Richard Baum

My new wife commented the other day that summer seems to have shifted forward three months. These days, it’s lovely between about March and June, but then horrible between July and August, the months where in the long-gone days of my youth I seem to remember it being quite sunny.

I floated this meteorological proposition to some colleagues today, as we looked out at the storm lashing Ashton-under-Lyne. The response was that the lovely April weather I was referring to was what has always been known as “spring,” and that all that’s happened is that summer has disappeared.

Whatever’s going on, at least it’s cleared up now and I am free to resume the summer-evening surveying that local Lib Dems have been doing across Prestwich and Whitefield. It’s been great meeting lots of people, almost none of whom are spewing the type of anti-coalition bile I am terrified of when reading the letters page of the Bury Times (written almost exclusively, I have learned over the years, by politically active people from the various parties rather than genuine members of the public).

It’s all remarkably pleasant, in fact, and it’s good to be able to hear people’s problems and respond positively like good councillors should.

So I’ll be doing that in a bit.

All this rain is slightly ironic because tonight is also the night when my family expands by precisely one bag full of tiny little fish, all of whom would feel quite at home in the puddles outside. I thought that my recent wedding should be the prelude to some familial expansion, and so we’ve decided to add to the cat by purchasing some fish, and storing them in a (hopefully) cat proof tank. It’s all a prelude to the hens which we’re hoping to get for our soon-to-be zoo-like abode in the autumn.

I used to keep goldfish when I was a kid. I remember the drill was to either win one at the fair, or nip down to the pet shop and return with one in a polythene bag. Things have moved on somewhat now, as my trip to Pets @ Home tonight will be my third attempt to persuade them to let me have a goldfish.

The first time I went in to buy the tank they said that it would be wise to let the water settle first. I returned two days later with the sample of water they asked me to provide (!) so that they could test it. It passed the test, but they said that I had to wait 72 hours to let the filter bed in, and they still wouldn’t give me my fish. So I am hoping that tonight I will be able to make it third time lucky.

I feel slightly guilty that I am clearly unfit to look after even a goldfish, apparently, although slightly baffled because the last one I owned (when I was a child) lived for about 8 years.

Anyway, enough about my rollercoaster life. It’s time to go out surveying.

Rick

It was great to see hundreds of local people at the Farmers’ Market in Prestwich on Sunday.

It was another great success, but sadly it was spoiled for many by ill-timed roadworks nearby. It makes me wonder why the Council scheduled noisy roadworks which caused traffic problems right next to the market on what was a very busy day?

On a normal Sunday the area would have been quiet, but obviously not on a Farmers’ Market day. Since the Farmer’s Market was a Council-run event, I’d have thought the Council would have used some brains and not decided to close and dig up the road. Could they not have waited a week?

Sadly they didn’t seem to be aware of the likely problems, and certainly didn’t ask ward Councillors, residents or the Local Area Manager before digging up the road. Another example of poor management of the Council by the Conservatives running it.

Rick

As part of his ambitious plans to create a sustainable low-carbon economy, the Liberal Democrat Energy and Climate Change Secretary Chris Huhne has written to all local authorities to announce that they are now allowed to sell renewable electricity to the grid.

Until now only 0.01% of electricity in England is generated by local authority-owned renewables, despite the scope that exists to install projects on their land and buildings.  In Germany the equivalent figure is 100 times higher.

At present local authorities are able to put any renewable electricity they generate to local use, and to benefit from the associated feed-in tariff for projects smaller than 5MW.  But they are restricted from selling any excess renewable electricity into the grid. 

The steps that are now being taken could mean up to £200m a year in income for local authorities across England and Wales.

This is good news. Sensible, green, and putting power in the hands of locally electable and accountable councillors. I’d like to see more like this. It’s a shame that at the moment the Tories’ big idea of the “Big Society” seems to bypass Councils altogether, but hopefully the Lib Dem influence on the coalition can be positive and change things for the better as its doing here.

Rick

Since the spurt of blogging on Tuesday, I have been so busy that I’ve not been able to repeat it. It turns out that the aftermath of a wedding (thank you card writing, photograph analysis, present unwrapping, apologising to the female guests I drunkenly came on to etc etc) takes up more time than the wedding itself. For the oversight, I apologise.

That’s not to say that I have been idle. Aside from a return to work today (to 283 emails) there has been casework. This week I have had a housing issue to deal with, after some troublesome council tenants began causing misery for their neighbours. I have also learned about how to get unadopted roads adopted so as to help a resident enquiring about that (it turns out you need public access and pavements). And I have continued to try and find a solution for a local football team trying to stop young people setting fire to its pitch every weekend evening. Thankfully the rain will probably scupper them tonight, which is more than can be said for the Police, despite their efforts so far.

