Category: Uncategorized

If you believe the Adver, the sun’s always rising.

SWINDON police seized drugs and cash during a day of dawn raids.

It’s not even as though there was a large number of raids. There were only two. It must have been a very short day….

It must be confusing at times, working in the local public sector. The interconnections between organisations seem so incestuous at times that I’m surprised that people don’t end up spending much of their time talking to themselves. For example, I read that the Swindon Summer Festival is a partnership of Swindon Borough Council, Swindon Cultural Partnership, inSwindon and the Marriott Hotel. So that’s the council in partnership with two of its own partnerships and a hotel.

If you’re looking for a beacon of efficient organisation… this isn’t it.

Marks & Spencer seem to have got themselves a little confused geographically. Search for a branch near Swindon and the first three results are, not unreasonably, their not yet opened (for at least another seven weeks) Swindon Orbital Centre branch, their Swindon town centre branch and their Swindon Outlet Centre branch. Next comes Marlborough and then… Guernsey, then Cirencester! Follow the link for the Orbital Centre branch and you get a map… of Swindon town centre.

Not so much “More to explore at Your M&S”, rather a case of more to explore to get to M&S.

I’ve heard a slightly different explanation from any given so far of why Swindon Borough Council wants to build a canal along its chosen route. The explanation came from one of the canal trust’s officers.

One of the features of Swindon’s traffic highlighted in the council’s Central Area Action Plan is the high proportion of traffic that passes through the town centre. The plan aims to reduce this, so that most of the traffic left is actually going to or from the town centre rather than just passing through. The aforementioned canal trust officer said the reason the council wants to build a canal down Faringdon Road and Fleet Street is as part of that traffic management scheme. So the potential traffic congestion that our recently elected councillor was complaining of in his election campaign would be intentional rather than an unwanted side-effect.

I’m not sure how good the canal trust officer’s information source is, but it’s certainly a slightly different slant on the possible benefits of a new canal.

Update, Tuesday, 13 May: To clarify, the canal trust officer’s view was that the main reason for building the canal down Faringdon Road was for it’s traffic management effects rather than because, as the council have said, that would be the best place in terms of its civic amenity and tourist attraction value.

Even when doing little more than regurgitating a press release, the Adver cannot resist applying a positive gloss in support of the proposals to re-introduce a canal to Swindon.

Canal would give town a big boost

THE plan to build a canal through the centre of Swindon has been given the thumbs up by a business expert. Paul Briggs, chief executive of the Thames Valley Chamber of Commerce Group, has said that a canal could provide a big boost to the town. He welcomed the project as a key element in transforming Swindon’s town centre into a leisure and visitor attraction, disposing of its dreary reputation.

Only one of those sentences is true: that Mr Briggs of the Thames Valley Chamber of Commerce said that the canal could provide a big boost to the town. Could. Not ‘would’ only ‘could’. The article then goes on to reproduce almost the entirety of the chamber’s press release, leaving out only the first paragraph. I’ll repeat that paragraph here, as it makes clear what Mr Briggs was supporting.

The Swindon Chamber of Commerce has welcomed proposals to debate the redevelopment of Swindon’s town centre through the creation of a focal waterway. The plans hope to attract people to Swindon by transforming the town centre into a leisure and visitor attraction, disposing of what some believe to be a dreary reputation.

That’s only a ‘thumbs up’ to debating the plans. It is a long way short of supporting the plans themselves. As the rest of the press release made clear, whilst he is clearly not an opponent of the plans*, there are many questions still to be answered.

* Anyone who thinks the impact of the canal could match that of the coming of the railway 100 years ago obviously has their rose-tinted spectacles on: the canal has already been and gone once, with limited impact; the impression left on Swindon by the GWR remains unavoidable.

Not surprisingly, the annual general meeting on Saturday of Westmill Windfarm Co-operative produced opinions totally dissimilar to those of campaigner Joanna Lambert, who regards the five wind turbines as a noisy eyesore. However, some of them are as prone to overstatement as Ms Lambert.

I think they are not only beautiful but absolutely vital to the survival of our species and the planet.

A lack of cheap electricity may be inconvenient, but it hardly threatens the extinction of the human race.

