Curly's Corner Shop, the blog!

The summer is here, so share your sunny secrets

Yes, it’s recess season, MPs, Meps, MSPs, AMs, councillors etc. all take a big break from spouting hot air and head for the hills, beaches, and the sunnier climates of the world to read a book, fulfil outside business interests,  or write their memoirs as they re-engage their first love – lucre! The rest of us can enjoy a political hiatus and witness South Tyneside’s Labour Council undergoing a chameleon like change as they rediscover their very own first love, a hatred of all things Conservative, spiced up with a little Liberal bating too. Having followed the right wing path described during the Blair/Brown years and forsaken all things socialist, they can now transform themselves into dogmatic lovers of political rivalry and proceed to cock a snook at measures proposed by the coalition government in Westminster, and so it comes to pass that choice in education and financial probity are the first topics to undergo a radical change in direction – it is all their fault, and we just love telling you that!

We all tend to try and return to our first loves, they were character forming events in our lives which gave us emotional direction and perhaps, not unnaturally, remain with us forever. We retain a fascination over what might have been, or question ourselves over where it all went wrong.

I’ve had an exciting life with a wonderful husband, wonderful children, wonderful grandchildren and wonderful great-grandchildren but every day I think of my first love; He was killed in the war. –   Mary, 1944

I messed my first love around and lost her. I saw her recently in Newcastle. She looked really happy. Three young children were calling her grandma. I was a fool! –   Martin, 1976

I met my first love at a school dance.  He proposed two years later and we’ve been happily married ever since. -Janet, 1981

I never forgot my first love. When my marriage ended I contacted her on Facebook. She’s single so I asked her out. She told me to stop living in the past. -  Roger, 1991

Curly’s first love was a girl called Denise (surname perhaps Miller), wonderful slim figure, full of life and happiness, playful and funny, with a smile that should have been used by Colgate. He last saw her clambering over the rock archway in South Shields’ North Marine Park, she was really everything that I wanted in the female species back then but I just didn’t have the “bottle” to tell her! I’d hate to think when that moment occurred, she was a fellow pupil, albeit in a different class, in Barnes Road junior school and we were both around seven or eight years old – never saw her again in my life after I passed the eleven plus and went to the Grammar School, that’s the way the cookie crumbles! I just hope she didn’t fall for a Newcastle supporter.

So what/who was your first love?

Bosses at The Customs House want you tell them, names, dates, places, experiences, thoughts and feelings.

The idea came about because of the forthcoming play called Good To Firm, which asks the question: Do you ever forget your first love?
Written by Tyneside playwrights Ed Waugh and Trevor Wood, whose comedy hits include the international successes Dirty Dusting and Waiting For Gateaux, Good To Firm will evoke memories of first love for everyone who attends. Tim Flood, Customs House marketing and programming manager, explained:

“Everyone remembers their first love. Some of the experiences may be happy, some not so happy.
“Others may be of unrequited love. Some people may still have their love letters. We want to hear them all.”

The idea is to display these first love reminiscences on a wall during the course of the play, which runs from Wednesday September 8 to Saturday 11 at the 450-seat venue.Mr Flood continued:

“What we’re after is a brief account of your first love, up to a maximum of 32 words, with your first name and the year of your first love. They can be straight accounts or poems. They can be a happy ending or a sad ending. There will be many, many individual stories about first love and we aim to use as many as possible in the display.”

The winning entry will win a pair of tickets to the opening performance of Good To Firm and a two-course meal in the Green Room.
People can either email their stories to marketing@customshouse.co.uk (subject: FIRST LOVE) or post them to the Marketing Department, The Customs House, Mill Dam, South Shields, NE33 1ES, marked First Love.

Mr Flood added:

“Good To Firm is a great comedy about first love viewed from 27 years later. It is guaranteed to make everyone who attends laugh and to think about their first love.”

Good to Firm runs from Wednesday September 8 to Saturday 11. Tickets cost £14, £12conc and are available by calling the Box Office on 0191 454 1234 or by visiting www.customshouse.co.uk

I wonder if they’d be interested in Curly’s first love, or whether they might be more excited by my story of a dance with Maggie Thatcher when I was a Young Conservative at a conference at the Spa in Scarborough back in 1978, yes I loved that woman too. Oh yeah, and whatever happened to Margaret Humby?

