Hot food take aways

Have your say on Waynetta’s World

I made a post on April 16th criticising the lifestyle choices of some our residents in South Shields who seem unhappy with the idea of cooking a meal for their family and putting a reliance on the growth of hot food take away shops, I described the situation as “Waynetta’s World”. It brought a couple of interesting bu t contrasting comments, one had a distinctly liberal free market position the other was more pragmatic. However, sometimes the free market can create what we want at the expense of things that we really really want, and by allowing unfettered access to our High streets we could see normal shops being displaced by hot food take away outlets, in the same manner as grey squirrels displacing red squirrels.

It isn’t what we really really want.

As I set out in my previous post, education could be an enormous tool but it’s effect is subject to drag, i.e. it is going to take two or three years to have an appreciable effect. In the mean time we need to carefully plan our retail centres so that they offer a good mix, a variety of outlets, that serve the general needs of their communities. There would be little point in having a street full of estate agents (I mention this because Fowler Street in South Shields has been allowed to lose too much of it’s retail frontage in my opinion.)

South Tyneside Council now have a draft planning policy statement for hot food take aways setting out the criteria for allowing planning permission, and giving a vision for our retail areas. The council is inviting our comments until Monday June 30th. so now is a good time to think about making your opinions known, they say that our input will influence the final decision on a concrete policy on “Waynetta’s World”.

My own view is that two hot food take aways adjacent to one another is one too many, and that a lot of upper floors are unused and wasted. We could fit more in if people really really need them, by allowing them to operate at first floor level (subject to DDA restrictions) thus freeing up more general retail frontage. It’s good to be consulted and asked for an opinion, but a nice webform that allows me to make my comments online would be far more “switched on” and convenient.

I guess we can use this email address (ldf@southtyneside.gov.uk) to send comments to, at least that’s what I did.

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This needs clarity

Bag for life scheme

South Tyneside shoppers will be given the chance to ditch plastic carriers and bag themselves a more environmentally friendly ‘bag for life’ next week.

Wonderful scheme, I’m all for us shoppers re-using a bag for life, we did it years ago and I’m sure we can do it again now. The use of supermarket carrier bags is extremely wasteful and damages our environment. However, I’d like to know if the scheme is being used to distribute the supermarket’s branded bags or whether South Tyneside Council has spent money to produce it’s own bags, the article isn’t clear on this. If the supermarkets have been encouraged to give away their own bags than I assume there will be a small cost to them,and I hope that the council tax payer is not reimbursing that cost. We could use some clarification here.

With the government hinting that it may legislate sometime in the future over plastic carrier bags and South Shields shoppers already becoming more aware of the availability of bags for life at the checkouts, I wonder if our ‘re-education’ is being achieved with our own money?

I note that Tesco who are to bring value to Hebburn town centre are only prepared to help out the first 400 customers- more reasons to shop at Jarrow?

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Snooping on local communities

Hazel Blears’ guidance to authorities like South Tyneside

Via the excellent Spyblog

Hazel Blears, the chipmunk faced NuLabour minister has introduced a guidance paper for local councils, such as our own, which is nothing less than a snooper’s charter! She wishes to set up “tension monitoring” groups so citizens can provide a conduit to government departments and let them know about the major problems being faced on our estates and the sort of data that Blears wants to collate includes;

• quantitative data (e.g. police crime statistics and intelligence reports)
• qualitative community intelligence from neighbourhood wardens, community workers, casework by local councillors and feedback from local community meetings and organisations
• racially or religiously motivated offences or incidents
• details of new arrivals, refugees and asylum seekers, and Gypsy and Traveller communities in the local area
• gang and turf conflicts
• neighbour disputes

Heaven only knows why the government should be told about neighbour disputes over footballs landing in gardens, poorly maintained fences, and loud televisions. What else would these “tension groups” monitor?

• surveys of community views on reassurance, cohesion and safety matters
• state of local economic activity (decline or improvement)
• financial and social investment in the area
• demand for housing and condition of the local housing stock
• plans for renewal and the sustainability of planned or actual improvements
• political extremism

Political extremism? Who the hell is going to decide what that constitutes? My neighbour complaining about a new hotel and setting up a protest group to collect signatures on a petition perhaps, or how about me learning that a bloke in the pub has joined the BNP? Should I tell the local council’s monitoring group about this obviously extremist, misguided, but quite legal activity? Would it be extremist to disagree with just about anything that South Tyneside Council decided to do? Is it right that the local police should involve themselves in the collation of information about people’s political motivations and beliefs?

