SATIRE: What do Star Wars and elected mayors have in common?
SATIRE: What do Star Wars and elected mayors have in common?
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George Lucas imagines a fictional meeting of politicians
Star Wars gives a vision of what elected Mayors will be like
The following is parody/satire protected by this legislation. Star Wars is of course owned by Disney.
(dramatic music)
Tagge: Until Wirral Council is fully operational, we are vulnerable! The opposition parties are too well equipped. They’re more dangerous than you realise!
Motti: Dangerous to your political party, not to Wirral Council!
Tagge: The tax credits rebellion will continue to gain support in the House of Lords!
Elected Mayor: The House of Lords will no longer be of any concern to us. I have just received word that Prime Minister Cameron has dissolved the House of Lords permanently. The last remnants of the old democracy have been swept away.
Tagge: But that’s impossible! How will Prime Minister Cameron maintain control without the bureaucracy?
Elected Mayor: The elected Mayors now have direct control over their territories. Fear will keep the locals in line, fear of Wirral Council.
Tagge: And what of the rebellion? If the rebels have obtained a complete technical readout of Wirral Council, it is possible however unlikely that they might find a weakness and exploit it!
Lord Vader: The plans you refer to will soon be back in our hands.
Motti: Any attack made by the opposition parties against Wirral Council would be a useless gesture, no matter what technical data they’ve obtained.
Wirral Council is now the ultimate power in the universe! I suggest we use it!
Lord Vader: Don’t be too proud of this Wirral Council you’ve constructed. The ability to collect council tax is insignificant next to the power of politics.
Motti: Don’t try to frighten us with your sorcerer’s ways, Lord Vader. Your sad devotion to politics has not helped you conjure up the stolen plans, or given you enough clairvoyance to find the rebels’ hidden fortress…
[Lord Vader makes a pinching motion and he starts choking]
Lord Vader: I find your lack of faith disturbing.
Elected Mayor: Enough of this! Vader, release him!
Lord Vader: As you wish.
[He does]
Elected Mayor: This bickering is pointless. Now Lord Vader will provide us with the location of the stolen plans by the time Wirral Council is operational. We will then crush the opposition parties with one swift stroke.
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Bam Nuttall contract drawings of one of the twenty different designs for wiring for one of Wirral Council’s streetlights thumbnail
One of my favourite authors, Isaac Asimov when editing books of science fiction stories (or even his own stories) used to add an introduction to each story. This is an introduction to a piece by a guest blogger (in future these introductions will probably be shorter).
Many moons ago, I started and ran a video games website (single-handed) that had more readers each month than the Wirral Globe has now. Just in case anyone considers that a “hobby”, I was paid for it, just as I earn money from writing this blog.
Visitors to that website used to submit content (there was a forum too) and believe me having to edit a submission from a teenager who completely ignores any of the rules of grammar and doesn’t use full stops was a stretch.
For a while I’ve been thinking of a new feature on this blog similar to the letters page of the newspapers where users can submit content. After all (apart from a submission by Leonora who I’ve tried to gently encourage to write again) readers of this blog have had to put up with me for the last five years!
I have asked a number of people to write a guest post, however Nick Lauro has been the first to thankfully say yes!
Compared to the experience above, editing Nick Lauro’s submission has been a dream by comparison. I have only made one very minor edit!
His piece is about something that I’ll refer to as a “bread and butter” issue of political activists or a politician and reminds me of a similar problem I tried to sort out once on the Beechwood estate. Writing any more than that about it would spoil the surprise.
By Nick Lauro
Is it really too much to ask? It’s not as though I’m asking for the air fare and the accommodation costs for a trip to China, it’s just a couple of street lamps that need fixing! So began my speculation, as I pondered in the dark about exactly how much of Wirral council taxpayers’ money it costs to send a van and a couple of engineers out to repair a street lamp or two.
It all started around the end of September when unusually, my little cul-de-sac was plunged into darkness by the simultaneous failure of not one, but two lamp posts. Not the end of the world, maybe a bit on the Victor Meldrew side of petty but nevertheless, a valid security risk to my fellow neighbours whose houses sit next to the shrouded, wooded scrubland that provides an obvious getaway/hiding place, for even the most feckless burglar. It’s not the first time a street light has failed over the 11 years I’ve lived in the road, and has always been an easy problem to rectify; contact council, report faulty light, wait a few days, light fixed.