Do let them have your stories at The Customs House.

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Copperfield has some interesting suggestions.

Stuart Davidson is a policeman in Alberta, Canada, he used to serve in the Staffordshire constabulary and is the author of a published book “Wasting Police Time” as well as the highly successful Policeman’s Blog, writing under the pseudonym David Copperfield. He had a very interesting article published in The Daily Telegraph over the weekend highlighting some radical suggestions to reduce the Home Office budget for policing and comparing Canadian crime fighting results to British efforts, he is adamant that police budgets could be reduced by as much as 40% and still see an improved performance.

My experience tells me that you could easily slash billions from budgets and actually improve policing, which is now a job creation scheme for bureaucrats.

They could lose 40 per cent of their budget and still have more cash per capita than we do.

Of course, how you spend money is important. GMP employs 8,232 police officers in a total staff of 13,082, or one person for every 181 members of the public. My force employs about 1,400 officers and 500 civilians – one person for every 526 members of the public.

So with less money and far fewer cops, we do a better job, and there are lessons that can be learnt by British officers and their political masters.

I encourage you to read the full article and to decide if there is sufficient food for thought, and whether or not a similar model could be applied to other sectors of public service.

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The ever shrinking South Tyneside Independent Alliance

You now know “officially” what some of us have known for some time now, that Cllr. George Waddle has had enough of the Branley/Khan South Tyneside Independent Alliance grouping on South Tyneside Council, and has joined the growing list of councillors who have found that they can no longer work under the direction of Jane Branley and Ahmed Khan, leader and deputy leader respectively.

What we don’t know, precisely, are the full reasons behind George Waddle’s decision to abandon the people who gave him the supposed comfort of group strength and literary resources, nor do we know why decent councillors such as John Hodgson in Monkton and Gordon Finch in Horsley Hill choose to remain in a group where they have little or no influence over (a) their own party leadership, and  (b) wider opposition to Labour in this neck of the woods.

Jane Branley is unlikely to give up the ownership of the party in the near future, and Ahmed Khan is unlikely to enhance the reputation of the Independent Alliance in either the short or the longer term, additionally the other Branley is once again apparently finding it difficult to exercise his duties within South Shields Town Hall.

Would someone care to “spill the beans” over the real reasons why Waddle left, and over the current state of minds of Finch and Hodgson?

Just why would they want to stay?

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Cllr. Malcolm may be mistaken in directing South Tyneside’s Labour Council to oppose “academy schools”

I am a little dismayed that South Tyneside Council has decided to set it’s face against moves by some of our schools to seek academy “free” status and to seek full control for themselves over the finances, curriculum activities, management, style, and direction of their educational policies with full consultation and co-operation of their governors and parents. The exercise of choice by parents is something which Labour appears to want to challenge, and they may be in danger of blighting educational advance for pupils in some the more disadvantaged areas of the borough.

Whitburn is a prime example of a school already progressing well and wishing to push further to exceed the expectations of parents and pupils, and as Jennifer Beckles argues cogently in The Guardian (a newspaper which I am not in the habit of reading regularly enough) “free” schools set up in deprived areas could offer an improvement in morale, standards and ultimately educational achievement.

Labour leadership candidate Diane Abbott has raised these issues and spoken of the difficulties she faced in choosing a school for her son. But parental involvement in the creation of new schools could inspire other parents to get involved in school life and to engage meaningfully with their children’s education. Research shows that where this is the case, children achieve more. These types of schools are also more likely to understand and act on the issues that matter to parents.

Where there are knowledge or skills gaps, support could be gained from schemes such as the Future Leaders programme, a charitable trust which has a team of qualified school leaders trained in new school startups. Crucially, parent-created schools will help to break down the barriers between schools and families so that parents don’t feel intimidated when they walk into a school, or out of their depth in discussions with staff.

Some argue that free schools could lead to elitism as only certain types of families will want their children to attend. But if a free school is deliberately set up in a deprived area to help disadvantaged kids, how can this charge hold?

