Richard Baum

Last night’s Lib Dem Group AGM saw lots of interesting discussion about the election campaign just gone, and our plans to work successfully on the Council over the next 12 months. Obviously none of the discussions were anywhere near as interesting as frolicking in the sunshine outside, but unfortunately with the privilege of power comes the irritating burden of responsibility, so I had to put down my ice cold Vimto momentarily, exchange my flowing Hawaiian grass skirt for a suit, un-hand the hula girl, and go to the meeting.

Congratulations to Councillors Tim Pickstone and Andrew Garner who were re-elected Group Leader and Deputy Leader respectively, and to Cllr Mary D’Albert who remained conscious throughout her debut Group meeting. The last twelve months have undoubtedly been a success for our Group - election victories and leading campaigns on issues like congestion charging and post offices - and we are sure to go from strength to strength with a continuing leadership team and a new face on the Group.

The meeting also saw us discuss appointments to the many many (many) Council committees, working groups and outside bodies that exist across the community. In the grand shake-up I emerged on to the Resource and Performance Scrutiny Committee, and the Licensing Committee. I worked on R&P last year - it’s the Scrutiny Committee that takes a broad view of all the Council’s work and focuses on service performance and finance. It was enjoyable and I think we got some good stuff done, so hopefully that will continue. Licensing will be new to me, but I join my colleague Cllr Steve Wright on it and he only has good things to say about the work we can achieve on there.

I was also elected Chair of the Community Development Working Group of Prestwich Local Area Partnership last night, which is an exciting challenge. I was a member of the group last year and we achieved some great work in Rainsough and Polefield, so hopefully I can continue the momentum here in the coming twelve months. I will be supported by Cllr Ann Garner who is stepping down from the Chair herself but will still be a valued and influential member of the working group.

All such re-shuffling pales into insignificance when set off against the blue sky above me this morning. It’s still far too sunny outside to be cooped up in an office. Resultantly I may make a daring bid for freedom soon after lunch. There may be fireworks.

Have a good weekend. 

Rick

The continuing warm spell meant that last night I took advantage and mowed the lawn. The occasion also saw the juddering debut of my new strimmer. Such is the exciting life a Councillor leads in the week after an election.

So now my lawn has stripes on it, which I must admit are wavey in parts due to the fact that my lawnmower has the turning circle of an oil tanker, rendered even worse by the fact that in turning it I regularly ended up inside a shrub.

I have scheduled a barbecue for Saturday night, so expect that sky to turn black and start pelting the earth with rain like God’s own rage at about Saturday teatime.

Tonight is the Liberal Democract Council Group Annual General Meeting, where we decide who does what and how the Group is going to work for the coming year. It will be nice to see my colleagues’ brows looking less furrowed than when I saw them all last on election day (although they became visibly less creased as the results became clear).

And in the meantime, I must get back to work. Sadly not under a tree, but here in my office, which is so hot that I’m fairly certain there is liquid magma flowing through the radiators.

Rick

Now that the election is over, there is less need for me to spend every waking hour out on the streets, so of course God has warmly mocked me by stopping the rain and blasting us all with a premature taste of Summer. I took advantage of the nice warm weather last night by unpacking a flat-pack barbecue, and attempting to build it.

Obviously, this being a construction project overseen by a British elected representative, it drastically over-ran. However, the delay in completion was only a few hours long, and was caused less by chronic maladministration, and more by my utter inability to tighten a nut to a screw. Somewhere along the line, when I should have learned how to do man’s things like re-wire stuff and wear a tool belt without looking like a buffoon, I missed out. Other people know how to do this stuff. I absolutely do not.

What I have now then is a functioning, if somewhat rickety, barbecue. It’s not all bad - I suspect it can be just about used for its primary purpose, although it may not work entirely as planned, and is in danger of collapse at any moment. Rather like the Home Office, in many respects.

Where my barbecue is different from the Home Office is that it has foldy-down side bits for hot dog buns and burgers. And these folding side table bits do indeed fold down, after some rigorous shaking. They are the definite highlights of my work. And, like all masterpieces, we should not risk damaging them. As such they should be preserved in either the up or down position at all times, and not tinkered with. Let me assure you that my reluctance to repeatedly extend or contract the shelves is entirely about the preservation of fine craftsmanship, and nothing whatsoever to do with the possibility that the whole thing might fall to pieces in my hands, scattering white-hot coal fragments over my nearest and dearest.

Now that my work is done, all that is left is for me to put the BBQ to good use this weekend at my house-warming party, by poisoning all of my friends.

As well as being all manly and building stuff with tools, I have been catching up on casework these past 24 hours. I have facilitated a meeting between the Police and a local man concerned with vandalism at some local allotments. Also, I have chased up some missing street signs (Butterstile Lane and Carr Avenue, not that you’d realise you were there, of course), and got the Council Tax people to prioritise the case of a local man who’s refund application has got lost in the system somewhere.