She also wants to monitor the media in misguided efforts to assess community tensions - so you’d better be prepared to stay “on message”. What on earth does this say about freedom of thought and expression?

Spyblog provides an example of the insidious “tension monitoring form” and notes;

there is no mechanism for error correction or appeal, and no sanctions against abuse of power by officials, who will be trying to use the exemptions under the Data Protection Act and the Freedom of Information Act to keep this all secret from the public.

The guidance paper even includes advice on how to circumvent the Freedom of Information Act and the Data Protection Act.

The creepy words “horizon scanning” linked to Civil Contingencies Act 2004 Emergency Planning also sneak into this document - exactly the same language as is used by MI5 the Security Service and the Metropolitan Police Counter-terrorism Command, when they talk of data warehousing and the “Rich Picture” to identify “threats”.

There are times that I despair about the measures that NuLabour are prepared to consider to reduce, erode, and destroy long held and defended civil liberties in this country, and this piece of paper is yet another example of feckless unthinking politicians creating the conditions that would prove ideal for a corrupt government planning to build a police state!

Would South Tyneside councillor Joanne Bell care to offer an assurance that this ridiculous guidance will be effectively ignored by our local council, our communities will be stronger and  safer without it.

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South Tyneside Onview

Let’s go green and scrap it!

Having been alerted to the activities and emergent popularity of Boris johnson and his latest moves to both save money and improve London’s environment, I thought perhaps we ought to be doing the same sort of things in South Tyneside.

“There was little commitment of resources from Ken Livingstone to reverse the trend of decline in the number of street trees. I am taking immediate action to reverse this short-sighted decision. In the last few years a third of boroughs have seen a decline in the number of street trees. Many London streets, particularly in deprived areas, have no street trees at all. I believe that as many areas as possible should enjoy the many advantages that street trees bring. So today I have taken the decision to cut unnecessary funding of the Mayor’s personal publicity budget to plant 10,000 street trees by the end of my first term. Trees improve the street environment in which Londoners live and work so I will do all I can to save the trees we have and campaign for more trees to protect London’s open spaces.”

I wonder how many trees we could plant in South Shields or Jarrow with the money that could be saved by scrapping South Tyneside’s Onview magazine?

Considering that we have a reasonably good council website and a cooperative local newspaper to disseminate information, surely it’s worth a thought?

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Super new lights

Modern new look to sea front

In the relamping and revitalising programme for our street lights in South Tyneside, Balfour Beatty and South Tyneside Council have introduced a very modernising look to the sea front in South Shields. As part of the £63m contract new lamp standards with eco friendly energy saving bulbs are replacing the older ones. Take a look at the new look that has been introduced in the stretch from the Sea Hotel to Ghandi’s Temple, the design is really great, I love it. The lamp standards have a pronounced tapered curve to them with a much smaller lamp holder at the top, a very modernistic design indeed.

I didn’t have a camera with me when I passed by earlier this morning but I’ll produce a picture later in the day, I think you will like the look of the area, it’s very imaginative, should look great when both sides of the roads are finished.

Click the thumbnail to enlarge

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What a waste

Britain throws away £10bn of food every year

It’s the talking point of the morning, Dizzy Thinks picked it up at an early hour and Victoria Derbyshire is debating it on Radio 5 Live right now, after this article appeared in today’s Independent.

Each day, according to the government-backed report, Britons throw away 4.4 million apples, 1.6 million bananas, 1.3 million yoghurt pots, 660,000 eggs, 550,000 chickens, 300,000 packs of crisps and 440,000 ready meals. And for the first time government researchers have established that most of the food waste is made up of completely untouched food products – whole chickens and chocolate gateaux that lie uneaten in cupboards and fridges before being discarded.

The roll call of daily waste costs an average home more than £420 a year but for a family with children the annual cost rises to £610.