Despite the scheme being not too far removed from Labour’s academy ideas, it seems that some local parties, including South Tyneside’s have decided to take a political stand against the wishes and choices of parents, educationalists, and governing bodies, much to the discredit of local politicians. Indeed Labour’s South Tyneside leader Cllr. Iain Malcolm has taken to task one of the governors of Whitburn school, former Labour councillor Shirley Stratford who has been summarily sacked from her position as a school governor, where she was supporting the wishes of the teaching staff and the parents. By warning that any other LEA governors who wish to support parents and teachers in setting up “free academy schools” will also be removed from their positions Cllr. Malcolm is making it perfectly plain that he is looking for a fight with parents and forward looking teachers.

Shame on him, he has, with this stance, formed and moulded a political football, and the education of our children deserves the chance to prosper and flourish in new environments free from external influence, and not be kicked around by local political minions in a Labour Party devoid of national direction! I fear that the governors of Harton Technology College in South Shields and St Joseph’s RC Comprehensive in Hebburn may also come in for some “special treatment” from brother Malcolm.

One hopes that as the coalition government rolls out it’s plans for a council tax freeze that Cllr. Malcolm doesn’t play Big Brother in big boots to force local Labour councillors to oppose that too!

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Compare and contrast

The Independent, Tuesday 13th. October 2009

Keeping the Lockerbie bomber Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al-Megrahi in prison would have damaged British interests, Foreign Secretary David Miliband has said.

The Herald, Tuesday 20th. July 2010

Labour leadership contender David Miliband has condemned the decision to release the man convicted of the Lockerbie bombing as clearly wrong.

Clearly, being a Labour Cabinet minister or Foreign Secretary does strange things to the South Shields MP.

By the way, I’m doing software rebuilds on my desktop and laptop, it’s time to refresh and renew, so I may be away for a couple of days.

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There is a South Shields link to this story

Click the picture to learn more

You can generate your own Bart Simpson blackboard picture here

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This man needs taking to task!

“I do believe the coalition Government’s direction will have a significant impact on reducing job creation opportunities and sustainable employment if it continues to cut, without consideration for the social implications of such an approach.”

Cuts Michael, what cuts?

Don’t you remember that we already know that public expenditure was set to rise in the Budget announced by George Osborne?

Don’t you remember that we are actually talking about the reduction in the size of the growth in public expenditure?

Don’t you remember that Labour’s last Chancellor Alastair Darling heralded “cuts deeper and more severe than those applied in the Thatcher years” if they were returned to power?

Don’t you remember that the two major parties argued over a paltry £6bn worth of economies in the growth of public expenditure at the last election?

Coun Michael Clare, South Tyneside Council’s lead member for jobs, enterprise and regeneration, said the national situation will not get any better if the coalition Government continues its “brutal” cuts.

I guess you must mean the “brutal” rate of increase in public expenditure then Michael (in case you had forgotten).

However, just in case I forget, this is just the sort of language and reversion to type that I was expecting Labour members of South Tyneside to exhibit in the event that any bad news should befall this borough, little point in blaming the current economic situation on the party that created it (your own, in case you had forgotten) when there are good Conservatives and Liberal Democrats to pile the blame upon.

Just in case you have forgotten Michael, the election was less than ten weeks ago, remember? If the coalition government was four years old then perhaps we might be able to give your comments some credence, but seeing as it isn’t and the effects of Darling’s last budget have yet to feed through into the real economy, then frankly we cannot. If perhaps you had been humble enough to admit that Labour had left us with one or two problems and perhaps even given a short apology for the economic and fiscal ineptitude of a socialist government that once again ran out of other people’s money, I might have been more impressed. Instead your selective amnesia and eagerness to run to the default position of decrying evil Tory “cuts” does you a great disservice young man!

Now, then, how many jobs did the Labour Party manage to create in South Tyneside in the last thirteen years? Well there was a call centre on the riverside………….

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Pity that he couldn’t have managed this when in government eh?

Considering that the Prince of Darkness has revealed that Brown did everything that he could to woo David Miliband to his right hand side when in government, the South Shields MP politely declined the invitation, apparently Brown feared a leadership fight against Miliband, yet young David never did quite have the stomach for it in the first place.