Friday means Prestwich Advertiser day, and I am very disappointed to find that they didn’t print my letter of reply about Lib Dem voting records again, despite finding time and space last week to print a letter accusing me of not answering the original query (which I did, hence the repeated answer this week). The paper, owned by Trinity Mirror, the people behind the Labour-backing Daily Mirror, aren’t doing themselves any favours in the fairness stakes on this one. Maybe next time eh?

This weekend will see me finally do the last of the post-Honeymoon sorting out. People keep asking me if married life is different and the answer is “yes, there’s lots more laundry.” The pair of us going away for three weeks each has meant double time for the washing machine. I will also get through the other bits of casework yet to be responded to since I’ve come back (sorry if this is your query, but I am working through the backlog as quickly as possible) and get out and do some leafleting for the first time as a married man.

For once the women of Prestwich will have a reason not to pounce on me. Prior to now they just haven’t.

Rick

It’s rare that I look at the headline in the Daily Mail and think “that makes sense”, but I do agree with their campaign to ban clampers. Personally, I’d like to go further than banning them actually, and instead clamp all clampers to a lamppost and make them wear a giant flashing neon hat saying “clamper” on it, and have people throw vegetables at them until they pay an exorbitant release fee of my choosing.

Sadly the government haven’t listened to my lamppost / vegetable idea, and have simply banned clampers. The press release actually says that they have banned “cowboy clampers”, which makes me think of Marlboro Men affixing things to the wheels of my Peugeot 207 in between herding thousands of cattle across Arizona. But apparently that’s not what it meant.

Anyway, so the coalition, in the guise of Liberal Democrat ministers Lynne Featherstone and Norman Baker have announced that car clamping on private land is to be banned.

This long-standing Liberal Democrat policy and manifesto commitment will be introduced as part of the Freedom Bill this Autumn.

Home Office minister Lynne Featherstone said:

“The Government is committed to ending the menace of rogue private sector wheel clampers once and for all.

“For too long motorists have fallen victim to unscrupulous tactics by many clamping firms. Reports of motorists being marched to cash points or left stranded after their car has been towed are simply unacceptable.

“A ban on clamping and towing on private land will end this abuse and companies who decide to flout new laws will face severe penalties.”

Transport minister Norman Baker, who campaigned to ban private wheel clamping as Shadow Transport Secretary before the election, added:

“The rules governing parking on private land should be proportionate and should not result in motorists being intimidated or forced to pay excessive fines.

“Cowboy clampers have had ample opportunity to mend their ways but the cases of bullying and extortion persist.

“That is why we are putting an end to these outrageous practices once and for all to ensure that drivers no longer have to fear intimidation from rogue traders, allowing the parking industry to begin to restore its reputation with the motoring public.”

Hurrah for that.

Rick

I enjoy being off work, at least for a while. At first it’s all about catching up with sleep and going on nice walks. Before too long it’s about not getting up until 15.00 and not opening the curtains for five days, but thankfully I am rarely off for that long. Unfortunately though, even if I am off for a single day, there is the chance that I might forget myself and tune into the phone-ins on Radio 5 Live.

I have my radio tuned in there to catch the football, which is what’s on in the evenings when I tend to be in the car. I forget that during the day the station opens its phone lines to people who seem to actively enjoy shouting unfiltered bile to the entire nation, as if there’s a switch in their brain which simultaneously compels them to screech rubbish and dial national radio stations.

Today’s question was about Tony Blair’s donation of the entire proceeds from his memoirs (at least £4.6m) to the Royal British Legion to help them build a rehabilitation sports centre for injured service personnel.

That’s right. A man who could potentially earn an 8-figure sum writing his life story has decided to donate the entire amount to charity. A generous gesture, no? Well, no, not if you were one of the many boiled-blooded scream-mongerers who rang in this morning. I simply couldn’t believe the self-righteous harping and the frankly stupid remarks from what seemed like the majority of people ringing in. It made me, genuinely, ashamed to share a country with some of them.

Now, having worked for a time answering the phones at a radio station, I understand that a lot of people who ring in to daytime radio shows are at the polar ends of the normality spectrum. But I just don’t understand the pure hatred directed at a man who led the country for a decade, did so with a thumping democratic mandate which he won three times over, and then donated several millions of pounds of money which he rightfully earned to an exceedingly good cause.