The Environment minister, Joan Ruddock, said:

“These findings are staggering in their own right, but at a time when global food shortages are in the headlines this kind of wastefulness becomes even more shocking. This is costing consumers three times over. Not only do they pay hard-earned money for food they don’t eat, there is also the cost of dealing with the waste this creates. And there are climate- change costs to all of us of growing, processing, packaging, transporting and refrigerating food that only ends up in the bin. Preventing waste in the first place has to remain a top priority.”

Dizzy sees a law of unintended consequences as the nanny state tells us to get rid of food that is near, on, or past it’s use by date, and wonders if the Independent would scream the same big headlines if it were found out that we were consuming food that carried the slightest risk that it was “going off”. Derbyshire’s programme is carrying the full gamut of opinions from those calling us all greedy, even though we are going through a period of world food shortages and price rises, and those who call themselves “freegans” existing on a diet of food thrown out by others (yes there are such people in Britain who eat quite healthily by this method.) The anti consumerist/corporatist lobby isw also in there too blaming the supermarkets - it’s all their fault that we make the decisions that we do about food.

One of the best quotes that I heard this morning came from a “freegan” on the radio;

“There’s more than enough to cater for our needs, but not enough to cater for our greed”.

And this perhaps is the point that Dizzy misses, we make poor choices and our decisions are not rational when it comes to food shopping, sure supermarkets have tried and tested methods of promoting products (buy one get one free, buy a pack of six at a discounted rate etc.) but too many people have a lifestyle that dictates one big weekly shop instead of perhaps shopping a little more often and only buying what we essentially need. We are all prone to falling for the impulse purchase as we wander around the supermarkets filling our trolley to capacity, and they do make a point of putting the big promotional deals on gondola ends where we are more likely to see them. On those special occasions during the year such as Christmas and Easter we go out and behave as though we imagine the shops will be closed for a week, when in most cases the supermarkets will be closed for no more than a day or too whils your local shops will probably remain open. Without doubt I have seen families shopping in Asda and Tesco in South Shields filling three or four trollies at these times of year knowing full well that the contents of one of those trollies will be wasted as the food “goes off” before we have a chance to eat it.

It all seems rather mad!

I cannot agree with those who blame the supermarkets for this behaviour, it’s our choice yet we don’t tend to make the right choice, and I accept Dizzy’s point that we even make the wrong choices once we get the food home and into the fridge. Supermarkets have got much better at managing their own waste, food which is nearing it’s sell by date is often reduced to move it off the shelf quicker, there is no advantage to them in filling their skips with waste food (they pay a high price for having their waste collected so they like to cut the costs here too.) Smaller outlets and local shops also have mechanisms in place to reduce the amount of waste they produce, I like to recall the name used by one of my former work colleagues who describes a shop in Frederick Street, South Shields as “second hand Greggs”, it may sound disrespectful but the company is using this one outlet to sell off it’s products at discounted rates simply because they are now 24 hours old, but at least they are not throwing it all away. Others have arrangements to have food waste collected and reprocessed and recycled as animal feeds, again to prevent waste collection charges and as a positive measure to reduce landfill.

So business and retailers are doing their bit, it is the consumer who is failing to recognise the consequences of their own poor choices and decisions that results in such a mountain of waste, yet it need not be so. My mother made a virtue of using left overs to make a second nutritional meal for the family, my father even recycled chicken bones to make soups, and by consuming little and more often we are likely to buy only the things we really need rather than over indulging our fantasies about what we can actually eat in a week.

It may not help the “freegans” if we waste less, it may not help Tesco if we buy less, but hey it might help the family budget as food prices rise and shortages become more apparent. Market, price, supply, and demand, more often than not help to even things out, that’s the beauty of Adam Smith’s invisible hand.

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Fair deal for motorists

Costs of motoring have doubled under Labour

Twelve years ago I worked in Bishop Auckland and made the return trip from South Shields in a small car with a petrol tank of roughly the same size as I have now, 40 litres. Twelve years ago, as John Major’s government was getting ready to cede it’s authority to the electorate and welcome the Blair/Brown partnership, I used to shop around to fill my tank for less than £15, today I shop around to fill it for less than £50! Add to my costs the inexorable rises in Road Tax, insurance, general maintenance etc. and you can see that the price of motoring has more than doubled during the term of Labour’s tenure.

