Curly's Corner Shop, the blog!

South Tyneside Council beset by petty squabbling

I’ve had a busy few days which have kept me away from here, and as some personal matters progress I am finding it more difficult to make time to attend to this long running blog, additionally the photoblog at South Shields Daily Pictures has captured a lot of interest and is also consuming my time and resources.

Despite bemoaning our local politicians I do like to find the time to promote all that is best about South Shields and South Tyneside as a a place to live, and one of the best ways that I can do that is pictorially, which, I hope you will agree, I try to do in an interesting and pleasing way.

The great shame is that many of our local councillors in South Tyneside seem too have forgotten why they were elected, and some of them get afflicted by this amnesia in a very short period of time following an election. With fresh elections coming along for 18 councillors on 6th. May it is worth reflecting on what some of our councillors do with a slice of their time at (or not at) South Shields Town Hall on our behalf.

In this respect I am grateful for the amount of work expended by The Fat Councillor, a relatively new blogger reporting on matters in South Tyneside and beyond, who has gained a very healthy readership in a quite short period of time. It seems that this blog was primarily set up in response to a plethora of attack blogs and Twitter accounts which did nothing at all to promote the best interests of South Tyneside, and illustrated the amount of time spent by some local politicos on launching tit for tat personal attacks against a handful of our elected councillors and carried little in the way of policy initiatives or meaningful dialogue with the people that these sites were aimed at (their electorate at ward level). Ahmed’s Wise Words seems to be dishing out ripostes and a “taste of their own medicine” in good measure. It has also given me the opportunity to put me feet up for a few days now and then.

Today the Fat Councillor is revealing details from a report setting out the number and type of complaints submitted to either the local Monitoring Officer or sent to the Standards Board for England and Wales in respect of the standards of behaviour expected from your local councillors. I have a copy of the report and it makes extremely interesting reading (click the picture above to enlarge). Th Fat Councillor’s pie charts, for which I give him/her credit, quickly and graphically illustrate that only a handful of our councillors are responsible for a huge chunk of officer’s time wasted away pursuing petty minor complaints and that real complaints submitted by members of the public not associated with the political bodies represented on South Tyneside Council amount to next to nothing at all.

The document that I have in front of me covers the period from May 2008 to December 2009 and details 66 complaints made against councillors, 26 of these complaints were made by councillors objecting to the behavioural standards of other councillors, a further 7 complaints were made by people known to be associated with political organisations or elected representatives. Additionally, 9 complaints were made by people I know to be working for South Tyneside Council as public servants, and 5 complaints were received by a journalist or a residents association. Which leaves just 19 possibly made by genuinely aggrieved single electors, and some of those were complaints of the more serious kind.

Of the complaints received and investigated 46 were made against independent councillors (both Real and Independent Alliance) and 6 were made against Conservative councillors, and 14 were made against Labour councillors.

Of the complaints made 22 were submitted by Independent councillors and 4 were made by Conservative councillors.

The councillor who generated the most complaints against others was Ahmed Khan with seven, closely followed by Jane Branley with six, the councillor most complained against was Ahmed Khan (17 complaints) followed by George Elsom (14 complaints).

Which leaves you wondering – how right are people’s opinions when they claim that South Tyneside councillors are nothing more than a bunch of squabbling kids?

Those genuine members of the public (i.e. those not generally associated with the political bodies) who attend meetings at South Shields Town Hall, tend to come away dismayed and disheartened at the very poor standard of debate and discussion. The most noise made during and after meetings comes from those most closely and clearly associated with the political process, the rest just simply don’t want to talk about it.

I’d like to think that this document gives a clearer insight to the workings of the checks and balances in place which regulate the behavioural standards that we expect from our councillors, but my dismay at seeing so many independent councillors either on the receiving end of complaints or making complaints against others (frequently their former friends and allies) will probably not be shared by them. My guess is that they’ll see these statistics as something to crow about and be proud of, like the terrors on our estates who collect ASBOs to wear like medals on the chest!

Finally, back to Ahmed’s Wise Words, I have been asked a few times in the past week if I am The Fat Councillor, the answer to that is an emphatic NO, but I like his/her line in graphics and pictures. It is, at times, an amusing and savagely corrosive deconstruction of politicians both local and national, the author seems to have tapped a rich source of revealing material recently, so it is certainly worth a read. He (for I am assuming the author is male) can also be followed on Twitter.

We all like to have a little moan and complain now and then, but we surely expect our elected councillors to be more than a bunch of “moaning minnies”, surely we ought to expect them to work together, even in opposition, to promote the very best interests of South Tyneside. Debate and discussion should always be about policy, ideas, and vision for the future, NOT about personalities.

