THEY COULDN’T ORGANISE A DRINKING SESSION IN A PLANT THAT MANUFACTURES ALCOHOLIC BEVERAGES!

According to the latest Press Release emanating from the Tameside ‘brains trust’ (The council)  - in the face of on-going Government cuts, they are now going to concentrate their resources on statutory functions and other priority areas!

These they have prioritised as:

              Disposal of under-utilised car parks and new charges introduced for others.

Stopping inspection of low and medium risk business premises

To consider to reduce further the costs of bin collections by collecting outside     normal working hours.

Significantly reduce highway maintenance by dealing with high risk repairs only and  stop local highway improvement schemes altogether

Stop routine maintenance and lighting checks and respond to complaints only

Review all fees and charges

Reducing our winter gritting programme so that we only cover priority routes

How about a piss-up in a brewery?

If we take these one by one in means, they will sell off a few of the car parks that currently shoppers, workers and visitors use, which, if they are serious, not only increases the pressure on the remaining parking facilities, but inconvenient for workers and devastating to traders. This short sighted view to sell the land is purely to help plug the gap in the council finances, and they are using the excuse of it being ‘under-used’ as a justification for it. 
Surely we should be arguing that land 'owned' by the council is no such thing - it belongs to the people and as such should be available for them to use as they wish - if that is for parking so be it.
The other measure to introduce ‘new charges’ for the other Car Parks, only offers yet another reason to shoppers to shop elsewhere!

As for stopping inspection of low and medium risk business premises, well that is probably one of the factors which lie behind the ‘horse meat’ scandal!

Thirdly, after introducing one of the most costly and confusing refuse collection systems in the country; one which replaced a very successful ‘one bin’ emptied ‘once a week’ by one vehicle with 3 men, with 4 bins, with two sometimes three being emptied once a week by two or three vehicles with 6 or 9 men; someone, presumably the one with the council pencil and calculator, has decided this is expensive and maybe there’s a better way to do it!

Next, the announcement of significantly reduce highway maintenance by dealing with high risk repairs only and stop local highway improvement schemes altogether, hopefully means that they will stop creating hundreds of ‘traffic calming islands and pink pavements, together with the practice of sending round a man with a can of spray paint to put marks around the pot-hole’ in question, followed some weeks later by a couple of bods in a lorry who tip a pit of tarmac in the hole and stamp it down with their hobnails, followed some weeks later by 4 bods who dig out what’s left of the tarmac, clean the hole (which is now twice the size of the original pot-hole, fill it with more tarmac and complete it with a mechanical compactor.

At last, someone must have realised that by employing fill-it, botch-it and scarper; pothole patching will end up costing them much more in the long run! 

Now as for stopping routine lighting checks, this could have been sorted years ago when the council were presented with a simple computerised system that remotely checked the condition/longevity of lighting luminaires, but preferred to continue with the old method of sending two men in a van (on overtime rates, because to check lighting it has to be dark!) around the borough, visually checking street lights!

Reviewing all fees and charges, means all fee and charges will go up!

And finally, to reduce the winter gritting programme to only cover priority routes. Well that all depends on whose priority they mean!

Personally, simply stopping wasting money on ego boosting vanity projects like the killing of Hyde Market by throwing £1.3million reducing the market to a mere handful of stalls, might go along way. 

Also, wasting £36,000 on a virtual Town hall’ which had to be scrapped! Or the totally unnecessary insistence, on moving of a War Memorial 35metres costing another £75,000 and in spite of massive local resistance.

Then there's spending £14million on a low priority road to nowhere and another £1800 entering the council’s Northern Bypass road scheme for initial consideration for recognition in the Considerate Constructor Award scheme! Not to mention the extra cost of sending God knows how many dignitaries to the awards gala dinner!

In fact it makes one wonder if the council has any feelings at all for the town of Ashton; there can’t be many towns in the country whose council seems so desperate to keep people out of the town centre that they are not only contemplating selling off the central car parks, but they have now built 2 bypasses to encourage travellers to circumvent our shops and keep on going to other towns!

But, despite these newly announced cuts to services, they announced last week that they are spending £4.5million reducing the amount of stalls, remodelling the market square and building themselves a state-of-the-art new council office block, to which, I feel sure, people will flock to from miles!

Our Labour councillors seem to have a very weird idea of us all being in this together! - God help us!

RIGHT POLICY, WRONG PARTY!

"Now't to do with us, it's the bloody Tories!"

'Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it whether it exists or not, diagnosing it incorrectly, and applying the wrong remedy.' – If ever a quote was ‘Taylor’ made, this must be it!

Week on week, Cllr John Taylor tells us, in his own inimitable way that it is this ‘Tory led Government’s policy to reduce borrowing’ that is causing the council to cut costs. What he and others in his party will not tell you is during the last days of the disastrous Labour Government, whilst Alastair Darling was still Chancellor, he got a bill passed. It was this

 http://services.parliament.uk/bills/2009-10/fiscalresponsibility.html

 

To save you looking it up, it says that Government borrowing must decrease year on year, by law.