One has to wonder at the ultimate ambitions of our MP, who has found it increasingly difficult to visit South Shields since the ill fated Brown called the election,  and also wonder at his inability to articulate himself as Labour’s fortunes nosedived under the unelected Scotsman’s leadership. Now Miliband feels free to point out the high handedness, the weaknesses, and the failure to renew Labour’s political offer, he says that he didn’t feel ready to be a Prime Minister when we all expected him to lead a  bloodless coup against Brown, and that in his judgement he thought his decision to acquiesce was in the country’s best interests – history has shown that it was probably not in the Labour Party’s best interest.

I find it incredible that he and other Cabinet ministers felt powerless at the time that Brown and Darling decided to abolish the 10p tax rate, a decision which met widespread derision in the country, were they all living in morbid fear of the then Prime Minister? By agreeing to the “settled will” within the higher reaches of the Labour Party that they should stick with Brown he reveals a mentality since exposed in the newspapers that many of them were expecting a heavy defeat and preparing then for a period in opposition.

I find this terribly odd when the chances are that a change in leader may well have resulted in a much closer result in May. Miliband acknowledges that the Conservative/Lib-Dem coalition is strengthening its grip on power and is unlikely to be unseated or damaged in the near future, and then bizarrely states that Labour must remain the party of economic competence! I ask you, after the mountains of debt, the huge budget deficit, the growth in unemployment, the destruction of savings and pensions, and the reduction in Britain’s credit rating, competence David?

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Classified documents reveal no real libertarian intents

So David Miliband, the South Shields MP, may well continue to feel some heat over the last Labour government’s position on torturing our own citizens and “rendering” them to third countries where the real question remains whether “detention, rather than killing, is the objective of the operation”, but today’s article in the Guardian also reveals that despite Clegg and Cameron making all sorts of sweet sounds about liberal free thinking principles, in reality the status quo will be maintained.

Cameron also made clear that the sort of material that has so far been made public with the limited disclosure in the Guantánamo cases would be kept firmly under wraps during the inquiry. “Let’s be frank, it is not possible to have a full public inquiry into something that is meant to be secret,” he said. “So any intelligence material provided to the inquiry panel will not be made public and nor will intelligence officers be asked to give evidence in public.”

Right, let’s keep everything under wraps in case we are seen to be collaborating in various methods of torture, which historically have produced poor questionable evidence as those suffering are prepared to say whatever is required of them in order to escape the physical and mental pain and anguish. Surely as a liberal western democracy we are above these ridiculous medieval inquisitions, we surely have the intelligence resources and technologies to gather evidence without resorting to such sub human methods. To treat people in a manner as bad as that used to experiment on rodents in pursuit of the perfect lipstick is an anachronism which we all should condemn.

It (the coalition government) also wishes to preserve what it calls “liaison relationships” – operational links with overseas intelligence agencies, including those known to use torture – on the grounds that they are a vital part of the country’s counter terrorism strategy.

Vital? Oh really?
Perhaps that’s why they are embarking on a programme of seeking mediation with those British subjects who have suffered at the hands of brutal operatives in third countries and who have yet to face any real charges under British law, or even find themselves convicted.

The protection of the status quo does nothing at all to improve our reputation in the rendition business, nor anything at all to improve the perception that the new government is simply failing to manage the policy makers in the Foreign and Commonwealth Office.

Change of government = change of managers, not change of policy!

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Case brought out best and worst in people

This is a picture of PC David Rathband, the policeman shot at almost point blank range by Raoul Moat as he sat in his police car in Newcastle, I make no apologies for including it here. PC Rathband was quite sure he was going to die and asked paramedics to tell his wife and small children that he loved them very much, let us remember now that he was a family man like many others of us in the north-east, he was only doing his job, a job which serves the public and carries, at times, enormous risks. Moat cared not a jot for PC Rathband or his family, just as he neglected any feelings at all for his former girlfriend Samantha Stobbart when he blasted her with a shotgun,  nor her new boyfriend Chris Brown who he shot dead with two cartridges in a callous deliberate act of murder.

Along with many others in South Shields I watched events play themselves out in Rothbury last Friday evening in a very public stand off covered by television news channels hoping that Moat might see the sense in giving up his weapon and delivering himself to the police, but alas events took a different turn, in a way that some had predicted when the felon discharged the weapon at his own head.