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48 hours

I read a book some years ago, I was probably in my early twenties and going through a Solzhenitsyn phase, the book was entitled “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich” it wasn’t a large book, perhaps less than 150 pages. However it was detailed, full of thought about life, it’s pleasures and complaints, deprivations, and food, in fact a minute by minute chronology of one man’s life during a 24 hour period in a Soviet labour Camp. It was hard not to come to the conclusion that Denisovich was the architect of his own future, it would either be non existent or bright and full of hope.

Which in many ways relates to how we came to view both of our sea front parks in South Shields some four or five years ago. Indeed some people were questioning their relevance in our modern high paced lifestyles, but we all need an oasis of calm, we need to breath fresh air, we need to exercise in an environment changed from the norm. These values and instincts were recognised by our ancestors when they made our parks and open spaces available for public enjoyment.

Now that we can say with almost certainty that spring has arrived it is a good opportunity to get down to the South or the North Marine Parks NOW, yes before lunch and take your camera with you!

You never know, YOUR pictures may end up being exhibited at The Customs House in September, your pictures can be submitted as prints, on a CD, or attached to an email, but you only have until Tuesday 6th. April to get them in.

I think it’s an excellent way to increase the public’s engagement with our sea front parks and in today’s conditions you could happily snap away for hours, I fired off over one hundred shots yesterday and I’m off now to get some more – so watch out for me down there!

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Darling prepares the electoral battleground

Yesterday’s Financial Statement from the Chancellor Alistair Darling bore all the hallmarks of Gordon Brown’s premiership, it had the Prime Ministers grubby finger prints all over it and little or no attempt was made to reduce the massive burden of debt that thirteen years of Labour government has heaped upon the British people. This was an empty budget a missed opportunity to start putting things right, a chance to reintroduce “prudence” (one of Brown’s old girlfriends who must now be out of favour), but instead Darling did as was expected, the Prime Minister’s bidding, and laid out the ground for an election that will most likely be called at the end of next week.

This was a nakedly political Budget where the Chancellor and the PM spent most of the afternoon trailing tired statistics chronicling the thirteen years of Labour’s misdeeds and with a forecast of a minuscule reduction of £11bn in the budget, deficit they had the temerity to trumpet it as a success! The current deficit of £178bn is now forecast to be reduced to just £167bn, and as far as the national debt was concerned it appears as though they are quite willing to continue to allow it to rise. From a base of £352bn when Gordon Brown presented his first budget in 1997 it is now forecast to rise to £1.4trillion by 2014/15, an amount that equates to over £23000 for every person in the UK.

It is you and I and every ordinary Joe in Britain who will pay dearly for the thirteen wasted years of Brown’s stewardship of the economy and it all starts today, the usual victims will start to pay more almost immediately, smokers, drinkers, and motorists, and from next week we can add in the council tax payers who have seen their bills more than double under the life of this government. The reintroduction of the 17.5% VAT rate is now starting to hit us all in the wallets and shortly there will be an increase in National Insurance contributions (they can say what they like, this is a tax increase and it will curtail growth because it taxes jobs.) Because Darling confirmed that personal tax allowances will remain frozen, as inflation rises, all earners above the minimum threshold will find themselves giving a larger slice of their pay packet to the Treasury, another Labour tax rise hidden from view!

In a blatantly political move designed to draw dividing lines between Labour and the Conservatives Darling announced, on Brown’s behalf, that a 5% rate of Stamp Duty on properties worth more than £1m would be used to finance the removal of Stamp Duty on properties worth up to £250.000, this was meant to be a “Robin Hood” theft of the rich, but with the economy still asleep the likely cache of revenue is not going to be as large as he imagines and the property market is not exactly booming is it? On top of that, Labour’s “light touch” regulation of the financial sector in previous years has created a situation where first time buyers are now finding it wretchedly difficult to even raise the deposit on a property before facing the problems of finding a lender prepared to finance the mortgage following the disastrous propping up of Northern Rock and the other “zombie banks”, and just to give us all a huge laugh Brown and Darling now want to force banks (i.e. the failing ones that they bought on behalf of the tax payers) to lend to those who are not in the best positions to fulfil their obligations, isn’t this how we got into the mess in the first place?

Luckily David Cameron and the Conservatives saw this bear trap in advance and will not be planning to reverse the stamp duty measures, they can see a political ploy when it is being played, and another such ploy brought out yesterday was the tax exchange deal announced with Belize in a purely political dig at the Tories and Lord Ashcroft, of course no such exchange deals were announced about countries sheltering the profits of Labour’s multi millionaire donors such as Lord Paul!

