The town hall clock seems to have stopped. Whether this is indicative of our failing Labour Council administration I will leave for others to judge…
Archive for March, 2008
This evening I attended the City of Salford Conservative Federation AGM and I am very pleased that our local members had confidence enough in me to elect me as Deputy Chairman for a second year. We’ve got a really strong team of Association officers from right across the City and together with our excellent team of candidates (more on that soon I’m sure) I know we can deliver a positive Conservative vision for a City that has been let down badly by Labour.
Our new officer team is as follows:
Chairman: Cllr Robin Garrido
Deputy Chairman (Political & Campaigns): Cllr Iain Lindley
Deputy Chairman (Membership & Fundraising): Yan-Nin Cockayne
Honorary Treasurer: David Lewis
Honorary Secretary: Cllr Liz Hill
Constituency representatives: Judith Tope and Christine Allcock
Conservative Group Leader (ex-officio): Cllr Karen Garrido
As a political activist, stories like this one have me running for cover in more ways than one. I hope the forecast is wrong, I could do with a nice sunny few weeks leading up to the local elections!
That said, we are due poor weather on polling day. In 2006 and 2007 the sun shone brightly as people headed out to vote!
Just a quick reminder for local residents that the next meeting of the Walkden & Little Hulton Community Committee will be held next Monday (31st March) at Walkden Congregational Church on Harriet Street. The meeting starts at 6pm and all local residents are more than welcome to attend. Hope to see you there!
Today’s Manchester Evening News has caught up with Cameron’s latest visit to Salford. Hazel will be delighted…
I was pleased to read today that Smiths fan David Cameron has finally managed to thwart the Salford Labour Party spoilsports and have his picture taken outside Salford Lads’ Club.
Perhaps now Hazel Blears can spend less time on pointless, pathetic vendettas against opposition politicians and actually concentrate on making things better for local residents and communities in her Salford constituency.
I’m not holding my breath though.
On 1st April, thanks to the Labour Government of which Salford MP Hazel is an integral part, thousands of hard-working but lower-income families across the City will pay significantly more income tax due to the abolition of the 10% rate of tax.
This follows on from the huge double-whammy of the withdrawal of Salford’s LABGI grant (earmarked to pay for the Philharmonic orchestra) and the worst formula grant settlement for Salford City Council in decades, both decisions the responsibility of the Department of Communities and Local Government (Secretary of State, one Hazel Blears MP - clearly no relation!).
This itself follows on from the decision made by the Labour Government to close the excellent maternity and neo-natal services at Salford Royal (Hope) Hospital, and the decisions made by Salford City Council’s Labour administration to close good schools which give excellent service to their local communities.
Locally and nationally, the Labour Party have let Salford down. It’s time for a change!
Salford Labour have got themselves into a spin over Peel Holdings - there’s a bit of a rant on their website about Peel and the Liberal Democrats to follow up comments made by several Labour Councillors at Wednesday’s Council Meeting.
Personally, I find the idea of Peel working with the Liberal Democrats to unseat Roger Jones more than a little fanciful - the LibDems struggle to even nominate paper candidates in Irlam & Cadishead and last year came a poor fourth in both Irlam and Cadishead wards. Local residents in Irlam and Cadishead fed up with the lack of representation provided by their Labour Councillors should vote Conservative on 1st May.
The most interesting comments on Wednesday were made by Cadishead Labour Councillor Keith Mann, who compared meeting with Peel Holdings to “supping with the Devil”, and even went so far as to produce a long spoon to illustrate his metaphor. It was clearly not an off-the-cuff remark.
Presumably this is a completely different company to the Peel Holdings who are key partners for Salford City Council in a number of flagship projects, including the BBC move to mediacity:uk at Salford Quays. I don’t know whether Peel are yet aware of Councillor Mann’s comments, but he is a senior Labour Councillor and I would be very interested to hear whether the Labour leadership condones and supports his remarks.
I also assume that, as Labour clearly object to political parties being involved with Peel, they will be removing all references to mediacity:uk from their election literature. What do you think?
It seems that the Salford Labour Party is developing a unique new approach to media relations:
I’ll charitably ignore the terrible grammar, but this is a truly bizarre article and as it appears on the Salford Labour website I assume it has the blessing of the Labour leadership.
I’m sure all politicians of all political colours - both in local Government and at a national level - find the nature of press coverage to their distaste some of the time. I’m no different, although my only current beef with the Advertiser is their insistence on using a photo of me taken when I was 21… although perhaps that isn’t such a bad thing after all!
For Labour to throw their toys out of the pram in such spectacular fashion is not only completely counterproductive but is unfair and borders on abusive. From a personal perspective, all of the journalists I’ve ever dealt with at the Advertiser have been both friendly and professional, and I know that journalists in the local and regional press work long hours for an awful lot less money than the public think they earn.
Indeed, the political coverage of the Advertiser has improved immeasurably over the last few years, and their agreement to publish the weekly leader columns is to be greatly applauded.
As for the letters page, perhaps it hasn’t occured to my Labour colleagues that the vast majority of politically-orientated letters received by the Advertiser are in fact from local residents fed up of a Labour Council that takes them for granted and lets them down!
Councillor Roger Jones - Labour Councillor for Irlam Ward but better known as the architect of the toll tax as Chairman of GMPTA - attended the full Council meeting on Wednesday.
However, he disappeared when we broke for lunch and did not reappear in the afternoon. Roger is an elected member of this City Council and the Chairman of GMPTA, yet he did not manage to attend a meeting of full Council to participate in a debate about transport, congestion charging and the TIF bid. The Council Meeting dates were published nearly a year ago. Not good enough.
On Wednesday I attended two debates on the proposals to introduce a “toll tax” congestion charge in Manchester.
The first was in the Council Chamber, where my colleague Cllr Ian MacDonald and I introduced a motion calling for local residents to be given final say on the toll tax in a referendum. You can read the Advertiser report on the debate online, but needless to say your Labour Councillors voted down any proposals to consult the public in a referendum.
The second debate took place at Methodist Central Hall in Manchester.
It was organised by Kashif Ali of Manchester Conservatives and featured representatives from all three main political parties (Rob Adlard for the Conservatives, Marc Ramsbottom for the Liberal Democrats and Anthony McCaul for Labour) as well as speakers from Manchester Against Road Tolls (MART) and Clean Air Now UK.
What was interesting was that the Labour representatives in Salford and Manchester took completely contradictory positions in support of the congestion charge.
In Manchester, Anthony McCaul did his primary school teachers proud with a very competent reading of a speech clearly prepared and written for him by someone far higher up the Manchester Labour food chain - Pat Karney perhaps or maybe Richard Leese himself. However the speech set out a utopian vision 0f a public transport paradise to justify support for the congestion charging.
Meanwhile in Salford, John Merry and his colleagues put forward a wet lettuce of an amendment, wringing their hands and saying “we can’t decide anything now, we don’t know anything about this at all until the Government tells us”.
This is nonsense - the plans are available online at www.gmfuturetransport.co.uk. The simple truth is that they are too scared to have this debate before the local elections on May 1st.
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