Of course people are angry about the decision to go to war in Iraq. I disagree with that decision myself. But that decision was taken honourably, and the man who took it led his party to a general election victory two years later. The reaction to this donation made it seem as if Bernard Matthews had left his estate to the Cute Little Turkey Wurkeys Stroking Society. Shouts of “hypocrite” and “blood money” abounded, from people who clearly had never heard Mr Blair speak with such compassion about troops, and who probably don’t go about handing out millions to charity.

More seriously, it re-awakens the Iraq debate, and displays two worrying trends.

Firstly, it once again shows the lack of understanding that a lot of people (or at least those ringing radio shows) seem to have about how democracy works and what the relationship between electorate and elected is all about. We don’t elect governments (or councillors) to do everything we want, whenever we want it. We elect them to listen, take soundings, and then make their own decision based on what they think is best. That’s what representative democracy is all about. Sometimes, unfortunately, it means doing things that will annoy a lot of people. But if they annoy too many people then the next time there’s an election the electorate can undo them.

Unfortunately this concept seems to have been lost to some people, and it’s especially clear on issues like Iraq. We elected Labour in 2001 to make decisions. They made a decision over Iraq even though many people thought that the decision was wrong. It was their decision to make though, and the way our democracy works is to put that decision making power in the hands of the people we elect. Contributors to the phone in today seem unwilling to accept that the decision was valid just because it went against what they thought. This is worrying, especially given the tough decisions coming up over spending cuts, and shows a potential gap between the reality of our democracy and what people understand democracy to be.

The second worry is the incredible personal vitriol handed out to Mr Blair. Even the newspapers are hinting that this multi-million pound donation, the biggest single donation in the history of the Royal British Legion, is blood money. I am staggered that Mr Blair isn’t being universally praised for a gesture of unrivalled generosity. This is a huge sum of money, and yet so many people today were suggesting that Mr Blair was some kind of robber from the public purse simply for being able to earn that money in the first place. And all this hot on the heels of the Brown baiting which made me feel a bit queasy during the general election campaign. Why the hell would any sane person want to be PM if the best they can hope for as a legacy is either obscurity or hatred?

Mr Blair was Prime Minister for 10 years. I didn’t agree with a lot of what he stood for, but he’s definitely the top PM in my lifetime so far for the good he did. I don’t care how much he rakes in or what he chooses to do with it now that he’s a private citizen. That he has given up every penny from a highly lucrative book deal to support a worthy cause is something I doubt almost anyone else would do. I probably wouldn’t! The criticism, from people who clearly have enough time during the working day to ring in radio shows rather than run countries, is maddening in its wrong-headed intensity, and upsetting in its jaw-dropping personal hysteria. Criticise the guy by all means, but for God’s sake do it with some grace.

Some people were even suggesting that the Legion turn the money down! There’s so many people cutting off their own noses to spite their own faces that I must be the only 5 Live listener in the UK to have a nose at all!

Anyway, rant over. I’m listening to Radio 2 tomorrow.

Rick

I came back from my honeymoon to the usual mountain of mail. And like everyone else does, I immediately cast it all aside to reach the local free paper from a fortnight ago.

I wasn’t happy though, when I read the Prestwich Advertiser of 5th August.

In it, a local Labour activist queried why I hadn’t replied to a previous letter of his asking a simple question about how the Lib Dems had voted in Council this year. His original letter had hinted that there was a deal between the Lib Dems and Tories locally which could be seen when analysing how we’d all voted. It was a reasonable question, and one which, since someone had taken the trouble to ask, should have been answered.

I was annoyed though, because I had replied to the letter originally, only for the paper not to print the reply! Not only had the paper not printed my reply, but they’d now printed a letter criticising me for not replying!

I am very conscious of the need to answer questions from anyone, even dyed-in-the-wool Labour activists out to make my party and me look bad. I haven’t ever shied away from doing that, either in the press or on here. It really gets me angry when it’s suggested otherwise, particularly in the press when it’s simply not true.

The Prestwich Advertiser should know better. I hope their approach in this instance isn’t a symptom of their recent takeover by the people who own the Daily Mirror, the most voraciously pro-Labour / anti-Lib Dem national paper of the lot. I don’t think it is, because their news coverage has been very fair of late. But the letters page is a key local opinion-former, and it’s important that they don’t make mistakes like this.

To be clear, I have sent a letter to them this week explaining their mistake (together with a copy of the original reply I sent) and again answering the original question. Just so that an answer to the original query is in the public domain, I will put on here what is in the letter, namely that there have been two Council meetings since the local elections. Overall there have been five final motions put to the vote. The votes cast were as follows:
 
1) Motion on Six Town Housing - Conservatives and Lib Dems voted the same way.
2) Motion on cuts - All three parties voted the same way.
3) Motion on appointing the Leader - Labour and Lib Dems voted the same way.
4) Motion on appointments to committees - Conservatives and Labour voted the same way.
5) Motion on remunerations - All three parties voted the same way.
 
