Martin Tod

It’s been a bit of a hectic week for media with interviews on Sky, ITV and the BBC.

The BBC and Sky wanted to talk about the WWF report on Winchester’s Environmental Footprint.

The Sky interview (below) was live and straight into a camera with a small earpiece in my ear where I could listen to Eamonn Holmes.

The BBC interview was prerecorded at home. The final shot with Tom Hepworth is shot in our living room. That’s my TV that gets switched off at the end (and, yes, it does get switched off at the wall when not in use).

WWF’s analysis showed that Winchester uses the equivalent of 3.6 planets worth of resources - above the UK average of 3 planets - and way over the level we would need to be at to be sustainable.

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We’ve finally had confirmation that we’ve stopped the County Council completely cutting the 6A. After a huge amount of pressure, the 10.10 and 12.10 services have been saved. It’s taken a lot of hard work to get the County Council to see some sense on this. The 6A is a service that was designed to support elderly and vulnerable people living in sheltered accomodation and it was a disgrace that the Conservatives on the County Council ever considered cutting it.

We will still be campaigning for more than two services a day, but this is already huge progress. You can get a sense of the indomitable spirit of the ‘veterans against the bus cuts group’, especially Ron Petty, who did the most to save the service, from the following Thames Valley TV report.

Alistair Marsden of the Tower Arts Campaign and Bob Dylan have just produced the following awesome video about the Tower meeting at the Guildhall on November 1st:

I’ve just watched the ‘Location, Location, Location’ programme about the ten best places to live in Britain - and Winchester has dropped to number two behind Edinburgh.

However, we’re still the best place to live in England so I guess we shouldn’t feel too down!

I watched the show and we lost points for our carbon emissions and our road safety - two areas we’ve been campaigning on for quite some time.

Aside from our national commitments to a zero carbon Britain, I’ve already offered my time to Winchester Action on Climate Change and will be continuing with our campaign for proper 20 mph speed limits outside schools and in residential areas that want them.

At the meeting of North Stanmore Residents Association on October 8, several residents mentioned problem with litters on the path between Waynflete Place and Selbourne Place.

Alexis Fall and Lucille Thompson are pushing the council to clear the path regularly. I went along with them to have a look and we all thought - why wait - let’s clear it up now! Twenty minutes later it was all done.

(Despite the picture, I can promise that I did my share too - it’s just that one of us had to take the photo!)

The first time I went out with Winchester Litterpickers, I ended up buying my own litter picker (it costs a fiver), and it’s very useful for this kind of thing.

It doesn’t mean that we won’t be pushing for the path to be cleared when the council clears litter in the surrounding areas - but it also made no sense to leave loads of litter in place when we had the tools to hand to get rid of it!

Excellent meeting of Winchester Action on Climate Change on Saturday. There were all kinds of great people there from all kinds of different backgrounds – and real energy to get stuck in and do some real work to build awareness of climate change and what people can do about it. My background is in high technology and communication, so I’ve offered to help build a website with useful local information. Watch this space…

We had a great response to the University of Winchester’s Freshers’ Fair on Saturday.

Over 650 students walked out wearing ‘Scrap Tuition Fees’ stickers - and we had great support for our Youth and Student Group’s campaigns on Darfur and against homophobic bullying. We also got a good crowd of new members!

I remember campaigning against tuition fees as a student union officer in the 1980s and there was huge opposition then - and so I wasn’t too surprised when so many Winchester students responded so vigorously to our campaign.

The response was so strong that we had to reprint the petition forms after only an hour. We got nearly twice as many signatures as last year.

I know that some people think that Winchester students aren’t political (presumably people who haven’t heard of Winchester’s new Politics and Global Studies course). Our experience was quite different!

As you may have read in the Chronicle, the decision to end the Tower Arts arts programme now looks likely to be delayed to December 7 with a full ‘options appraisal’ and an extension of programming for Spring Season

The original decision was amazingly bad - premature, half-baked and made without any consultation. There should have been a full options appraisal at the start of the project - it’s good that finally there is going to be one. We now need to ensure that it is genuine. It must rigorously explore all the possibilities to maintain or improve arts provision in Winchester and not just be a paper exercise or a fig leaf to justify continuing with their current plan.

It’s great that John Tellett will be able to continue programming in the short term, although it’s essential that the new plan ensures proper programming for the long-term.

The Tower Arts campaign group have done a brilliant job. Our county council team has also worked very hard to get this decision changed. At last there’s a chance that local people may be listened to and that the original, extremely poor decision will be reappraised.

Encouraging news from the Hampshire Chronicle about the County Council’s response to pressure from our Trip to the Shops campaign and local residents about the state of Winchester’s pavements:

Why a trip to the shops may be a thing of the past

Pledge to spend £2m on pavement repairs

HIGH street pavements in Winchester are in line to be replaced at a cost of £2m, city chiefs announced this week.

The move will delight the many residents and visitors who have endured and complained about the city’s own version of crazy paving’ which, in some cases, has led to people tripping on the uneven surfaces.

We’ve been campaigning hard on this since last year (see reports here). It’s good to see progress, although I know from local residents that there’s a lot of work needed outside the city centre - and I know from personal experience that we will continue to have problems until there is tougher supervision of contractors by the County Council and better control of overweight lorries and trucks being allowed to drive over high street flag stones.

We’re going to keep up the pressure until all the problem areas have been tackled.

You can still report problems on our ‘trip to the shops’ campaign website.

My biggest memory of the first day collecting signatures in the High Street back last December was getting signatures from a troupe of local morris dancers!