Thankfully, I am better at the casework than I am at the furniture-building. It’s a good job, otherwise nobody would cast a single vote in my favour ever again.

Rick

I am at a bit of a loss at the moment, and I wonder if I’m the only one feeling the pain of election cold turkey. This is an odd time of year when the elections are finished and the Council has yet to kick off. A kind of hole in the political space-time continuum that sucks people in at the conclusion of the count, and spits them out at annual Council with nothing in between except for a black and empty week and a half.

I do miss the campaign though, despite disliking every minute of it. I don’t have a mother-in-law, but I suppose if I did, and she came to visit for an entire horrific and unendurable month of ceaseless horror, before abruptly leaving, I’d feel the same kind of confusing sense of loss. I’d have done anything to end it sooner, including acts of criminal violence, but now that it’s gone away and left me with nothing to think about but the good bits, I wonder if I wasn’t just wasting time complaining instead of appreciating it. It’s not often a team comes together to achieve something that is genuinely good. It’s even less often that I am a part of it.

For weeks on end I was immersed in the election – leafleting all day every weekend, canvassing every night, and thinking of little else but how much I wanted to win a contest which, it turned out, even fewer people cared enough about to vote than last year. In the last week I was literally doing nothing but sleeping and election-ing, and in the last 24 hours even the sleeping was jettisoned in favour of about 5,000 leaflets and lots and lots of knockabout knock-up fun. It is not the nature of elections to have soft landings, but I wish there was some way of scaling down activity gently, rather than ramping it up until the last minute and then just stopping.

I miss it now, despite wishing the whole thing over throughout. It’s the people more than anything, of course. Although I wanted to commit an act of savage harm on the person who asked me to go knocking up 100 more people at 20:00 on election night, I’d really quite like to be back there now with the rest of the team, knowing that he was as tired as I was and that we were both going through it together. Thankfully my sleep-deprived and leaflet-addled body couldn’t muster the beating I so longed to meter out, because if it had then I probably wouldn’t have been invited back.

I spent the weekend away from Prestwich. In Cumbria, at a hotel I am loathe to call “my favourite hotel” because I think it makes me sound worryingly middle-aged. Is it right for me to have a favourite hotel when there is 99.8% of the world left to explore? People retire to their favourite hotels. People my age should have favourite bars or something. Is it wrong that mine is becoming the one at Bury Town Hall?

Well, I suppose this hotel is my favourite one so far. And in it I returned to normality, of sorts. It’s a “foodie” place, and whilst on six nights a week the menu is more or less normal (with only one or two dishes that I am not cultured enough to understand), the Sunday night tasting menu involves bizarre dishes which this week included filet of python. There were only about six guests, and one man declined the python on animal welfare grounds, only to tuck in with gusto to the replacement course of veal. I can only hope he didn’t vote.

But throughout the weekend, where I did normal things like sleep in late and watch TV and drive off to see attractions that weren’t related to local pot-holes or derelict shops, there was something missing. It is depressing to think that I am almost certain it was a pack of leaflets and a canvass sheet.

Rick

Liberal Democrats at Bury’s election count last night:

Here’s our new team of Councillors in St Mary’s Ward - Donal O’Hanlon, Mary D’Albert and Richard Baum…… Labour MP Ivan Lewis sneaks past behind.

Lib Dem Councillors elected last night Mary D’Albert, Vic D’Albert and Ann Garner with some of their group colleagues Steve Wright, Wilf Davison and Donal O’Hanlon.

More pictures here

Last night’s results were a triumph for local Lib Dems in Prestwich, and my thanks goes to everyone in the ward who helped and supported us through a long and tiring campaign. Congratulations to the newest Lib Dem Councillor in Bury - Mary D’Albert, who joins Donal O’Hanlon on the St Mary’s team. Re-election for Vic D’Albert in Holyrood and Ann Garner in Sedgley means that we now have all 9 Councillors in Prestwich, the culmination of work that started in Holyrood 22 years ago when we had no Councillors and not much else either!

I am very tired this morning. Yesterday could not possibly have lasted a mere 24 hours. It felt like it lasted about a fortnight. The count alone seemed to drag on for days. If I had the strength or inclination I would investigate the clear flaws in the space-time continuum that affect campaigners on election day. But, perhaps to the relief of us both, I don’t.

In the end the result was a good one for us, and I hope that the good work we’ve started locally will continue now that we have 9 Councillors out of 9 in Prestwich. We are moving forward now in Whitefield after an excellent second place in Besses.

