komadori’s green corner

It’s so nice to see Mr Small and the local red nest putting their electoral convenience before the interests of the people they represent. As first reported on the TalkSwindon forum, Mr Thompson has been in living in Spain since January and hasn’t attended a council meeting since July last year. You’d think that if you’re too ill to represent your people, the best thing to do, for both councillor and those they represent, would be to resign and rest in the hope of making a quick recovery. Apparently not, according to Mr Small.

There is no secrecy about the fact that Barrie is going to resign. I would expect him to step down by around mid-March. We want to save the council taxpayers extra expense by not calling a by-election.

What carefully chosen words. There was plenty of secrecy: there is no secrecy now only because others have revealed what is going on. I also don’t recall the red nest having such a level of concern for taxpayers in the past when members of their own party flew the nest to the opposing side. It’s difficult to see this as anything other than political self-interest masquerading as concern for the people.

I don’t like the idea of 750 houses being built around Coate Water any more than Ms Saunders does. However, I do find some of her reasons for wanting to protect the area from development a bit odd.

The council also has to consider the beautiful views from Liddington Hill and the area of outstanding beauty. These views are equally as important as the views from Coate Water.

Ms Saunders seems to be suffering from an affliction common amongst campaigners: an inability to see existing large developments. For those that haven’t noticed, if one looks from Liddington Hill in the direction of Coate Water, rather prominent in the background is a town called ‘Swindon’. In comparison with that backdrop, another 750 houses are not going to change the view from the hill that much.

I find it rather puzzling that Mr Small can convert the Audit Commission’s recent ‘comprehensive performance assessment’ that Swindon Borough Council is ‘improving strongly’ into something completely different.

I would also remind Nick Martin of the comments made last week by the chair of the audit commission, who described Swindon as a stagnant authority.

I’ve searched the Commission’s whole report for the word ‘stagnant’ — it’s not used once. If the chair of the Commission spoke these words, they seem not to have been recorded. The only mention I can find of Swindon being a ‘stagnant authority’ is Mr Small’s.

The leader of the red nest seems to have forgotten that, when his group were in charge, the council was, by the Audit Commission’s analysis, one of the worst performing councils in the country.

The only thing that seems stagnant in all of this is Mr Small’s contribution to political debate.

With a little flurry of leaflets (three in fact) from our local blue egg, it seems that the local election campaign is off to an early start. As is traditional in Swindon election leaflets, there’s a couple of photographs of the candidate standing in front of some graffiti tags. (I wonder if the taggers get a buzz from having their handiwork feature in election bumf.) In addition, there are mentions of the canal (nice idea but concerns about the local impact), town centre redevelopment (though I’m not quite sure why Central will be the ‘envy of the rest of Swindon’ when the vast majority of the development is in Eastcott), an invitation to sign a petition against post office closures (which is a little late seeing as the consultation period has just ended) and an oh-so-toned-down comment about the problems with waste collections.

I’m sure if I just replaced the photographs and the colour of the ink, I’d get a close approximation of the leaflets I’ll be getting from the other parties over the coming months.

I have previously commented on the silliness of some of the obstacles placed in the way of cyclists in Swindon. Today I came across one such obstacle at Taw Hill, on National Cycle Route 45. The route is newly signposted, with the signs indicating that it’s just 13 miles to Cirencester and, for the more energetic, 48 to Gloucester. But with pointless obstacles like the one shown — everyone, including me, cycles round, chewing up the grass — it wouldn’t be the quickest of journeys.

Surely there are more effective ways to slow careless cyclists whilst allowing more careful riders on their way relatively unimpeded.

The Swindon Strategic Partnership (which often seems so close as to be indistinguishable from Swindon Borough Council) has published the final version of its Community Strategy or 2030 vision. It reads slightly less like a socialist eutopia than the draft version did, but still remains fanciful. Perhaps it’s meant to be that way.

Rural areas will benefit as much as the urban areas with work undertaken to address issues like public transport, local jobs and affordable homes.

Presumably because they’ll have been subsumed into the urban sprawl that government development plans are imposing on the town.

The rural areas of the Borough will be made up of diverse, vibrant and economically sound communities.

Told you so: most people would think of rural areas as being made up of fields, woods and villages; for Swindon, it’s housing and communities all the way.

Swindon’s appeal will stem from having an attractive and well-equipped town that has successfully blended traditional architecture with high quality contemporary buildings that incorporate sustainable design and construction principles.

That is, every historic building will have been converted to flats, with only the original facade remaining.

The town centre will be a far more attractive place for everyone to visit in the evenings thanks to significant reductions in the amount of crime and anti-social behaviour.

So, the lollipops will work.

Not surprisingly, given his past record, Mr Bluh is ecstatic.