So, despite the original letter (and its follow up) hinting that there is some kind of deal between the Tories and the Lib Dems, the facts are otherwise.

Hopefully that will be printed in this week’s paper to set the record straight!

Rick

Apologies for the lack of recent bloggings. I have been away, and have returned bronzed, rested, and married.

All three of those things were planned. This wasn’t a trip to Vegas gone drunkenly wrong. It was in fact a trip to Aldershot gone romantically right, followed by a honeymoon in the Isles of Scilly.

The wedding was, for me at least, a marvellous day. I can’t speak for my new wife, whose smiles surely masked the horror at having had to legally bind herself to me for life. But as far as I was concerned, it could scarcely have gone any better. The rain held off, I managed to tie my cravat, and my speech took place without any Labour Councillors shouting “shame” as I rose from my seat, which was a novelty.

This is a family blog, so I won’t go into the detail of the wedding night, other than to express mild disappointment at two things I feel I should warn fellow grooms-to-be about. First, I was bitterly sad to find that the bridal suite I was staying in was comfortably the nicest hotel room I will probably ever legally get into, but that because the wedding didn’t finish until 2am and because breakfast meant being out of there by 8.30, I had no time whatsoever to utilise the facilities. There was a bath the size of David Beckham’s swimming pool, and a space age trouser press that looked like it had been designed by Arthur C Clarke. But I couldn’t use either.

Second, the bride’s dress was not as easy to remove as the movies would have us believe. I was expecting a sleek, slithery manoeuvring something akin to the boozy end of an evening enjoyed by James Bond. In fact the contraption was held in place by a compendium of buttons, hooks and loops so complicated that it made the control console of a Saturn V mission look like an Etch-A-Sketch. For someone as cack-handed as me (I couldn’t tie a double knot in my shoelaces until I was 16), getting her out of that was like drinking two quarts of vodka, donning a blindfold and then trying to build a full scale Meccano replica of the Cutty Sark. I am going to go on Dragon’s Den as soon as humanly possible with the world’s first velcro wedding dress. It will be a sure-fire hit.

Still, she escaped it eventually, which sadly brought us a few minutes closer to the end of what was the single most lovely 24 hours of my entire life. It was quite emotional to think that such an ensemble of my nearest and dearest is unlikely to come together again unless I either get insanely rich and can pay for them all to get somewhere, or I die. I don’t begrudge our photographer his outrageous fee any more, because his photos are all we have left.

Apart from the Debenhams gift list, obviously. Oh, and each other.

So after that we went on our honeymoon, to Scilly, a place so jaw-droppingly beautiful that it renders foreign travel utterly needless. Forget environmental arguments or the fact that you can’t stand the French. The best reason I have ever seen never to leave the UK is called the island of St Agnes, and it’s 25 miles off Land’s End.

We didn’t stay on it, although we could see it from St Mary’s, which was a couple of miles away and was where we were staying, in a 17th century former windmill which had been turned into a cottage for romantics too tight fisted to stay in a hotel (like me). It contained four round rooms, one on top of the other. The bedroom was at the very top, and the bathroom was at the very bottom, accessible only by an outside staircase, which sounded cute in the brochure but which is irritating when my bladder goes to sleep an hour after the rest of me, and wakes up three hours before.

For the yachtless, Scilly is accessible only by a ferry, a helicopter, and a tiny aeroplane. On the way out we took the helicopter, which was a new experience and one which I found much preferably to flying. If it didn’t cost a thousand times as much as any other mode of transport (except perhaps the Metrolink), I might helicopter more often. My fear that the rotor and the blades would become detached mid-flight, sending us hurtling into the sea, proved unfounded, although I was slightly perturbed on arrival at the heliport to be informed by the check-in man / mechanic that there would be a delay due to “maintenance issues.” These issues were overcome enough to prevent airborne tragedy, and we arrived.

On the way back we came by plane, a 15 seat affair driven by propellers and called an “Otter.” I am no expert in aeronautical nomenclature, but if I was I don’t think I’d name a tiny plane carrying people from islands across seas after an animal that specialises in diving headfirst into water.

Whilst on the islands there was plenty of walking, eating and relaxing. I was forced at divorce-point to go horse-riding, which was a terrifying affair I don’t wish to repeat in a hurry. My horse was bigger than anything I’ve seen close up since Jurassic Park was on at the IMAX. Getting on it was like trying to mount Ayres Rock. My terror was made all the worse by the 12 year old girl escorting me, who leapt aboard her own horse and proceeded to thoroughly show me up by leading the way as I bumbled along behind hanging on for dear life.