The whole episode since his release from prison saw variously the best and the worst in people from the north east and the sections of the media reporting the news, which amplified some of the tensions already existing between the public and the police. It was the actions of neighbourly well spirited people which gave the police the leads that they needed to track Moat down from Vigo to Rothbury, and it was the responsible journalists who responded correctly to Northumbria Police requests when they needed news blackouts and when they needed additional publicity to generate public cooperation. These actions undoubtedly resulted in fewer people being exposed to Moats fragile state of mind whilst in possession of a deadly firearm.

However, his boastful remarks of being in a war against the police have brought out the worst in others, allowing them to express themselves by leaving flowers at the scene of his death and at the scene of his other alleged crimes, the setting up of a Facebook “sympathy” page has also allowed these deluded people to gather together to create a rather silly looking image for people from the north east. It is no surprise that Prime Minister David Cameron has criticised these moves and proclaimed that there can be “no sympathy” for the callous murderer Moat.  Personally, although I find there is some merit in Simon Heffer’s arguments yesterday, I find the “sympathy for Moat movement” to be demeaning for the people of the north east, embarrassing to witness, and likely to provide the rest of the UK with the stereotypical imaging that they like to use to portray us as “thick northerners” – and nothing could be further from the truth!

Heffer’s somewhat misogynistic views don’t help his case, neither does his description of the folk of Rothbury as being “morally sub normal” (someone needs to educate him that Moat and his small band of followers are almost without exception resident many miles away from Rothbury, and the majority of folks interviewed in the town last Friday were clearly not originally from this region), however certain passages ring true and describe better the life of Moat the monster than the anti hero, especially when recalling the thoughts of another ex girlfriend:

Moat, according to her, engaged in acts that many men and women would not want to include in their domestic lives. He raped her. He would tie her up and flog her with a belt. He throttled her until she fainted. He hit her on her spine with a baseball bat. He kneed her in the face. She described him as “a living, breathing monster”. I for one would not seek to disagree with her.

Come on folks, do you really want to belittle this region by sympathising with someone who behaves like this?

Heffer touches on a note of dissatisfaction with our police forces and he may have a very salient point after the thirteen wasted years when greater and greater volumes of legislation have been dumped upon the heads of Chief Constables, who somehow have to manage their men and women in the prosecution of laws, many of which are more difficult to understand. The pressure built during the Blair and Brown years when public services became target driven led to a different type of police force than we were earlier used to, as they became more remote and too many beat officers were tied up behind desks completing mountains of forms and paperwork, by the end of the NuLabour regime Neighbourhood policing had become a “buzzword” in some forces, and in others this community aspect was carried out by volunteer uniformed “replacements”.

The police are good at mobilising themselves for murderers, rapists, abductors of children and possibly armed robbers. They are exceptionally good, too, at catching people who commit minor motoring offences. For the vast mass of crime in the middle – theft, burglary, mugging, flouting of the drugs laws and so on – they are utterly useless. Their role extends little beyond supplying a crime number to a victim so that a claim may be made on the victim’s insurance. That part of the operation might as well be privatised and sold to Lloyd’s. It is much easier to sit in a layby and catch someone driving over the speed limit than it is to retrieve the precious possessions of a family that has been burgled, so why try? That is how the public see the police, and it won’t do.

There is much to acknowledged there, and Heffer may well have caught the public mood, perceptions are often worth more than the realities, yet the reality is that our police forces have been driven off course by the battering of new legislation and target achieving, they no longer have the time or will to build rapport and community cohesion and have been weakened by top down pressures that have resulted in better figures but poorer reputations. Cameron and May have decided that there needs to be a bonfire of vanities in respect of some of the laws passed by NuLabour, something which is long overdue but will play but a small part in the rebuilding of trust between the police and the public, a trust that can only flourish with fewer simpler to understand laws which allow police men and women to get out of stations and into communities.

Perhaps then, all together, we can begin to relearn some common values of what is right and what is wrong and help each other to become “self policing” in a manner than does not require much more than common sense and common purpose. The Home Secretary and the Prime Minister along with Nick Clegg and his websites, face a huge challenge in finding those common moral values, as a quick read through the comments to Heffer’s article reaffirms that incidents such as this really have brought out the best and worst of people.

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