Figures compiled by the AA show that the average motorist pays more than £1,800 annually in fuel duty, car tax, VAT on petrol and other levies – an increase of more than 50 per cent in little more than a decade.

Luckily, being now retired, I am not obliged to drive the same amount of miles as I did ten years ago, but many are, I know scores of South Shields people who drive up to 40 miles to get to their place of work. The revenue that the government takes from motorists has risen from £31bn in 1997 to an expected £50bn this year, an increase of well over 50%, motorists are being unfairly punished by a government that seems to have declared war on them. What really stinks as far as many average families are concerned is the retrospective tax increase for cars bought over the past seven years, so those who have tried to save money by making their vehicle last longer are to be hit again by another hefty increase in Road Tax. We even get taxed on our insurance policy these days!

The Daily Telegraph has launched a campaign aimed at getting the government to redress the balance, Gordon Brown has vowed to listen us all these days you know, and it is supported by motrists’ groups, MPs, and charities.

Edmund King, the AA president, said:

“This campaign is needed because it appears the car is seen and taxed as a luxury rather than a necessity. Motorists are now taxed at a higher rate than champagne drinkers but for the vast majority of people driving is an absolute necessity.

“The high taxes are now affecting people’s lives and families are having to cut back on other areas of spending to pay for their cars. What is really hitting people are these plans for retrospective taxes.

“The Prime Minister should now be listening to these concerns.”

Being a bit of a cynic when it comes to this global warming and CO2 emissions thing (I’m still trying to be convinced that it isn’t just a scam to raise revenue for western governments) I’d like to see just where this government is spending this revenue and what on, it certainly doesn’t look as though it’s being spent on repairing roads, or planting new forests or investing in recycling plants to produce biofuel from congealed vegetable oils! There is plenty of evidence, however, of it throwing money at local councils like South Tyneside to allow them to put back breaking humps along every thirty yards of each street that they can find, just be grateful you are travelling in a car rather than an ambulance! Some of our streets are so disfigured by these humps that there is little chance of the next Warney Cresswell being found playing football in our borough!

Ronnie Campbell the MP for Blyth is also expressing his “concern”, especially over the plight of his rural constituents in Northumberland, it may surprise him to learn that many folks from South Shields are feeling the pinch day in, day out, as they travel through the Tyne Tunnel to work in places like Ashington, Cramlington, Newbiggin, and Killingworth. These are places where it is virtually impossible to get to on public transport for 6.00am to start a day at work.

Give us all a break Gordon.

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Global warming might stop

Scientific paper predicts halt in temperature rise.

So a scientific paper for Nature suggests that there will be a temporary halt in global warming - do you get the feeling, that after a number of recent reports suggesting that the northern Atlantic ice fields are larger than they have been for the last fifteen years, and that the northern hemisphere’s temperature has been lower this winter than at any time over the past fifty years, that these scientists are all in a tizzy and just cannot agree on how or why the earth’s climate changes so often?

Commenting on the new study, Richard Wood of the Hadley Centre said the model suggested the weakening of the MOC (meridional overturning circulation) would have a cooling effect around the North Atlantic.

“Such a cooling could temporarily offset the longer-term warming trend from increasing levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.

“That emphasises once again the need to consider climate variability and climate change together when making predictions over timescales of decades.”

They are scrabbling around for answers, they just aren’t too sure yet, there are too many words like projections, models, accuracy, and uncertain.

Meanwhile regular global warming critic John Coleman founder of The Weather Channel in the USA has hit out once again describing the concept of global warming as ;

“the greatest scam in history”

“Some dastardly scientists with environmental and political motives manipulated long term scientific data to create in [sic] allusion of rapid global warming.”

“Other scientists of the same environmental whacko type jumped into the circle to support and broaden the “research” to further enhance the totally slanted, bogus global warming claims. Their friends in government steered huge research grants their way to keep the movement going. Soon they claimed to be a consensus.

“Environmental extremists, notable politicians among them, then teamed up with movie, media and other liberal, environmentalist journalists to create this wild “scientific” scenario of the civilization threatening environmental consequences from Global Warming unless we adhere to their radical agenda.

“Now their ridiculous manipulated science has been accepted as fact and become a cornerstone issue for CNN, CBS, NBC, the Democratic Political Party, the Governor of California, school teachers and, in many cases, well informed but very gullible environmental conscientious citizens.