I am taking a couple of easy days now where I will not cast eyes on a single leaflet, and then it’s back to work with a full team of Lib Dems in St Mary’s. I will write more then. At the moment my eyes are heavy.

Thanks again for eveyone’s support. And well done Mary.

Rick

Liberal Democrats have continued to move forward on Bury Council making another gain from Labour and holding off a challenges from the Conservatives. This is the fifth election in a row in Bury where we have made gains.

Full results to follow, but in our key wards in Prestwich the results were as follows:

Holyrood
Vic D’Albert (Lib Dem) 1632
Labour 669
Conservative 852

St Mary’s
Mary D’Albert (Lib Dem) 1308
Labour 1013
Conservatives 692

Sedgley
Ann Garner (Lib Dem) 1488
Labour 906
Conservatives 1238

Across Prestwich the share of the vote was:
Liberal Democrats - 45%
Labour 26%
Conservatives 28%

The Liberal Democrats now have ALL NINE councillors in Prestwich. We’ll be doing our best all year round to stand up for the local community.

Across the motorway Lib Dem candidate Julie Baum put in a stunning performance to move into second place with a 50% increase in the Lib Dem vote.
Besses
Julie Baum (Lib Dem) 614
Labour 1084
Conservatives 584
Others 354

Well done to all our candidates, but particularly to re-elected Councillors Vic D’Albert and Ann Garner, and to new Councillor Mary D’Albert.
A huge thank you to the whole Lib Dem campaign team for a stunning result. Full results to follow.

Please don’t forget to vote in the important local elections on Thursday 1 May 2008. These elections will decide who will represent you at the Council for the next four years.

Hard working local resident Mary D’Albert is the Liberal Democrat Focus Team candidate on Thursday.

Important Information
- Polling Stations are open from 7.00am - 10.00pm
- You don’t need your polling card to vote
- If you have a postal ballot, but have not yet sent it in, you can complete it as normal and take the completed envelope to your local polling station on the day.

Polling Stations in St Mary’s Ward
Rainsough and Heathlands Road area - Rainsough Mission
Agecroft Roads, Butt Hill, Barn Hill, Prestwich Hills etc - Butterstyle Primary School
St Anne’s Road, Carr Clough, Lowther Road areas - St Andrew’s Church, Woodward Road
Prestwich Village - Longfield Centre Library

If you need any more information, or need a lift to the polling station call our helpline on 0161 798 0117

Thank you!

The rain battered me this morning when I was leafleting - I have taken the week off work for the conclusion of the campaign, and our candidate Mary D’Albert and I were out in the storm this morning. Mary is obviously significantly cleverer than me, and had remembered a coat. My t-shirt did not take kindly to the soaking it received.

Remember, there’s only two full days after today, and then it’s polling day, when the people of St Mary’s get to choose who will represent them on the Council for the next four years. Will it be the local hard working Lib Dem who has lived in Prestwich for years, understands the issues, and whose party campaigned to save our local school and who started the Village regeneration at last? Or will it be the Labour Party insider who has moved to the area to replace the Labour councillor who proposed the school closure, who represents the party bidding to close local post offices, and whose party let Prestwich decline over 21 long years of maladministration?

It’s as simple as that, and I believe that the evidence speaks for itself. We’ll be out on the streets of St Mary’s more or less non-stop over the next 72 hours, so if we see you, do stop and say hello. At busy times like this it’s always nice to stop and chat to the local people we hope to serve in the future.

Rick

I am a bit damp at present, having just returned from leafleting in a downpour. Obviously now that I am back inside, the sun is shinning, but that’s just the typical fun God likes to have with me.

With just three days after today left until polling day, it’s full pelt for the Bury Lib Dems as we campaign for the local elections. As well as Mary D’Albert in St Mary’s, long-standing and hard working Councillors Ann Garner and Vic D’Albert are standing for re-election in Sedgley and Holyrood wards respectively, and we have candidates in all the other wards across Bury too. So there are soaked Lib Dems up and down the Borough right now.

My finger is still attached to the rest of my hand, which is an unexpected bonus given the amount of blood pouring from it on Friday night. I nearly lost the plaster in someone’s mailbox this morning, but managed to retrieve it despite the overwhelming temptation to leave it on top of the Labour leaflet which it had fallen on to. So right now the wound is being given a chance to breath before this afternoon’s leaflet-fest.

I am not sure how frequently the blog will be updated in the coming days. My fingers should be doing things involving leaflets, envelopes and doorbells, rather than typing, I suspect. But I will try to make it every day nonetheless. It’s important that we remember the key choice for Thursday - between a Labour Party imploding across the country and trying to make poor people poorer still, whilst shutting down schools and post offices here in Bury, and a Lib Dem candidate in Mary D’Albert who campaigns for stronger local facilities, a better Prestwich Village, and really gets things done locally.

Rick