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Latest News Winchester

Reporting graffiti on telecoms cabinets

Like so many, I’m getting very irritated at current levels of graffiti – and there’s a lot going on at the City Council to get it under control.

Most graffiti in our area is removed by the Business Improvement District or by the City Council and both have significantly increased spending recently to get more removed. Strictly, neither can remove it from another organisation’s property without permission – and that includes the boxes owned by Openreach and Virgin Media – as well as substations owned by SSE – and equipment owned by Network Rail.

Each of these has places to report graffiti – currently as follows:

One tricky thing to handle is identifying which organisation a cabinet belongs to. Openreach has a guide to this (pdf) – but, if there isn’t an obvious logo or label (or even a barely visible faded one), the main trick is to look at the keyholes on the cabinet.

BT Openreach has triangular or star-shaped insert.

And Virgin has more conventional keyholes.

It’s always helpful to take a photo. Also write down or photograph whatever numbers are on the box in case it’s a useful reference. Openreach also ask you to use the What3Words app or website to get a useful link or set of three words to give an exact location – and I’ve also used this successfully with other organisations! If you don’t like using a proprietary system and want to use a more open reference or app, then the Ordnance Survey’s OS Locate app gives you easy access to latitude, longitude and National Grid references.

Any other comments or suggestions on how to get graffiti removed? Please add a comment below.

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County Council Latest News Winchester

Hampshire’s cuts to hit Winchester hard

A press release I sent to the Chronicle – that colleagues liked so much that they asked me to post it online. So here it is:

Yesterday’s meeting of Hampshire’s Conservative cabinet confirmed that they will go ahead with their reckless £140 million cuts. These will only cost us more long-term.

In particular:

  • Their cuts to health and care will mean that the NHS is unable to hit the financial targets laid out in its ‘sustainability and transformation plan’ – and will put health and care services under even more stress.
  • Their cuts to Household Waste Recovery Centres are almost certain to lead to more fly-tipping.

In a surprise decision, the Cabinet also voted to recommend extra money to support parish and town councils in covering for services cut by Hampshire – such as community transport, school crossing patrols and subsidised bus services – however the Conservatives still have not put anything in place to support the many areas of Hampshire without parish and town councils – such as Winchester.

There’s also still no sign that they are taking any account of the impact of the cuts in less well-off areas of Hampshire.

Martin Tod, Liberal Democrat County Councillor for Winchester Westgate, commented:

We’re paying the price for the Conservatives’ incompetent and chaotic management of Brexit and the economy. This has led to collapsing investment, the lowest growth in both the EU and the G7 and rapidly growing inflation. Aside from the effect on people’s cost of living and the very real threat to businesses and jobs, this utter incompetence makes it even harder to tackle the crisis in funding for council services.

These cuts are a disaster of the Conservatives’ making – Conservative MPs, Conservative Ministers and Conservative Councillors have all contributed to this fiasco – and it will hit local people hard. The Conservatives are now compounding their failure by deciding not to have any kind of plan for the many areas of Hampshire without parish and town councils.

This is a real threat to Winchester – and, along with my colleagues, I will continue to push for the council to put in place a plan for unparished areas – and to stop the most damaging of their proposed cuts.

And nationally, the sooner we can find a way to ‘exit from Brexit’ and focus on a plan to turn round the economy, the better it will be for jobs, for businesses and for our local public services.

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Air Quality Latest News Winchester

Conservatives vote down tougher action on air quality

Once again, Conservative Councillors at Winchester City Council have voted down a proposal from the Lib Dem group to have a tougher policy on air quality in the city.

I summed up on a proposal at today’s council meeting that it should be compulsory for all council proposals to report on the air quality impact of any action they recommend.

Under the Conservatives, again and again, the council has treated air quality as something that’s only done by the environment team.  Other departments are left free to ignore it. It happened with Station Approach. It happened with the ‘pollution patio’ in St George’s Street. And the proposed new Parking Strategy doesn’t do enough. With 51 deaths a year in the Winchester district from air pollution, this can’t carry on.

It’s got to be impossible to ignore air quality in council plans – right across the council – as well as making sure that the Air Quality Action Plan due later this year does enough to tackle it. You can’t sort air quality in a silo. It’s got to be everyone’s business.

That’s what we proposed. And it’s deeply disappointing – although not surprising – that, once again, the Conservatives voted it down.”

