The week end press reports that following the destruction of parking meters in Cardigan (Wales) high street sales increased.
Marcus Jones, the Government High Streets Minister has suggested that small town centres could become “parking meter-free zones” in an effort to save shops from closure. The Government is growing increasingly concerned that punitive parking costs and fines are deterring shoppers from using their local high streets.
Small stores are going out of business as people increasingly shop online and use supermarkets to avoid parking charges.
At last the penny has dropped, people prefer the free parking at supermarkets to paying for parking at Council car park sites. Hadleigh High Street is a good example where parking at Morrison’s is simple and free whereas when one uses the Co-op and the Council car park you have to get a free ticket to show your latest permitted time of departure.
And yet, even as late as last year, a senior Babergh District Conservative Councillor told me that parking charges would have to go up in 2016/17 because of budget gaps. These are the people for whom there can never be enough evidence to overturn an entrenched view.
Where is the application of the Primum non nocere principle which means “first, do no harm?” In practical Local Government governance this means that it may be better not to do something, or even to do nothing, than to risk causing more harm than good.
Ministers have warned, “The law clearly states that parking fines should not be used as a way of generating revenue.” The Department for Communities and Local Government has advised that any local authority found to be using parking fines as a way to make money could face reduced levels of government funding.
(Of course parking fines and parking charges are two different things, so I do not rule out Babergh bringing in short term car parking charges in the belief that this time it will all be different!)
More details can be found on http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/society/11747831/Free-parking-in-town-centres-to-save-the-high-street.html
Political – National and other
Council to Apologise
The Daily Mail reports that Forest of Dean District Council has been forced to issue an apology for squandering taxpayers’
money. It accepted a motion criticising it for “scandalous waste” over the past eight years after Labour members forced through the vote, demanding an ‘unqualified apology’, when the ruling Conservatives were left short of numbers at a meeting this week.
Which just goes to show that eternal vigilance is the price of enjoying yourself whenever the right opportunity presents itself.
I am quite envious that I have never been in a position to pull off such a coup – although I do sometimes count up my friends at meetings just to see if any mischief might be supported.
Did I mention that my great grandfather was born in the Forest of Dean (and as such had the right to mine coal) – obviously the descendants of his malcontent friends carry on the practice of getting their kicks in whenever they can. But if you are in Ruardean don’t mention the Bears (see The Forest of Dean by Humphrey Phelps).
Snow Clearing
On 23rd December the Health and Safety Minister Lord Freud urged a common sense approach to clearing snow from footpaths and pavements. As we brace ourselves for the first arctic blast of the season, Health and Safety Minister Lord Freud is urging a common sense approach to clearing snow from footpaths and pavements. There are no health and safety regulations that prevent people from clearing snow at their home, their business or at their neighbours’ homes, despite newspaper stories in previous winters to the contrary. Now ministers want to pre-empt the usual health and safety myths ahead of the first snowfall that could prevent people from doing a good deed to help stop others falling and injuring themselves on a path or pavement. Minister for Health and Safety Lord Freud said: “People need to be aware that they will not be reprimanded for doing a good deed by clearing ice and snow. The truth is very simple: you can clear ice and snow from footpaths and pavements but always be careful that you don’t put yourself in danger. “Countless lives have been saved and injuries prevented because of robust health and safety practices. But bogus excuses give real safety laws a bad name and stop people from taking action.”
The Chair of the Health and Safety Executive Judith Hackitt said: “Anyone can clear ice and snow from public spaces, so don’t be put off because you’re afraid someone will get injured. Remember, people walking on snow and ice have a responsibility to themselves to be careful. “Health and safety legislation is designed to protect people where there is a genuine danger that someone could be killed or seriously injured, not to stop people from getting on with their lives and certainly not to stop people from reducing the risk for themselves and others by clearing snow and ice.”
