Greetings from sunny Lanchester on its first day with no bus service to anywhere, as is now the case on all Sundays and Bank Holidays "until further notice".
If either this, or the evening cuts, or the school bus cuts is still in place in 2013, then neither of the County Councillors should be re-elected, nor should the one with a party in the conventional sense be reselected. They are both easily old enough to retire, and perhaps this is their way of announcing that such was already their intention. There, I have said it. At least one of them appeared not to know that this was happening until informed of it at this month's Parish Council meeting.
Even leaving aside the ludicrous notion that public provision is only for the poor, the number of Lanchester people who could reasonably be so classified is greater than the entire populations of certain other places which have not been subjected to this. Using either a mean or a median income figure, how can Burnhope, which has also been subjected to severe cuts in service, not qualify? The same is true using levels of benefit dependency, and the number of claimants in Lanchester is actually larger than the total population of Burnhope, where by no means everyone is in receipt of such assistance from the community at large.
In fact, certainly based on mean income, a colony of Eighties pop stars and the like within the former Castleside District Ward makes it the richest of the three in the Lanchester County Ward. Yet, I am very pleased to say, there seem to have been few or no such cuts to the service enjoyed by Castleside, despite the ease of walking from there to a neighbouring, considerably poorer area in order to catch a bus to Consett in one direction or to Newcastle in the other.
There has been practically no notice about this. I say again, if this is still in place in 2013, then neither of the County Councillors should be re-elected, nor should the one with a party in the conventional sense be reselected. After all, the school transport thing is already going to cost numerous people their seats either by election or by deselection, and rightly so.
Rejoin the Labour Party round here? Are you having a laugh? I'm not.
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David, Whilst the bus subsidy has gone, Go North East still have the power to run these unsubsidised routes. Their company make good profits even without the subsidy. I would hope they consider running a few less services during the day and a few more in the evening.
ReplyDeleteSweeping anti-councillor comments are not helpful in this instance, it is very easy to stir up this sort of political opportunity and point the finger, however, you have previously said where the blame should lie. They are a direct result of the huge cuts and this is a reality of these central grant cuts on the ground. Not good is it and there is more to come.
The uproar to these cuts are in fact praise for what was previously provided by the council before the coaltion implemented their localism ideology.
Blah, Blah, Blah. They have until 2013. In fact, sod that. They have until Christmas. Or what...?
ReplyDeleteMalcolm, you should ask your predecessor about making an enemy of David Lindsay. He has scented blood on this one, leave it to people who have been politically active a lot longer to deal with him. You don't want whatever he puts out there about you if he takes against you to be hanging over your head while you are trying to make it, ask your predecessor. David Lindsay was a bitter enough man before he got sick, he is a sociopath now. Ask your predecessor.
ReplyDeleteNice of him to join us?
ReplyDeleteOn topic, please.
"Malcolm, you should ask your predecessor about making an enemy of David Lindsay. He has scented blood on this one, leave it to people who have been politically active a lot longer to deal with him. You don't want whatever he puts out there about you if he takes against you to be hanging over your head while you are trying to make it, ask your predecessor. David Lindsay was a bitter enough man before he got sick, he is a sociopath now. Ask your predecessor."
ReplyDeleteWe would all do well to recognise David's status as a rising star of the intellectual left. David, if you will, represents an academic counterpart to the incomparable Neil Clarke.
The people of Lanchester well know that he has significant skills in political communication. It is all the better that he does not follow the New Labour approach introduced by Tom Sawyer which sought to apply the business based model as if it were the only viable option. Indeed, his approach puts me in mind of the working class ethos with its ambivalent relationship to business practices.
While David's political opponents foolishly try to label him as a deeply repressed and obviously autistic thirty-something with the intellectual sophistication of a cucumber, the wise folk among us take a different view.
We need politicians and intellectuals who will fight for the one-nation vision. It is interesting that while socially the dominant narrative of our society is one of increasing tolerance and 'progress', our public services are characterised by a chronopolitics in which they are trapped by a Nietzschean eternal recurrence of botched neo-liberal reform after botched neo-liberal reform with no end in sight. Mao Zedong would have been proud of the permanent revolution in our public services. Does anyone but David even point this out? Why aren’t we hearing about this?
We all laughed at Fukuyama's "end of history" thesis, but when else have politicians of the left merely advocated a slightly more humane neo-liberalism? David, the political world needs you and it is one of the great pities of the modern era that your illness may prevent what would undoubtedly be a long and illustrious career in Parliament (having carefully distanced yourself from the anti-parliamentary New Left) or at the upper echelons of the think-tank world.
I always enjoy it when they try to be funny, because they always unwittingly slip in something true all along. Can you spot it this time?
ReplyDelete