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Latest News

Neither in sorrow, nor in anger, but it’s time for Nick to go…

There are four things I want a leader to do:

  • Deliver a winning political strategy
  • Create an effective election winning core team
  • Effectively communicate a distinctive vision – especially at major elections
  • Deliver Liberal Democrat policies – whether in or out of Government

On political strategy, I am extremely concerned that the ‘centrist party of government, not a party of protest’ positioning is completely wrong. The most effective political leaders – Thatcher – Blair – and, dare I say it, local government leaders like Keith House in Eastleigh – manage the double of being both credible in Government AND dissatisfied with the status quo – protesting – pushing for change. The opposite of a ‘party of protest’ is a ‘party of the complacent status quo’. For me, the answer to ‘that question’ in the Farage debates crystallised the issue. How can someone who was an MEP for 5 years – and (I would hope) understands how the British people feel alienated from EU decision-making – not be fizzing with ideas for reforming and improving it? (Indeed, how, as DPM, has he not been using his responsibility for constitutional reform to try and put in place reforms to build greater public EU accountability into our parliamentary system?) We always want change. We always want things to be better. We can never, and should never, be the party of the establishment. That’s got to change – and I don’t believe that change can happen with Nick in charge.

There’s a deeper strategic point, that I’ve repeatedly made at the Liberal Democrat Federal Executive, that we need to guard our distinctiveness vs. Labour and the Tories. Nationally we need ‘signature policies’ that illustrate our values and that neither party will match. Over the last few years, they have included constitutional reform, civil liberties, the environment and, historically, Iraq. It’s vital that we defend our position on all of those, but, sadly, we have failed to deliver on constitutional reform – we have conceded far too much on civil liberties – and lost our clarity on improving the environment. Aiming for the ‘centre ground’ without anchoring on policy positions where we are clearly not aiming for a happy consensus is essential for us to be a meaningful political movement.

On the core team, Nick’s team is weak – not because they’re not bright and capable – but because they do not contain a diverse enough range of experience – inside the party and outside the party – and do not appear to care about having an empowered and politically capable front line. All they appear to want donors and deliverers. And they have a surprisingly nonchalant attitude towards the wipe-out of our local councillor base in large areas across the UK. The idiotic email we received on Friday is a symptom of that. There are scores of bright young ‘think tank’ types – but not enough people with front line experience. People who understand that, while we need to work with the Tories (or Labour), they are the enemy and are putting plenty of effort into thinking how to screw us over – morning, noon and night. People who have experience of building a team, creating a motivating political vision on the ground and winning vs. the other parties. I don’t trust the central organisation to deliver the campaign we need in 2015 – indeed, I’m not sure it’s capable of doing it – and I don’t see how that is going to change without Nick changing.

The biggest problem is communication. Effective communication produces results. And the communication we’ve seen during the recent European campaign has not been effective. This isn’t about being in Government. We were in Government before the Clegg/Farage debates. Nick was able to connect with people (sometimes brilliantly) in the past but is now a busted flush. Perhaps unfairly, a whole chunk of the electorate who we need to win over is irrevocably alienated from him. His polling is dire. The sad fact is no-one will listen to him in 2015 – and anyone who thinks that isn’t a problem has a very strange view of how General Elections work.

Finally there’s the question of policy delivery. I supported joining the coalition and, while I didn’t agree with every word of it, I supported the Coalition Agreement. (I’ve just re-read it and, while some of the problems with it are now clearer, there’s still a lot of good stuff in there).  The biggest disasters of this parliament have generally come from outside the coalition agreement (e.g. the bedroom tax) or are in direct contradiction to it (NHS Bill, Secret Courts) and those decisions all went through Nick. And I genuinely don’t know what we’ve got in return. Yes, we’ve had some important wins like strengthened mental health policies. Some of the Coalition Agreement policies have been delivered on a larger scale and with larger impact than originally committed (e.g. apprenticeships) although many of those are offset by policies where we’ve under-delivered. But in terms of big signature policies that weren’t in the Coalition Agreement, what has there been? What have we got for all the painful Conservative party policies that Nick has signed us up to since 2010? Free school meals in primary schools? Is that it?

Ultimately, the killer point for me is the third one. Mid-term unpopularity was always to be expected – not being listened to is a much more serious problem.  I can’t see how we can fight a general election with a leader that no-one wants to hear. It just doesn’t make any sense.

So Nick has to go – and that’s why I’ve signed the letter at http://www.libdems4change.org.

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Latest News

Principle vs pandering on equal marriage

The Hampshire Chronicle has reported why the two Conservative MPs in the Winchester District voted as they did on the Marriage (Same Sex Couples) Bill.

George Hollingbery said:

“This was a free vote and one that was a matter of conscience. I have always believed that a defining characteristic of any developed society is that it treats its citizens equally.”

Steve Brine said:

“I have received more contact from constituents on this, mostly opposed to the Bill for what it’s worth, than any other subject in almost three years, and many said to me the coalition should not be spending any time on this has no mandate for such a major constitutional change.”

If you want to know what Steve Brine thought before so many people wrote to him, Andrew Emmerson has provided a useful summary on his blog.

What should people write to him about next?

(Perhaps we could tell him what a ‘constitutional change’ is?)

Update

Discussion on Facebook has made clear that this wasn’t even populism!  As this Guardian poll makes clear, the majority of the population support equal marriage.

I’ve changed the headline from ‘principle vs populism’ to ‘principle vs pandering’.