there are no elections for them this year. It’s just slightly less than the pay award for council employees and slight more than the thousands of borough residents who will enjoy no pay increase at all this year.

Just me being a bit cynical.

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[YouTube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=94lW6Y4tBXs&fmt=]

It’s so good it’s worth seeing again

Conservative MEP Dan Hannan has become an internet sensation after the mainstream media ignored his speech attacking Gordon Brown in the EU Parliament, his YouTube video of the event is the most watched video currently available on YouTube and it has now been seen more than 684000 times, and it’s on course to be the most viewed political speech in the fastest time in internet history. He also been interviewed by Fox News in the USA, they seem to think that a star has been born! Hannan also revealed himself to be a big Ron Paul fan – way to go boy!

Labour MP Tom Harris seems to think that Dan Hannan’s attack was an outright disgrace

Gordon Brown isn’t just Labour’s prime minister; he’s Britain’s prime minister, and for any UK politician to launch such a disgraceful, personal attack on his country’s leader — in a foreign country — is nothing short of disgraceful.

Hmm, now, was he elected as Labour’s leader? Nope.

Has been elected as Britain’s Prime Minister? Nope.

Has he faced the British electorate with his ideas on European integration? Nope.

With the EU formulating 80% of our laws now, is Europe a foreign place when Gordon Brown declares we are right in the heart of it? Nope.

Seems to me that 3 minutes of criticism from a man simply articulating what  the majority of us would wish our Westminster MPs to say, (in a Parliament to which he was elected to represent his constituents), is rather more than you can handle Tom. Better get used to it, there’ll be plenty more between now and the general election.

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The final solution

Err….yes, I quite forgot about the final option, it’s called the Dennis Healey strategy, named after another famous Labour Chancellor who ran out of money.

Better be quick, the IMF isn’t a bottomless pit.

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