The Fenhall Drift banner, with the historic Lanchester Parish Church on one side, and with a Roman soldier and a miner on the other, is to return to Lanchester, still owned by the NUM, but leased in perpetuity to the Parish Council and to hang, at the union's own suggestion, in that very church. Everything in that sentence is perfect. It even harks back to the old problem of keeping the C of E on board; when the effort was made, it provided a rich seam of upper and middle-class people whose involvement in it had made them aware of the importance of civic participation and of State action to remedy social evils, and who used Labour as a means against the disestablishmentarian tendencies of the Liberals.
But it's not all good news. Lanchester Village Green and the play area at Hurbuck Cottages have always been classified as community assets with no monetary value. They were priceless. As far as we are concerned, they still are. But from this new financial year, we are required to place a monetary value on them, even if it is only that of one pound. We have gone for that, since if we had been more accurate, then we might have been required to sell them, despite the fact that, even in this day and age, it is hard to see what on earth could possibly be given planning permission to be built on Lanchester Village Green. We are not prepared to take that risk.
However, there is no getting around it: there is only one reason why anything needs to be given a monetary value. Parish Councils the length and breadth of the land will have cottoned on to that one in relation to their own village greens and other community assets. So much for localism. So much for the Big Society. So much for what would smugly tell you that they were the parties of the countryside.
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They definitely won't be building anything on Lanchester village green while the planning committee for the north of the county is chaired by a man who lives just off Lanchester village green.
ReplyDeleteI suppose that this is why you never did a politics degree or involved yourself too much in the Labour Club at university, although I do remember you in it. With politics like this, you would have been driven up the wall by people who thought it was all about dialectical materialism and that every obscure Far Left hero from the 30s was a major figure in Labour history.
ReplyDeleteI manage to be driven up the wall by that sort of thing anyway. Do you know that there have been at least four published biographies of Victor Grayson, yet never so much as an unpublished PhD on Herbert Morrison's London machine? For example.
ReplyDeleteOf the two people whom I remember running Durham University Labour Club, one is now the Labour candidate at Leicester South and the other is now a member of the General Synod of the Church of England. I am not saying which of them was rumoured to have slept with Dolly Draper at some conference.
As you know, New Labour was as guilty as the extreme Left of believing that the extreme Left was Labour historical norm. That was why New Labour defined itself against the whole of Labour history. But the real Labour historical norm is as expressed in this post and the one just above it.
ReplyDeleteWho now speaks for that in Parliament? No offence, but even you are only a parish councillor although you are probably going to tell me that you know lots of likeminded people further up in local government. No offence again, but that is still only local government. Any remaining peers must be very old.
Getting you into one House or the other is the last hope of setting the ball rolling to restore proper parliamentary representation.
Lord Glasman is not "very old". Lord Stoddart is, but he is still going strong, and is quite possibly in better health than I am.
ReplyDeleteI do indeed know plenty of sound people in local government, although rather fewer since Derwentside District Council was abolished. But they are still around.
New Labour accepted the sectarian Marxist definition of the British Left because its own roots were in sectarian Marxism. It knew, and knows, absolutely nothing about the Labour Movement properly so called.