“Only one reporter at ABC has been allowed to counter the Global Warming frenzy with one 15 minutes documentary segment.”

“I have read dozens of scientific papers. I have talked with numerous scientists. I have studied. I have thought about it. I know I am correct.

“There is no run away climate change. The impact of humans on climate is not catastrophic. Our planet is not in peril.”

Me - I still remain to be convinced, there is a nagging doubt at the back of my head, maybe I’m a conspiracy theorist, but I keep asking myself “What if?” Hard facts appear to come from only one direction, those with alternative sets of numbers are drowned out by the noise, there seems to me to be an intolerance on behalf of those who think they know the answers (IPCC) to even listen to scientists who are researching alternative theories and claim to have different answers. I’m also of the opinion that the best recycler of materials and energy that we currently know of is mother earth herself. The earth’s evolution pre-dates mankind by millions of years and might even outlast mankind itself, she appears to have her own mechanisms for readjustment and more natural power to evolve to suit her needs than we perhaps realise.

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Defragged!

Apologies for the lack of posts today

Every now and then you need to give your pc a good clean out, get rid of old files, find duplicated files, back up your documents and settings, back up ‘my computer’, save all of your music, pictures, documernts, and essential software to disc, and then delete them from the hard drives to save or create space.

The registry requires cleaning, ram needs to be reorganised and optimised, tcp settings need to be optimised, and then your volumes or partitions to be defragmented otherwise the whole machine starts to slow down. It’s a bit like spring cleaning your house!

So that’s what I’ve been up to most of today and while these volumes were being defragmented I took a good long leisurely walk through Marsden’s old quarry and the Crags in South Shields, taking my brother’s advice to carry the long lens and keep an eye open for kestrels. The weather was perfect, warm and sunny with just a little breeze, there were people on South Shields golf course enjoying a round, and dog walkers in plentiful supply. With the sky being almost blue with just a few high clouds the views to the north and west were superb and even St. James’ Park in Newcastle was able to be seen (as Prince Charles might have said “like a huge carbuncle on the face of humanity”.) However, I didn’t spot the kestrels.

I managed to come back with some useful material for South Shields Daily Photo which will be featured over the coming days, and I also managed to escape the cacophony of noise generated by some the political wannabes driving around town with megaphones mounted on their chariots blaring out “the line” on who we should vote for on Thursday. Despite the pilot tests in recent years on new voting methods to encourage greater electoral participation (vote by text, by email, via internet, by post etc.) it seems that the old tried and tested ways still have their advantages in South Shields, besides, the “pilots” singularly failed to increase turnout. Thursday will probably prove the point that political engagement is still lacklustre throughout the country, don’t expect any massive turnouts breaching the 40% barrier anywhere other than London.

If you get a chance, say tomorrow, to have some exercise in a more rural environment, take a close look at how many plastic bags are snagged on hawthorns, brambles, and gorse bushes, see how many empty bottles and cans are buried in the undergrowth, and then you can decide how well your local council deals with waste and how well our education system is working with the youth of our generation.

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The ugly gasometer

What would you do with it?

Looking at the agenda for the meeting of South Tyneside Council’s Cabinet meeting on Wednesday I see that they are to consider the recommendations of the Resources and Regeneration Scrutiny committee, and somewhere in that report is a reference to the ugly gasometer in Oyston Street, South Shields.

Of course, if you were to build a new town centre from scratch you wouldn’t choose to drop one of these ugly, but necessary, monstrosities into it’s heart would you? However it was put there many years ago when we were more or less in control of our own energy supplies (pre Gazprom days) and perhaps we are kind of stuck with it now. However the scrutiny committee report appears to make no specific recommendation about the old gasometer, so what would you prefer to happen with it?

Personally, I’d like to see some application for a community grant or charitable funding to create South Shields biggest ever community art project. I’d like to see the old brute painted with some pictures illustrating the energy and vitality of our young people in South Tyneside. I can envisage gigantic eggs cracked open on it’s lower half with a variety of happy smiling faces of all colours and creeds rising out of the top half. Something, bright, innovative, and cheerful - just like enterprising Geordie kids!

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