Saturday 14 May 2011

Taking The O Out Of County

Apologies to everyone whose comments were removed by Blogger during its recent 48 hours of dysfunction. I have restored them as best I can.

Now, to business. I do not know where you are reading this, but I do know where you are not reading it. You are not reading it at a computer provided by Durham County Council. That august body would appear to have no problem with social networking, since it permits Facebook and Twitter. But from its facilities, such as those in its public libraries, you cannot access this blog, although you can access the websites of the Communist Party, the BNP, the Stalin Society ("to defend Stalin and his work on the basis of fact and to refute capitalist, revisionist, opportunist and Trotskyist propaganda directed against him") and the Springbok Club (which "advocates and works towards the re-establishment of civilised rule in Southern Africa").

Go North East now operates a system of electronic passes called keys for the purchase of bus tickets on a weekly, monthly or annual basis. I received mine this morning. Jolly good, you may say. Well, only up to a point. Now that I have a bus key, can I have my buses back? You know, the ones to my hospitals and my railway station after eight at night, or at all on Sundays and Bank Holidays? Again, over to the County Council.

5 comments:

  1. And your enemies say that you are not a man of the people.

    Yet again we are paying the price for not having you at anything above parish level. If you had been a county councillor or our MP, the Catholic schools transport thing would never have happened and neither would the cutting of the 15/15A. What will it be next?

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  2. Hear, hear, 21:26. Why are decisions about public services always made by people who do not use them or could afford not to?

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  3. "Yet again we are paying the price for not having you at anything above parish level. If you had been a county councillor or our MP, the Catholic schools transport thing would never have happened and neither would the cutting of the 15/15A. What will it be next?"

    That is absolute and total rubbish. Whatever David's abilities, these decisions go beyond the influence of one councillor or one MP. Blame the south for voting in the Tories and blame the liberals for walking the lobbies with the Tories allowing the massive cuts to the central government grants to be implemented.

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  4. What to cut specifically is a matter for the Council in question, and the Ward Councillor can have considerable influence if possessed of the right personality. MPs less so, but that depends on other factors.

    Blame my rancid innards, if anything.

    Possible news on the Catholic schools transport in the next week to 10 days, by the way.

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  5. This anonymity thing is getting out of hand! I wrote the comment replied to at 08:26 and I am glad to see that those who have held back the great man over the years are finally realising what they have been missing and are rattled when it is pointed out.

    He would tell you the two Lanchester members of the unitary county had the job for life and he was happy with that because they were so good. Fair enough, but when did either of them last catch a bus?

    Despite being one from the old Derwentside Labour establishment and one from their old allies in Derwentside Independents, the perfect David Lindsay combination, he still doesn't have so much a school governorship since a very different regime took away his two former ones. What are they playing at?

    The council's governor of the Catholic primary school is an Anglican canoness who taught RE in non-Catholic schools! She has never even been politically active in Lanchester, if anywhere. Don't tell me Mr Lindsay is less qualified than her.

    That's just school governorships, because he has been distinguished in that field before. It could be any of lots of things. Since before he got sick, before he left the Labour party, whenever, they have scandalously wasted his talent. That was to suck up to the former MP by promoting her unelectable gofer.

    But he has gone now, good riddance, and Labour no longer has complete local dominance. The ideal bridge man between them and everyone else in this Lib Dem free parish/ward is staring them in the face. What did he ever did to them, that they scorn and persecute him so much? Or is it just because if they gave him something equal to his talents they could never get away with taking away the buses to the Bede's and from Lanchester to Consett or Durham?

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