I was told that the day previously, the actor Jude Law had ridden the very same horse. Obviously there’s a rude joke in there about that being the only time in my life I’ll ride something Jude Law’s ridden. But I am above making it.

We met said Mr Law a couple of days later, in a posh hotel we’d sheltered in to escape the cold. He’s the type of man so depressingly handsome that it confirm’s to me that God is the divine equivalent of Jeremy Beadle - chortling away whilst playing nasty tricks on ugly people like me. His staggering beauty almost put an end to the marriage there and then. Thankfully my wife is a stickler for the types of local Lib Dem fundraisers that Hollywood A-list types simply can’t provide.

It’s been a great couple of weeks. I have another two days off work too, to catch up on casework and answer my emails. The bad news is that I have to contemplate the fact that having used up all my leave in one go, I now have no more holidays until Christmas. The good news though is that when they do come round I have a wife to share them with.

Rick

The “consultation” on plans to introduce car parking charges in Prestwich ends in one week, on August 9th. You have until then to let the Council know your thoughts.

I use inverted commas in “consultation” because, as ever, it’s not a proper consultation. The Conservatives running the Council have decided their policy and voted it through already. Now they are just concerned with the detail of the charges, not the principle of them which everyone I’ve spoken to disagrees with them about.

The time to tell them what you think about that approach to running Bury is at the ballot box in May. Right now it’s the time to let them know what you think about these charges. The address to write to is:

Transportation Services, PO Box 545, 3 Knowles Place, Duke St, Bury BL8 9HA

Lib Dems is Bury have been opposed to these charges since day 1. We voted against them when they were first proposed and have done ever since. We will continue the fight against them because they’re bad for local business and not fair on people needing to get to the local NHS facilities.

Let the Council know what you think of these proposals in this last week of the consultation.

Rick

Apologies for a couple of days with no bloggings. Or, if you prefer, apologies for returning when you may have thought I’d gone for good. I haven’t gone for good, although things might be a bit sporadic over the next few weeks as I get hitched and then disappear off on honeymoon.

My own wedding (coincidentally taking place at precisely the same time as my fiancee’s) is next Saturday, but tomorrow is a dummy run in the form of another wedding to which we’ve been invited. I did consider dressing in next weekend’s clothes to get a practice session in, but feel that may somewhat spoil the day for tomorrow’s real bride and groom.

In amongst preparing for the nuptials and doing my day job there has been casework and the like to occupy me as well. As your local councillor it’s my job to help if you’ve got any issues with council services. This week there’s been a mixed bag, with everything from problems with licensed premises, to vandalism and anti-social behaviour, to the perennial favourite - the missed bin. The missed bin concerned was in fact my own, and it wasn’t missed so much as wrecked by the bin wagon, which took not only its contents but also its lid when the thing was emptied on Monday! A spectacular success for the neighbourhood foxes, who were given free reign until it was replaced, but sadly no good for me. Thankfully it was speedily dealt with.

The same couldn’t be said for the residents of Belvedere Court, a couple of whom contacted me earlier in the week to say that their paper recycling bags hadn’t been collected and now presented a fire hazard. A touch over-dramatic in my view, since in order to be a fire hazard someone would need to set them alight, and if someone was setting things alight in the flats then they’d succeed whether there were bags of paper there or not. But still, a query is a query, so I made sure that the Council got onto it.

I was also amused by a couple of national things this week. Ed Miliband’s ridiculous claim to have been against the Iraq War in 2003 but to have forgotten to mention it at the time was disappointingly opportunistic, although this naked opportunism was sadly and wildly outdone by the Labour Party as a whole which has decided to campaign against AV in the referendum on changing the voting system which will happen (all being well) next May. Labour were actually the only party to campaign FOR it in the election, but now that the coalition (including the evil Lib Dems, now more evil than the Tories apparently) are proposing it, they are against. After 13 years away from opposition they appear to have forgotten that they aren’t meant to oppose everything, just the bits they don’t agree with.

But even electoral reform can’t distract me from weddings, and that’s what will keep me occupied for the time being. When I left work today my colleagues had tied balloons to the car with such uplifting slogans as “under the thumb” and “good lucj - you’ll need it” scrawled on them. With such sentiments in my mind do I leave for the weekend to return on Sunday night only five short days away from getting married. And, if those five days reflect anything that I have learned with dismay recently, they really will fly by.

Rick