So we can see now that Brown plans to fight the election on a faux tribal class battlefield in an us against them toffs strategy, I say faux because hidden in the detail of the budget is the fact that it is the people at the lowest end of the economic ladder who will pick up the bill for Brown’s fight, as usual.

They play with our lives and livelihoods and obfuscate, dither, and put off the big decisions that the country needs now, the glaring hole in the budget is the comprehensive lack of a comprehensive spending review, it is not something which they wish to even contemplate as politics gets in the way. The spending review has been postponed until after the election, or to put it as I have before, a huge mess for the next government to sort out.

In a nutshell, this was a Chancellor opening the cupboard to show us that it’s bare, the only contents are a few faded battle plans dusted down from the 1970s, a time when another Labour government ran out of money and Dennis Healey ran cap in hand to the IMF to bail out Britain, yet now Brown’s debt mountain is inexorably higher than it was then, it is far higher than that amassed during the Second World War and that took over sixty years to pay off.

It is true, Labour governments always run out of cash, they are poor stewards of our economy and are always the authors of their own obituaries.

This election cannot come soon enough, Blair and Brown inherited a healthy Britain but years of increasing spending and increasing debt have destroyed our future, we need change and not just a change in management, a change in policy and philosophy and a return to the values of good housekeeping, we need a government that acts and behaves in the same way as responsible housewives looking after every penny and deciding wisely what is and what is not good value for money. The Conservative Party urgently needs to talk about it’s philosophy, values, and vision for a complete change, the narrowing in the opinion polls reflects the fact that voters cannot arguably see this change and that they perceive David Cameron to be as much of a marketing phenomenon as Tony Blair was in 1997. More of the same in a different wrapper is not what we need, Cameron iterated yesterday that we need to “sack the manager”, well that’s fine, but only if the new manager has a completely different set of values and principles and real vision about where he/she is going, a change in the style of doing things would be no use at all, we need a complete change in direction!

Busted Britain needs the Conservative Party to wake up, take the fight to Labour in an effort to show that they do know how to change the direction of the economy, and to be able to hit the ground running, they need to demonstrate that they know how to stop the haemorrhage of the nation’s cash and resources, as even now the value of the pound is being affected by Darling’s budget as money men give it a big thumbs down, and they need to show a strong will and spirit to roll up their sleeves with a “can do” attitude. They need to show that they can once again roll back the frontiers of the state and give a chance for the free private sector of the economy to grow and flourish and produce, only then will we see a growth in jobs, prosperity, and security.

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South Shields retail units sold

Henry Boot the development company responsible for the building of the Waterloo Square retail transformation at the foot of Garden Lane in South Shields has announced the sale of the four units which house BHS, Debenhams, River Island and Next to Royal London Mutual Insurance Society Limited. The £11.5m sale nets Boot a 5.8% premium on its investment and sees the purchaser paying £2.5m above the year end valuation for 2009.

As King Street suffers the effects of the recession, populated by mobile phone stores, charity shops, pound stores, and cardboard cut out imitation shops, and the former Asda store in Ocean Road remains empty, it is good to know that at least someone is profiting nicely from our once vibrant town centre, perhaps Henry Boot could be persuaded to redevelop everything from Coston Drive to Charlotte Terrace!

South Tyneside Council has talked for a number of years now about increasing and improving the links between King Street and the new developments either end of Coronation Street, there were tentative plans for a niche market project in the Chapter Row area, and of massive updates for the Market Place. Trouble is, these days, consultation and fine tuning takes years and years as the ruling Labour Party in South Tyneside fear dreadful consequences of decision making, they appear to be suffering a lack of leadership, and are driven more by the fear of failure than the desire to strive for success. The years of obfuscation, listening, consultation, planning, listening again, consulting again, rolling out road shows and endless waffling in Community Area Forums has had a stultifying effect on progressing the development of our town centre and other areas waiting for regeneration, such as Rekendyke/Frederick Street. (It is now four years since I first wrote here in response to South Tyneside Council’s plans, I warned against allowing another thirty years to roll by, and yet although land clearance is at last under way, in the intervening four years not a single sod of earth has been turned into a pile of bricks held together with mortar as forecast in the plans.)

It’s surely time to take some risks and make a few decisions, or should we just sit back and watch as our neighbours in Sunderland, North Tyneside and the Newcastle/Gateshead Partnership just sail past and leave us behind?

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Well what are shy retiring MPs supposed to do?

Update

If you would like to sign a petition calling on The Queen to strip Byers of his membership of  The Privy Council, you can do so here.

Guido reports that 756 people signed in less than two hours, that figure has now risen to over 1500 in less than three hours.

