Richard Baum

This morning I joined Bury South’s MP Ivan Lewis, my fellow St Mary’s Councillor Donal O’Hanlon, and about ten local residents in a graffiti clean up around Prestwich Clough. And let me say this - if we want to stop the problem of graffiti in one instant hit, all we have to do is make the culprits try and clean up the stuff they’ve daubed onto brickwork, because it’s incredibly hard work!

We were using the graffiti kits which are available free to local residents and businesses. The kits contain gloves, cloths, scourers, and three different levels of cleaning solution. The first level is good for metal signs, the second level for stone surfaces, and the third level will simultaneously work on brickwork and burn through the casing on nuclear warheads. Unfortunately even this super strength stuff, which mysteriously turned my fingers yellow and the fingers of Ivan Lewis blue, won’t shift the graffiti from brickwork without hours and hours of hard scrubbing. I now have biceps stronger than titanium.

It was really heartening to see quite a number of residents out to help us. Even the ones who didn’t fancy ruining their elbows scrubbing graffiti chipped in with litter picking. The fact that it was organised at all shows great community spirit, and seeing passers-by stop and join in was even better.

The mood was soured slightly by five or six passing young people who took pleasure in throwing litter our way, smirking, and walking off despite our calls for them to pick it up. This type of thing is the most infuriating anti-social behaviour I come across. But, whilst I could have spent my time contemplating quite how utterly thoughtless and irresponsible their actions were, and how we manage to live in a country where that kind of attitude is allowed to develop and that kind of behaviour allowed to go unpunished, it did actually make the time go that little bit quicker as I imagined ever more exquisitely painful forms of retribution for each and every one of the little hooligans.

But before long all that was forgotten, and we made quite a team tackling the graffiti. Unfortunately, I have taken three things away from the morning, and two of them are negative. First the good one - that the people of Prestwich have shown that we can come together, people from different streets, different wards, different political parties, and do something good in our own time for the community. It’s great.

But it barely scrathes the surface. There was probably 20 man hours put into graffiti cleaning today, and we probably only touched 10% of the graffiti, and completely removed even less than that. It’s a huge job, and of course removing it doesn’t prevent it re-appearing.

And, of course, that we are forced to congratulate ourselves for nibbling away at the edges of the problem is an indictment of the Council’s continuing action. That they can sit at the Town Hall content to see Council Tax payers using third-rate “graffiti kits” to clean up mess on public property is shameful. The Council have the manpower, equipment and resources to do in a few hours what it would take volunteers weeks to do. The only thing they lack is the will. It’s time that changed. We need to show the vandals that they can’t win. We need to show them that if they daub graffiti, it will be removed straight way. We need to show them there’s no point, because we care about Prestwich. Ten people really did show that today, and I know hundreds of others think it too. It’s about time the Council recognised that, and did what we pay them to do.

Rick