22/02/2014

WILL THEY GIVE THE GREEN FLAG BACK?

Once again, without any consultation or explanation with the people of Mottram & Broadbottom, we witness first-hand how the local democratic process has been totally ignored as yet another of our community facilities is sold off.

Over the last few years, Tameside councillors seem to have been endowed with the reverse Midas touch. Everything they touch turns to faecal matter!

Not content with destroying Mottram Library, the Longdendale Recreation Centre and playing fields and vast areas of ‘green belt’, I refer to their latest underhand shenanigans, namely the closure and putting up for sale of the Lymefield Visitor Centre in Broadbottom by the draconian ruling junta that is Tameside council’s ‘Executive Cabinet’.

It should not be the case that the first people hear that the council has decided to dispose of one of their community facilities is by looking in an estate agents window!

It shows nothing but total disdain for the voting public and proves beyond doubt that the ruling Executives treat our three local councillors as mere window dressing to keep up their numbers!    

Not long ago, Tameside council’s PR machine was waxing lyrical over this well used community facility and boasted that the site had not only been awarded, but retained the prestigious 'Green Flag Award' which is an annually judged certificate for the financial management, maintenance and upkeep of sites and the involvement of users and the community in their management.

The fact that the ‘Green Flag Award’ was retained is significant, because it means the site is subject to annual inspections. It therefore proves that this visitor centre must have demonstrated it was being run with a financially sound management up to the last inspection, so the council’s statement that it deems the centre to be surplus and costing too much to run, totally contradicts their own publicity!

According to the council’s own website, it says quite clearly that community participation is particularly strong at the Lymefield Visitor Centre, with many volunteers giving their time to the running of the site and centre and supervising events.

So, what will happen to all those people of the community who organise special events?

What thought has the council given to the various school groups, who again, according to the council’s own publicity, allows children to experience and connect with the countryside? Where will those who organise walks in the countryside, now assemble? What will happen to all those regular events which include all members of the local society?

Presumably Tameside’s ‘Executive Cabinet’ members; the majority of which now seem to have turned their envious eyes from their ‘industrial corridors of mills’ to focus on ‘the picturesque part of the borough’ with a view to concrete over it, will not admit their abject failure to manage, but do their usual trick and blame someone else. 

As for Broadbottom, the selling off of the Visitor Centre is the first step in returning an area which had been sympathetically transformed into Lymefield Visitor Centre & Broad Mills Heritage Site, where heritage and countryside lived side by side in tranquil harmony, back to another Tameside wasteland.

So, given the choice, are we expected to believe the council’s words (which at time of writing was) on their website or the reasons they've inadvertently proffered through the council’s Estates Officer, Oliver Telford, who in responding to an inquiry by The Longdendale Community Group, said, ‘…that his department has been given a list of properties which the council deems to be surplus and costing too much to run….. the proposals are then discussed with the Executive Board of officers and councillors…..and then it goes to the ‘Executive Cabinet’ for a key decision.’

Never mind posing for photographs whilst opening food banks and offering tea & sympathy regarding rising prices, the only certainty about Tameside Labour councillors, especially when you see their allowances continue to spiral upwards year on year ( 2012/13 - £1.2 million) is that they are, with pitifully few exceptions, a collection of self-serving, unpleasant parasites, and the sooner they are voted out, the better!

3 comments:

  1. Any chance of you writing quest articles for the Tameside Citizen?
    Breath some life back into the blog?

    ReplyDelete
  2. Curmudgeon, the visitors centre was a great starting point for walks around the Broad Mills Heritage Site and Broadbottom in general. It was a place where people unfamiliar with the area could obtain information to assist them.

    Of course when the parasite's expenses need protecting, places like this, which are a valuable community asset, are the first to go. Oscar Wilde's phrase "The price of everything and the value of nothing" certainly applies here.

    Let's hope the apathetic 75% of the Tameside dross at last wake up and boot these leeches out of office at the next local elections. The local councillors would be hard pressed to run a chip shop.

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  3. Democracy relies on the average member of the lectorate being of a certain level of intelligence, integrity and having sufficient knowledge of and concern for their country/area etc, and on people not being too bloody lazy and apathetic to bother getting themselves informed and involved and voting.
    When these things don't happen we get the election of the corrupt and inferior, evidenced by the perpetual 'shoe-in' reelection of the gang of self-serving incompetents and cretins who are our local ruling clique, and also the potential reelection of the worst government in our national history, i.e. the last Labour one.

    ReplyDelete

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