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Small enterprises need to do whatever it takes to market themselves

One of the hardest ways to make a living is to become self employed, take all of the risks on your own shoulders, perhaps even risk the security of your home and family by using your property as leverage at the banks to raise capital, the whole process is fraught with dangers as your “baby” slowly learns to crawl and walk, any thoughts of running are a long way off yet.

When a business is born it’s capital and assets are probably at their lowest as the owners (often sole traders) struggle to get the enterprise off the ground, find markets and customers and begin to grow, and one of the smaller parts of their budgets will be allocated for marketing and advertising. It is essential that they rely on channels other than word of mouth to offer their businesses and services to others, and remember that they all hope to grow and employ other people as the business begins to thrive.

So it is with some angst that I’ve seen local councils, including our own in South Tyneside bureaucratically getting in the way of small businesses and using that old chestnut “Elfin safety” as an excuse to bully and harass them into removing whatever small forms of advertising they can afford.  They cry that small “A frame” boards are a severe risk to pedestrians, the disabled, wheelchair users, and the visually impaired, yet have we ever read of anyone suffering injuries in South Shields or Jarrow because they fell over a street board? They are large enough to see, in most cases easy enough to negotiate a path around (even for wheeelchair users), and even the visually impaired can detect them as they go about town.

Yet councils wave the big stick at small businesses by requiring their removal and give the appearance that they don’t care about nurturing success on their patch, meanwhile these very same councils are quite happy to accept decent sums of cash from businesses to advertise in their publications and in their public buildings, or to erect “sponsored” road signs (such as we see in South Tyneside at various roundabouts) or to put “sponsored” waste bins in our path as we traverse our high streets in a case of  “do it our way, or no way at all“. I find it all a bit hypocritical.

So it’s good to see that at least in South Tyneside some sort of rethink is being undertaken.

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Gut News just gets better

I’ll be honest I haven’t had a great deal of time to write blog posts recently, either about national politics or local news and politics here in South Tyneside, but I have been helping to put South Shields and the surrounding area on the map through South Shields Daily Pictures which is attracting thousands of visitors every day  and attracting many comments from people in the Aminus3 community and beyond. That is where most of my focus and attention has gone these past few weeks, but I try not to forget here and I see that local issues are, as ever, interesting, controversial, and engaging!

We haven’t had a weekend entertainment posts for some time and I’d like to share this week’s Guy News with you, Guido, Tory Bear, and Emily Nomates are improving greatly as a team and the production of the videos are almost as good as anything you will find on BBC2. So here is this weekend’s Guy News covering McBride, Whelan, Pickles, Brown, and the funding of the Labour Party – enjoy!

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Social networking is the way to go!

It’s great these days how MPs, councillors, and even some South Tyneside politicians are using social networking sites such as Twitter or Facebook to help us stay in touch with their activities. It lends an air of openness and honesty to their campaigning activities don’t you think?

Just as important is the link from the longer version websites, to the shorter 140 character précis pieces, which is why the South Tyneside Independents say on their blog based website

“Follow South Tyneside Independents on Twitter”

Which is great, you get to see the full RSS feed of their Tweets, but if you want to delve any deeper than the cursory headlines you find that you need to be a sort of a member of an exclusive club to get the full story!

Years of berating other political parties in South Tyneside for a lack of candour does not seem to have altered their ability of behaving just like copy cat clones.

No chance of change then.

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I’m offline

Typing this from a friend’s PC, I have suffered some self inflicted damage to my own (which now refuses to boot), so may be offline for a few days until I get it sorted. Currently looking for a Windows boot CD, and a boot virus cleaner. If worse comes to the worst I will reinstall Windows (or perhaps a Linux distro) and start again from scratch, I don’t want to take this option because I will have lost a huge address book of useful email addresses and telephone numbers.

Fingers crossed, I hope to be back soon.

Update 8:15 pm

Corrupted boot.ini file and mbr fixed, all data saved, just need to collect all of the Windows updates now to be fully back in business. Lesson learned the hard way!

Apologies for the absence.

Former Labour councillor in return effort

An interesting snippet of information has just come my way, following Jarrow Labour Party’s spectacular cock up in the nomination process for the Primrose ward by election in South Tyneside (which resulted in the finding of an emergency candidate), Arthur Meeks the former Horsley Hill Labour councillor has secured the nomination to fight the Bede ward in Jarrow for Labour.

Arthur is a former chairman of the Licensing sub committee and is a trusted lieutenant of South Tyneside Council’s Labour Leader Iain Malcolm, and the South Shields man narrowly won the nomination by seven votes to six, beating Alan Smith, the husband of former councillor Moira Smith. Sources close to the meeting tell me that Arthur Meeks’ victory has caused quite a stir in the Jarrow Labour Party but that an aggressive campaign will be launched from next week to unseat the Independent Tom Defty.

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