More information can be found on https://www.gov.uk/government/news/snow-clearing-health-and-safety-myth-shattered
Photo source: http://bahnbilder.ch/picture/7697
A Cynic Writes
Bill Bonner in The Daily Reckoning on Wednesday wrote that the American voters w”ere busy at the polls… participating in the solemn fantasy of modern democratic government. Approximately 60% of people who were eligible to vote stayed away from the polling stations. Among young people, 18-29, the total was even higher, about 75%. The rest wasted their time standing in line and giving their ballots to the usual grifters, panderers and earnest nincompoops who fill public offices.
One of them, Michael Grimm of Staten Island, had a commanding lead when last we looked. Representing New York’s 11th Congressional District, the local paper says he is ‘hot headed’ and ‘distasteful’. It claimed he was making Staten Island the “laughing stock of the nation” after he was indicted on 20 counts of mail fraud, tax fraud, and perjury. In April, he threatened to throw a reporter off the balcony of the Capitol building. Perhaps the reporter had it coming; we don’t know. But we understand the voters who cast their lot with Grimm; at least they have no doubt what they are getting – exactly what they deserve. But the problem with political jokes, as Henry Cate observed, is that they get elected. And then, we all have to live with them”.
* I don’t classify myself as a grifter, panderer or a nincompoop who fills a public office but this is an apt description for some.
Tower Hamlets
The Spectator’s Coffee House Evening Blend reports that Tower Hamlets was “a council ruled by a ‘medieval monarch’ that was ‘riddled with cronyism and corruption’. That was how Eric Pickles’ described the local authority ruled by Tower Hamlets’ First’s Lutfur Rahman. The Communities Secretary sent in three commissioners to take over the authority after a report by accountancy firm PwC found contracts were awarded without the appropriate paperwork and Rahman picked preferred companies. It said Tower Hamlets’ ‘current governance arrangements do not appear to be capable of preventing or responding appropriately to failures of the best value duty of the kind we have identified’. This is Pickles’ first intervention in a council since he sent commissioners to monitor Doncaster in 2010. His statement in the Commons today drew support from Labour, who are calling for Rahman to resign as Mayor. His way of governing and the rotten borough practices of the council leave him with no friends in other parties
http://us6.campaign-archive2.com/?u=b7034b6517cfdcc8d4d4e60e9&id=19fa52a048&e=725a6d17bb
In the Trough!
Guido Fawkes writing in the Sun on Sunday highlights the perils of being in the public eye and making political statements. His focus was on Harriet Harman (deputy Leader of the Labour Party) who wore a T-shirt bearing the message “This is What a feminist Looks Like” from the upmarket High Street chain Whistles.
This T-Shirt retails at £45 and the workers who produce the T-shirts are paid £0.62 per hour. Even for Mauritius these wages rates are sub-optimal. Whistles also has the same design on a clutch bag at £55, a sweatshirt for £85 and an iPhone cover for £30.
Advertising like this by political leaders (including David Miliband and Nick Clegg) could not be bought.
Profits from the T-shirt sales were to go to the Fawcett Society. And to be fair the Fawcett Society were assured that the garments would be produced ethically here in the UK.
So what we have here are politicians making a point, retailing manufacturers enjoying pork on pig and an ethical society with egg on its face.
All in all a sad day for community involvement and a good day for cronyism and poor judgment.
As the saying goes – if you think education is expensive – try ignorance!
