Full of cold

I’m full of cold and have a busy day – Cabinet tonight and associated meetings.

Worrying news in Fifield about the potential F&M outbreak, but the vet that was on Radio Berkshire was “fairly optimistic” that the tests would be negative. 

The Council meeting on Tuesday was a lot of fun, answering questions and bantering in debate. Pity the microphones were necessary (Libdem cost to taxpayer : £30k) because of the messed-up acoustics of the Chamber. Even more of a pity that the microphones were flaky!

Express / Observer letters

Medina Dairy rumbles on beyond the planning meeting. I am told that the panel took over two hours on the item, so it’s hard to believe that issues that Councillors needed to know about were not fully aired as John Holdstock is claiming. His own representatives no doubt had a number of occasions at the meeting to raise any matter pertaining to the application they wished to! 

Local residents will be very keen to ensure that conditions are adhered to – and we have already improved the enforcement activities of the Council if conditions are breached since being elected in May. We all know very well the sensitivities of this site because of recent history, but a planning application is a planning application, not anything more or less.

My response to Harry Parker’s Advertiser letter was published in the Advertiser, but not in the Express, where he gets a letter in this week about Heathrow.

In the Observer, a bizarre letter strewn with random Libdem themes appears from LM McKlintock. Just addressing the Council tax issue, it seems strange to attack us for trying to lower the burden of the most unpopular tax – as has been successfully achieved in other Conservative authorities like nearby Wokingham and Bracknell, and further afield in Hammersmith and Wandsworth. We are the low tax party, and if LM McKlintock doesn’t like that he/she should say taxes need to rise to pay for whatever state activity he/she deems necessary for the public to receive more of …..

Gord’s Britain

People with more time than me come up with fantastic stuff like this :

Great market in Maidenhead

There is a great onstreet market in Maidenhead this week – lots of colourful stalls and plenty on offer. I splashed out on Belgian chocolates (not good for the waistline). The Advertiser ran a ‘lots of empty shops’ story yesterday which is a good reminder of the challenges that we face in improving the town for the better.

Letter(s)

Dear old Harry Parker writes to the Advertiser in a very disjointed way. A similar letter appears today in the Express with “name and address supplied”. How curious. He tries to link in the Advantage card discount (he is opposed to this despite every Libdem councillor in Windsor that opposed it having lost their seat. Do they never learn?!!), opposed to a Leader’s office at the Town Hall that meets with his disapproval despite their existance in many other councils, and tries to conclude because of all these new things, that things are the same as they used to be when we were last in control (which of course is bad)! Message to Harry – if you do what you always did, you’ll get what you always got….

Campaign on again

Back out on the campaign trail – in Datchet, where there is a by-election on 4th October. Feedback on the doorstep has been excellent to date. Our candidate Gary Muir is working really hard and is very good with people – we hope he will be successful and make an excellent councillor.

Advertiser Letters

School meals – Gavin Ames writes with a lot of the problems affecting the school meals service. There isn’t much in the way of solutions offered therein, however. Because there is not an easy commercial proposition that can pay for school meals, either the taxpayer pays more, or the parents pay more. Mr Ames’ assertion that the tendering company has it easy is way off the mark, because if it was that cushy a deal we would be choosing from lots of applicants interested in free money, which simply isn’t the case. It is also not surprising that we like many other local Authorities are in this difficult position.

 Should we have shorter library opening hours to pay for more peas and beans? Or tax people a bit more, who, let’s not forget, have already paid a great deal of extra tax to the Government since 1997 (a fair amount of the extra having gone to schools!)

 There are no easy choices here, otherwise it would have been solved already.

 S E Kenny writes about the new parking. People have been able to park all day for a pound or two in Windsor by getting a fresh ticket. This is nothing new. The only difference is that the Council will be a pound or two worse off (compared with the issues above, this is pretty small potatoes, forgive the pun). Apparently the culprit is the underlying legislative parking order that is ‘pay and display’ not ‘limited waiting’. We may have more options when decriminalised parking comes about next year to prevent the existing and previous abuse of the pay/display machines.

Diana Coad writes about the EU Treaty Referendum (or the lack of it). Apparently the fact that 95% of the changes remain that were in the Constitution that Gord said would entitle us to a referendum counts for nothing. When he was on the radio this week I sensed him chalking up a ‘backstop’ position by saying that there could be no reneging on some of the “details” that had been agreed during the discussions. This serves him two purposes – he has his trump card vs Europe (you will all lose if we vote this down so give us what we want) and he has his get-out (we didn’t get all we expected from the “detailed discussions”) if the heat from his own MPs becomes too great.