In a nutshell, the Bill imposes a statutory duty on the Treasury to meet specific targets for the reduction of Government borrowing and debt. The then Labour Government believed that by introducing this last minute legislation, it demonstrated their commitment to ensuring the sustainability of the public finances. 

The Bill requires the Treasury to make sure that:

Government borrowing in each financial year between 2010/11 and 2015/16 is lower than the previous year, measured as a percentage of GDP. 

So, Councillor, if I’m wrong I’m sure your next letter will put me right, However if I’m right, then I think you owe the people of Tameside an apology for misleading them, because the policy to reduce public spending; which you keep telling us is the reason you are cutting public services, was in fact, Labours!

"No more boom and Bust!"

What the vociferous councillor also fails to mention is the fact that the UK pays the EU £30million every day and spends £50 million every 9 hours on debt interest payments as a result of the economic incompetence of Gordon Brown’s Government—a Government which councillor Taylor, was a proud supporter.

The prosaic councillor then invited us to wonder down another of his well-trodden paths were he attempted to justify Labours spending, specifically on ‘investment in school building’ where he told us “This country had the money to invest in our schools and we did!” That being the case, perhaps the councillor could explain why Labour felt it necessary to borrow the funds from Private Investment Companies (PFI) which has mortgaged those schools and created a massive 30year multi-billion debt for the taxpayer and created vast profits for private companies?

"We might be at the bottom, but It's all a matter of semantics!"

And as recent results have shown, gleaming, new school buildings don't equate to  gleaming, new standards, with Tameside Schools languishing at 145^th out of England's 150 Local Education Authority regions!

No one should be surprised when a Labour councillor blames all the nation’s ills on the Coalition Governments policies, but it would appear that none of our political parties have grasped the basics that borrowing money cannot raise the country out of the mire. If the taxes that the government collect, which are gargantuan, cannot meet the bills then the bills must be reduced. 

We can no longer afford the ambitions of our politicians.

OUR WEEKLY ‘INDEPENDENT’ NEWSPAPERS

This may well sound like sour grapes, but where have the questioning voices gone? Where are the counter arguments; - a glimpse of the ‘other side of the coin’?

 

You've overstepped the mark!

Just to pick out a few of the statements that deserve questioning, let’s start with Cllr Jim Fitzpatrick. 

In his letter to the Editor, he was raging at the Longdendale Community Group, (That’s the group, who, when the objections to the building of TESCO in Hattersley were being voiced, he said ‘he’d never heard of them!) Basically, he accused them of producing a leaflet that was, in his words, scaremongering!

This was because on reading the councils preferred plan for their region, they discovered it included the council's proposal to build a huge industrial area on green field sites near the M67 junction; to which, when the group were informed, they quite rightly feared that it would add considerable misery to what is an already hyper-congested area.

Cllr Jim, went on to claim that, ‘This process has been well publicised in the local press, on the internet and on Tameside Radio. He said, he was staggered that the LCG weren’t aware of it!’

Well it didn’t surprise me! Especially when 'The Advertiser' is not delivered ‘free’ in Mottram & Longdendale like it is in other parts of the borough, neither do residents receive the Tameside Citizen! The newly revived ‘Tameside Reporter’ at a cover price of 45p, is not widely bought in the area, and people do not spend days searching the council’s website. Now this might be upsetting to our councillors considering the money they spend on advertising, but the council’s own propaganda radio station, 'TAMESIDE RADIOOOOO' is not as popular as the council would like to believe.

If I say it's a tax, it's a bloody tax, right!

The paper would not be complete without the trappings from a local Taylor who as well as saying he agrees with welfare reforms, he then counter argues by regaling readers to a story of total inaccuracy in which he confuses the under occupancy housing benefit reduction (which is something that will reduce the amount of housing benefit for those living in social housing who happen to have excess capacity) with a so-called ‘tax’ of which it is no such thing! (a tax is something one pays on top of a purchase price!) - semantics maybe, but that's what the council bosses revert to when they're found wanting!

He then, after replacing the lid on the ‘Brillo tin’ and with the sun blinding the reader from the rays reflecting off his newly polished brass neck, said, If councils and social landlords had been allowed to build the much needed properties then this problem would not be with us! - Really!

He fails to tell us that housing was a great Labour failure, which consisted of a decade of building the least housing stock since the war in both private and social sectors! 

Every thinking person knows that Labour neglected social housing during its thirteen years in office. So, now, in order to tackle the problems of homelessness, overcrowding and poor accommodation caused by this nationwide lack of social housing, we find the present Government at least trying to sort out the mess!