Your Public Servant
The Spectator (Coffee House Blend) reports this evening as follows:
David Cameron told colleagues last week that he had been nervous about what sort of a speech Ed Miliband would produce this year. He’d done two very good ones for the past two years which had set the agenda for the autumn, the Prime Minister pointed out. So how was this last conference season before the General Election going to work out? Well, he didn’t need to worry too much about that as the Labour leader gave a poor speech last week and the Prime Minister gave one of his best speeches of his career this afternoon. First, the substance. Cameron announced the following: – The personal tax allowance will rise to £12,500, taking everyone on the minimum wage out of income tax. – The threshold for the 40p rate of income tax will rise to £50,000. – The Conservatives will protect NHS spending in the next Parliament. – Cameron will ‘get what Britain needs’ on freedom of movement (without any definition of what Britain does need). – A Tory government would scrap the Human Rights Act and introduce a British Bill of Rights. The conference liked the bit about the personal allowance (the Lib Dems didn’t, accusing Cameron of being ‘shameless’), but they loved the bit about the 40p. But this wasn’t just a speech aimed at the core, though as James says, it seems to have given them more of an emotional connection to David Cameron than before. It was a speech that tried to tell floating voters that the Tories are now the ones occupying the moral high ground, not Labour. It was angry in parts: Cameron became unusually personal and emotional when he talked about his own experience of taking his son to hospital, turning furiously on Labour to say ‘how dare they suggest I would ever put that at risk for other people’s children?’. And he barely restrained himself from attacking and ridiculing Ed Balls and Ed Miliband, contrasting their pitch for government with his. He was unusually self-deprecating, joking about his verbal slips and the time he left his daughter in a pub. And when he talked about his own leadership, he tried to be humble, saying: ‘I don’t claim to be a perfect leader. But I am your public servant, standing here, wanting to make our country so much better – for your children and mine. I love this country, and I will do my duty by it. We’ve got the track record, the right team…to take this plan for our country and turn it into a plan for you.’ The question is whether the tax cuts and moral high ground-hunting in this speech will be enough. It may well be that voters are more annoyed by George Osborne’s two-year welfare freeze than they are impressed by what David Cameron had to say today. But if conference speeches could win elections…
Give a Man a Fish
I could not resist sharing this:
A Decent Pie at Last?
Yesterday’s Daily Telegraph reported that a hospital canteen’s ‘fry-up’ pie had been described as a ‘heart attack on a plate’ (HAOAP).
A former government adviser called for ban on the pie crammed with bacon, sausage, black pudding and beans, with an egg on top, being sold for £1.50 at Ninewells Hospital in Dundee. Prof Mike Lean, former government adviser, and chair of human nutrition at Glasgow University, said it was a “shocking” example of a meal, adding: “It should never be anywhere near a hospital. It is laden with fat, salt and without a vegetable in sight. There should be strict guidelines for all food sold in hospitals.”
Prof Mike Lean obviously doesn’t consider beans as a vegetable. Nor does he consider the therapeutic effect of comfort food like this. For me the real problem is how cheap is the food for it to be sold for £1.50. Can anybody make any money from a food product like this at this price?
For many people, the HAOAP is a treat not a daily staple. The Professor’s remarks also exclude the possibility that the calories etc., may be being worked off either on the job or in the gym. If a little of what you fancy does you good, then this might be just the right thing.
Meanwhile the University of Glasgow boasts a number of cafés whose offerings include baguettes, baked potatoes, breakfast rolls, confectionery, deli cakes, desserts , hot chocolate, flavoured latte, ‘food for later’ range of soups and meals to take away, full breakfast(s), home baking, hot & cold drinks, hot filling jacket potato suppers , hot pastry savoury snacks, individual brasserie-style meals, pizza , sandwiches, soya milk options , speciality coffees and teas – made to order. There are Vegan, gluten free and vegetarian options available, but I’m sure that a closer scrutiny of the Bills of Fare would show a reasonable selection of artery hardeners. I’m glad the Professor is a former government adviser and not a current one.
The original article may be found on http://www.telegraph.co.uk/health/healthnews/11054202/Hospital-canteens-fry-up-pie-is-heart-attack-on-a-plate.html#disqus_thread
Nigel Farage
I was intrigued to see this news item just after the Euro elections. The Daily Telegraph of the 12th June stated that Ukip leader Nigel Farage had unwittingly become the star of a mobile ad campaign for Europe’s largest infidelity dating site
Part of the charm of Nigel Farage is that he cultivates the Jack the Lad image. Like others (e.g. Boris Johnson) he is a clever man who occasionally plays the fool. Behaviour which is unacceptable is laughed off- but papering over the cracks can only go so far.
Victoria Milan is apparently specially designed for men and woman who are currently in a relationship but seek some excitement and spice on the side through a discreet flirt or affair.
It would be difficult to see any member of the mainstream parties being associated with such an organisation
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