Have you heard the joke about the missing street sign…?
I have been in exasperated communication with the Council today regarding the continuing drama of the missing street sign on Butterstile Lane.
The sign has been missing, presumed nicked, for three months now. I reported it when it disappeared, and since then the forlorn signposts have been standing vacant like a football goal waiting for a cross bar.
I have blogged about this before, expressing my shock at the Council’s advice that it would take ten weeks to replace a sign. I was of the view then that it’d be quicker to design and build my own iron forging plant and cast the sign myself than wait for the wheels of Council bureaucracy to creak round and get this sorted. When I chased the matter up a few weeks back this view was confirmed when I was told that ten weeks actually meant twelve weeks. The reason for the further delays was not explained to me, so I can only put it down to someone not doing their job properly and treating the issue with the contempt it doesn’t deserve.
So we arrive at today, at the end of the revised waiting period, and still no sign. Quite why something this small yet this important to drivers and walkers and, well, anybody really who wants to know where they are, can’t be sorted in less time than it takes to walk across Europe is a mystery to me.
So I have made my feelings clear to the people in charge. We still don’t have a sign, but I feel slightly better and it makes me feel that at least I’m trying to do what I was elected for, rather than just having ineffective Council officers crush any notion I might have of making even a tiny difference for local people.
Honestly, sometimes I think talking to the Council and asking them for something is about as useful as begging a shrub to cook me my dinner. But we live in hope – my main current hope being that the press pick up this blog post and embarrass the Council, thus joining me in trying to up the pace towards “snail” from its current level of “corpse.”
Rick
7 Comments
have your say
While it is always easy to disparage the council to which you are elected if you are in opposition, a taste the Lib Dems are so very acquired to, because of course the whiff of power is so obscure, one must remember that electors will see you as part of that council, regardless of party colour.
In the interest of local government, be more specific in your qualms.
I thought I was being specific! The Council promised to replace a street sign within ten weeks. I thought that was a very long time to get a very small (but significant) job done, and was disappointed to see that we’re now at twelve weeks and counting and it’s still not done.
My qualms aside from that failing are that the officers concerned seem sometimes to treat the problems of residents as a nuisance rather than their actual job.
The “whiff of power” is not really that obscure for Liberal Democrats, who run Rochdale, Oldham and Stockport in Greater Manchester alone! More Councils, indeed, than the Tories…
While it is always easy to point out arithmetic advantages of certain parties in certain geographical regions, politically, it is usually wise to holistically evaluate the electoral achievements of individual political parties on a larger scale, and of course it would be the Toryist and Unionatives that are winning in the north west, per votes cast.
I do enjoy your flowery language.
I disagree with your argument there. I think it’s wise to vote for the person you want to represent you.
And of course, analysing number of votes cast regionally is irrelevant because our electoral system doesn’t take that into account. Which is why the Lib Dems are the only party advocating changing it.
Given the constraints of individual human longevity, i.e. the short span of a given human lifetime, e.g. mine, this will be, more than likely, my last contribution to this inertial discourse.
It is convenient, is it not, that the party that would benefit most from PR, with or without principle, is the party that advocates its implementation? Disregarding, of course, centuries of FPTP which enables the democratic virtues of local accountability to ensue. Salami-slicing constitutional conventions in the name of progressivism is nothing more than short-sighted, short-term, opposition opportunism. Perhaps that is why, as discussed, the Lib Dems fail to make the electoral grade. Conservatism champions gradual, timely change in favour of ill-conceived ideological radicalism. That is why the party adopting sensible conservatism, namely the Conservatives, is the worlds most successful political organisation and will most likely continue to crush, and to outlive, all other political parties in our time.
Let me first offer my sincere condolences on your health which, given your reluctance to continue our coversation lest its conclusion comes after your own, must be in pretty frail shape.
It is convenient, is it not, that the party that would lose most from PR, with or without principle, is the party that has most vigorously blocked its implementation? Disregarding, of course, the fact that local accountability is perfectly possible under certain systems of PR (Additional Member System for instance), in conjunction with true national representation that doesn’t give parties 65% of the seats with 40% of the votes.
I would hardly call a fundamental overhaul of the voting system “salami slicing” a constitutional convention. It’s a wholesale constitutional reform to bring about the true meaning of democracy - a reflection of the voice of the people. Perhaps that is why, as unfortunately not yet discussed, PR is used in democracies across the globe and here in the UK in Scotland, Wales, London and the Euro elections.
Liberalism champions freedom, fairness and a trust in the people of the world. That is why the most successful countries of the last 100 years have done away with the types of negative, class-ridden rigid structures which had, under Conservatives, kept power in the hands of the few and made lives miserable for many, and moved towards a liberal consensus. It’s also probably the reason behind the types of gradual, timely changes that have seen the Tories at long last try to rid themselves of the bigots racists and homophobes who called the party their own for much of history, and have belatedly embraced such liberal mainstays as environmentalism and social justice.
I’m about tolerance and progress and coming together to make things better. You’re about “crushing all other political parties.” That doesn’t sound very principled to me, and that’s the difference.
But the truth is, we both have some sound policies. I just think that we have more than you, which is why I stand where I do. And I bet that most people care more about that than about much else.
It’s a shame you’re slipping off this conversational coil. I was having fun.
“Crush” being used metaphorically, of course, to reinforce the overwhelming tendency of the UK elecorate to ineluctably come “home” to the Conservatives, no matter how unpopular they are at their troughs.
Anyway, the biggest problem we face is not ‘liberalism’, particularly in it’s classical form (not forgetting that the Whigs were influential in Tory policy in the early years of the party), but Moscow-inspired neo-Marxism, Old Labour.
Of course, New Labour is a sorry re-enactment of deluded, misinterpreted Thatcherism, but there is still a critical mass of left-wing socialists within the Labour Party who threaten our way of life far more seriously than the lamentable Lib Dems, a party disproportionately popular with the fresh-air inhaling, sandal-wearing, lentil-eating south-westerners or university freshers. My point being, councillor, is that the party to which you subscribe is not an ideological threat because it possesses no zest for political power, obvious by it’s lack of leadership, self-confidence and parliamentary success (it’s been a while now, 60-odd MPs (more to go at the next GE, in spite of Huhne’s miscalculated psephological forecasts) and still getting no where near the statute book)). That’s not to suggest it is a competition, I would sooner have a Lib-Tory dominated parliament and watch socialism fade away like a cheap pair of jeans than our current set up. At least then the electorate would then be presented with choice at elections: Social liberalism, or Social conservatism. Perhaps less scrambling for the centre-ground.
Anyway, it has; despite congenial, yet healthy disagreement; been interesting.
But I am afraid it judders to a turbulent halt. We will perhaps meet again in a future entry should my “elitist” “classist” grouse-shooting self choose to re-visit yourself.