This important document is the ultimate vision of how local people want their borough to be. Thank you to everyone who gave their views which have helped shape this exciting, ambitious set of aspirations.

As the vision itself states,

This document has been produced with help from nearly a thousand local people.

That’s less than one percent of the population of the borough. Whilst clearly well intentioned, I suspect the vision owes more to the officials that drafted it than to the population of Swindon as a whole.

I don’t wish to belittle the experience of a man in Nythe who was attacked when a dog broke free from its tether: the description he has given does seem quite bad. However, having the Adver headlined its story ‘Man Savaged by Rottweiler’ you’d have thought they could have illustrated the story with a photograph that shows something more serious than just a ripped jean, without a hint of the bite wounds that apparently required hospital treatment. As it is, you could walk into a high street retailer and buy jeans in a worse state than the pair in the photo.

Yet another bright idea from Swindon Community Safety Partnership has been announced today, just a week after their last act of genius. Their latest idea is to give revellers boozing themselves to oblivion on Friday and Saturday nights a pack containing a bottle of water, a lollipop, a personal attack alarm, condoms and flip-flops. This ‘survival kit’ will, if the title of the news item on Swindon Borough Council’s website is to be believed, increase said inebriated revellers’ awareness of the effects of alcohol. According to Mr Lovell,

This project is a demonstration of the holistic approach we take when dealing with the night time economy in Swindon to ensure it is a safe place to enjoy.

I have an alternative suggestion for making the Fleet Street area of Swindon safe. The pubs could, as licensing law requires, stop serving those that are clearly drunk, and the local judiciary could take a more serious approach to those found guilty of drunken violence. Just those two things would be far more effective in making people feel safe than a lollipop and bottle of water ever will.

Some people must have a strange life, only enjoying those things that others hate. Take Mr Newman, for example, who is concerned about plans to stop leafleting in Swindon town centre.

I have no problem in restricting leaflets from companies promoting goods or services for profit. But they need to build in exemptions and safeguards for trade unions, political groups and religious organisations, who contribute to the vibrant life of the town.

Take away all the companies promoting goods and services from the town centre and… there’d be no town centre. There are many groups that make life in Swindon vibrant. Trade unions and political groups are not amongst them.

I look forward to being able to walk through the town centre without having to dodge those attempting to thrust pieces of paper with inane political or commercial advertising into my hand. I suspect most others will too.

It’s difficult to know where to start when attempting to comment on the campaign by Joanna Lambert against a new windfarm… especially when plenty of others have already subjected her to plentiful dose of ridicule. Never mind, I’ll try.

When Watchfield air base was started it was a heavy drop air base, and the reason for this was that they found there were exceptionally low wind levels around Watchfield.

Remind me of that later please….

My reaction when I came over the hill on Friday to see they had gone up was that they are so much bigger and more dominating than I imagined.

So dominating that you didn’t see them until you went over the hill. Massive, then.

I was someone who thought they wouldn’t be awful, but they are and have completely devasated the landscape.

Err… to the west, Swindon; to the east, Didcot power stations. Blinkered vision is a dreadful impediment.

They are so enormously tall and move all the time so the eye is drawn to them, not like a building which is static and you learn to look beyond it.

So you’d prefer five 50 metre high blocks of flats to be built there would you? No? Thought not.

Millions of people over the last 4,000 years must have walked along the Ridgeway marvelling at the intimate beauty of the Vale.

For most of the last 4000 years, walking was more a necessity than a leisure activity. I suspect they had more pressing thoughts on their mind than “Isn’t it pretty here.”

Until that awful day ten days ago the walker’s eye drifted to the church towers, to the tall poplars and oaks.

And to the six cooling towers of Didcot A power station in the background.

Yet now five massive industrial turbines with angry noisy blades cutting the air will dominate the landscape for decades to come, and shatter the peace and serenity for those around.

I’d never realised the traffic on the A420 and the trains on the Great Western mainline were so quiet until you mentioned it. And what was it you said about it being an air base? Guess those aircraft were silent too. Oh yes, and did you say something about there not being much wind? That’ll be the meek and quiet variety of ‘angry noisy blades’ then.

Even when the blades are turning, electricity is not necessarily being generated unless the wind blows at the right speed. Because of this irregularity this plant will have to be inefficiently backed up by fossil fuel power.

It’s fortunate that we’ve got Didcot power stations sitting so prettily in the background then, isn’t it?

It seems a cruel trick that 10 to 20 per cent of all our energy bills in future will be a hidden levy to fund this ongoing rural destruction without any serious clean electricity produced

I trust you’ll be submitting a letter in support of a Watchfield nuclear power station then? No?

All campaigns need publicity. I suspect this sort of attention wasn’t quite what Ms Lambert had in mind.