What Cllr Taylor and the rest of his comfy career councillors will not tell you, is that under the last Tory Government, between 1979 and 1996 the total building for houses by local authorities and by registered social landlords were *913,690, while from 1997 to 2008 under Labour, building totalled a significantly lower *290,750. However, the most striking aspect of the figures is the steep decline in local authority housing during the period in question, which fell from a peak of *88,530 new homes in 1980, to a low of *130 (yes, one hundred and thirty houses) in 2004. 

Now, considering the lack of new building, the growing number of people on the housing list in Tameside and his purporting to be a Senior Local Authority councillor, who tells us he puts the people before his career, perhaps Cllr Taylor should have concentrated less on moving 'War Memorials' and closing 'Public Footpaths' and cleared the way over his years in office for more social house building! – with national waiting lists for social housing running at four million, it’s plain to see that the failure to reinvest the monies following the ‘right to buy’ as introduced by the Tories followed by the lack of building under Labour is at the root of the problem. - A problem that has now come home to roost!

Of course politicians won’t tell you this; and neither it seems, will our ‘independent newspaper’ that just so happens to be owned by a social housing landlord who have a few of our Senior councillors sitting on their Boards of Directors!

He then finished off his criticism by saying he did not see any of the Government’s policies in either the Tory or Lib/Dem manifestos. But there again he wouldn’t would he, seeing as they are working from a document called the ‘Coalition Agreement’

– By the way councillor, while we’re on the subject of keeping promises that have been made in manifestos, perhaps you could explain the following:

In 1997, a few days before polling day, in an interview reported in the London Evening Standard, Mr Blair was ask directly, "Will Labour introduce tuition fees for higher education?"

Mr Blair's answer was: "Labour has no plans to introduce tuition fees for higher education."

Labour manifesto: Labour In 1997 said Labour has no plans to introduce tuition fees for higher education. You then introduced tuition fees ... In 2001 you said: 'we will not introduce top-up fees and have legislated to prevent them'. You then introduced top-up fees."

Some years later it was left to Labours Alan Johnson to explain, “…even if the manifesto pledge had been breached, sometimes it was necessary for governments to change course: "There will be occasions when politicians do have to do something different to what they said they'd do because circumstances change!"

*Source: The Department for Communities and Local Government

Which way is the wind blowing, Ed?

Then we had the pontificating of the Denton & Reddish MP Andrew Gwynne, who, with more faces than the town hall clock wrote a piece regarding the ‘Injustice of the cuts’

Following the usual 'hand-wringing’ and patronising platitudes he announced he was backing Ed Miliband when he outlined what he called ‘a fairer tax system that works for everyone!’

This proclamation consisted of saying that they would introduce a ‘mansion tax’ on homes worth over £2million. Unfortunately, neither he, nor anyone else in the Labour party have said how this would be achieved, as it would either involve revaluing every dwelling in the country to amend council tax bands or applying a one off tax, which, for many reasons, could easily be avoided!

He then went on to say, They would reintroduce the 10p tax rate which would be a real benefit to ‘ordinary working people’ particularly the 2,750,000 basic rate tax payers across Greater Manchester.

What a load of condescending crap!

If he and his Labour cronies were so concerned about the ‘ordinary working people’ of Greater Manchester, perhaps he could explain why he, the two Ed’s and David Heyes voted with the majority of Labour MPs to keep the clause in the Finance Bill in 2008 abolishing the 10% starting rate of income tax. - If it was OK to remove it to make tax fairer then, how can it be fairer to re-introduce it now?

At the time, it was estimated that over five million of the poorest people living in Britain – those earning less than £18,500 a year – would find themselves worse off.

However, before you all run off and book your holidays on the strength of this fantastic economical boost from the Labour leader; The Policy Exchange, the centre right think-tank reckons that if a low paid working family is on in-work benefits such as universal credit, the true value of the 10p band as opposed to 20p is only 67p a week! (That a massive £34.84 a year!)

Source: HANSARD: Income Tax — Abolition of starting and savings rates and creation of starting rate for savings — 28 Apr 2008 at 22:00  

Included in those who voted to abolish the 10p rate were:

Name	Constituency	Party	Vote
Edward Miliband	Doncaster North	Lab (minister)	aye
Edward Balls	Normanton	Lab (minister)	aye
Andrew Gwynne	Denton and Reddish	Lab (PPS)	aye
David Heyes	Ashton-under-Lyne	Lab	aye

Mr Gwynne then went off on one of his own scaremongering episodes by suggesting that the cuts to police budgets which may deliver reductions to the front line puts our community at risk, however, official statistics all show that crime is reducing. 

Both recognised methods of measuring crime (the Crime Survey of England and Wales (CSEW) and police-recorded crime) have shown a decrease in crime over the past decade.

As an MP Andrew Gwynne knows full well that the system for recording crime in England and Wales is widely recognised by international standards as one of the best in the world.

So instead of getting behind the police for reforming in the right way, he prefers to scare his constituents by highlighting the worst case scenario.

…And you wonder why voters turn away in droves!