The AGM itself was an odd affair. Held in a marquee beside the turbines and run by a chairman who forgot that not only did motions need to be proposed and seconded but they also needed to be voted on. Then their were the questions and comments from the floor, a mix of a few logical questions concerning the future of the business, and a large number that were bizarre to varying degrees. There were people who clearly found the whole idea of making money from a business as abhorrent and suggested alternatives to people receiving interest on their investments. There were others proposing over-the-top technological solutions to non-existent problems: as one of the co-op’s advisers said, why bother with battery storage of power from windfarms when they’re connected to the National Grid? Others were keen to publicise their own schemes — watermills on the Thames seemed popular — or had parochial questions about their own interests. The overall impression was more parish council than efficient business.

One thing was indisputable: the turbines were quiet, with the sound of birds in the surrounding fields much louder than the swishing of the blades.

Well, there ends one of the most lacklustre local election campaigns that I can remember. The blue and red nests have seemingly put all their canvassing efforts put into Parks ward, with the voters in the rest of the town almost been taken for granted.

With it being a couple of years since I last voted at a polling station there were a couple of things that struck me as I cast my vote this morning: the first polling station official didn’t ask me to confirm my name and address when I handed over my poll card; another didn’t bother to stamp the ballot paper with an official mark, just tore it from a pad and handed it over (perhaps they were pre-marked); yet another official sat reading a newspaper and didn’t even bother to look up to see what it was that I was putting into the ballot box. It’s little checks such as these that stop this week’s shaggy dog story being nothing more than a tale of naïve stupidity.

In their first — and possibly last — offering of this year’s election campaign, the leaflet stuffed hurriedly through my letterbox this evening is, like their manifesto, long on what the blue nest have done, but short — very short — on what they intend to do in the future. It tells of things done and things being done, but nothing of things yet to be done… from which I can only conclude that they are intending more of the same. (Guess they’re not called Conservative for nothing.) They also seem to be struggling to distinguish their positives from their negatives.

Since the Conservatives took control of the Council in June 2004, we have ended Labour’s unacceptable Council Tax hikes,… We believe in positive campaigning and are the only party that will set out a positive agenda.

Their three-year-old agenda may be positive, but in a deteriorating economic climate some of it, particularly town-centre redevelopment, is looking less than realistic.

With just three days to go to the local elections, it’s a bit late to be running stories about the use of social networking sites to encourage voting.

Facebook used to galvanise voters
Social networking website Facebook is being used by a Wiltshire council to encourage people to vote.

Swindon Borough Council said the aim was to help make it easier for citizens to find information about the election and to exchange ideas with others.

Swindon Borough Council actually ‘said’ very little: the BBC has just copied the words from the council’s website. And if they’d bothered to check, they would have seen that they have hardly galvanised anyone: the Facebook group has just eleven members, three of whom are administrators.

There is a story here: it is one of poorly promoted experiments and inefficient use of council staff time.

In his latest election leaflet, Mr Ali seems to be having difficulty remembering what has been the work of his red nest colleagues.

The Tories have introduced a waste and re-cycling scheme that has failed to address the needs of Central’s multiple-occupancy homes. After over a year of campaigning for recognition of this problem your local labour councillors have an agreement that a specialist waste warden will visit the multiple-occupancy homes.

Whilst not disputing the failings of the waste collection scheme, I could have sworn their had been others more active on this issue.

Swindon needs a road system to match the Labour Governments town regeneration project.

Strange… as I recall, one of the main features of the town centre regeneration planning has been the unwillingness of the government to contribute to improving transport infrastructure.

The Tories solution is to narrow key roads and increase traffic volumes on Central’s residential streets.

Err… that’s the canal that is part of the regeneration plan is it? Who did you claim that project for? Being a bit selective in what you claim as your own perhaps? Lets not forget either that the impact of the canal on traffic is much more complex than Mr Ali and his colleagues would have us believe. Yes it would increase traffic at the Broadgreen end of Central ward, but traffic at the Kingshill end would be decreased. He also seems confused over schooling.

They have also failed to… provide sufficient local primary education, forcing parents and children to undertake unnecessary costly journeys.

Yet on the red nest’s website he says something different.

I am proud of Labour’s huge investment in new schools.

Contradictions like this hardly give an impression of a reliable, trustworthy person.

It’s nice that Mr Ali alone among this year’s election candidates has made any attempt at communication in the run-up to the election. It’s unfortunate that so much of that communication is untrue.