Reporting a faulty street light is as simple as visiting the Wirral council website and filling in an online form that rewards you with a message of acknowledgement much preferable to hanging on the end of a telephone waiting to speak to an overworked, underpaid, first line support employee from an understaffed department. After you’ve completed the reporting process, you sit and wait for the lights to come back on again or in this case, not… four plus weeks and two ignored Tweets later, darkness still prevails when the sun goes down and my train of thought drifts toward ideas of austerity, cuts and a local authority so fiscally challenged, they can no longer provide the same level of service for our most basic of urban requirements. But wait; there is much talk in the local press about my locality being saved from oblivion by the universal panacea for all cash strapped local authorities a ‘Golf Resort’. We have a white knight upon his steed, bringing us promise of regeneration and our council coffers once again, overflowing with bullion surely enough to restore Wirral’s street furniture to working order for years to come?
Alas, our saviour and two of his executive salaried colleagues have departed in what looks to be a strategically planned exit, taking between them, some £500,000 of council taxpayers’ money in remunerations. Who will save us now, from further fiscal disaster? Who can keep the dream alive for ‘Wirral Waters’? Will the money to fix two dodgy street lamps down my road ever be found?
Seriously folks, when an organisation funded by money from the public purse our money can seemingly see fit to play the sort of boardroom games more in keeping with the style of premier league football managers, it is easy to feel bitterly short-changed. The recent monetary machinations carried out by our most highly paid public servants, only serves to cast suspicion and doubt on their ability to even find the money to change a light bulb.
ICO rule that Wirral Council’s refusal of FOI request based on "commercial interests" is incorrect (FS50585536)
ICO rule that Wirral Council’s refusal of FOI request based on "commercial interests" is incorrect (FS50585536)
ICO Information Commissioner’s Office logo
The Information Commissioner’s Office have issued another decision notice in favour of this blog. You can read it for yourself as I’ve uploaded it to the blog decision notice FS50585536 (although eventually it’ll be published on ICO’s website).
It’s five pages, so I’ll summarise what it states and go into the history.
As a local government elector during the 2013/14 audit I requested various invoices for legal work which I have a legal right to inspect and receive free copies of as a local government elector on the Wirral.
Sadly the invoices that this decision notice refer to were only the first page of a multi-page invoice. I made a FOI request for the rest of the invoices. One was for £48,384 and the other for £2,700 (both from Weightmans).
Wirral Council first refused the request on a quite baseless and ludicrous application of stating that they were covered by legal professional privilege.
Whoever dealt with it at internal review agreed with me that this was incorrect.
However then Wirral Council refused the request giving the reason of "Commercial interests".
The Information Commissioner’s Office was not convinced by Wirral Council’s arguments and has rejected Wirral’s application of withholding the information based on commercial interests.
I am pleased the decision notice doesn’t give Wirral Council the option to "pick another reason" to withhold the information. There’s one request I have to Wirral Council now on its third decision notice because Wirral Council has exploited that loophole in the past.
So Wirral Council have (well had from the date of the decision notice which was 2 days ago) 35 days to supply the information or 28 days to appeal the decision.
Let’s hope Wirral Council stop playing games over freedom of information and do the right thing?
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EXCLUSIVE: What do the plans for a new fire station at Saughall Massie look like?
EXCLUSIVE: What do the plans for a new fire station at Saughall Massie look like?
Dan Stephens (Chief Fire Officer) answers questions at a public consultation meeting in Saughall Massie to discuss proposals for a new fire station (20th April 2015)
The story of the possibility of a new fire station in Saughall Massie has rumbled on to a new phase as Merseyside Fire and Rescue Service has requested pre application planning advice from Wirral Council. Pictured above is Dan Stephens in Saughall Massie trying to explain the need for a fire station earlier in the year to residents.
In the interests of openness and transparency (and if the Chair of the Merseyside Fire and Rescue Authority Cllr Hanratty is reading and deplores the drain on financial resources providing the information I’m about to show on this blog I might point out it was emailed to this blog I didn’t ask for it so no cost to the public purse whatsoever), I’m publishing here some documents to do with Merseyside Fire and Rescue Service’s request for pre-application planning advice.
Just before I get to the documents (I’m sure someone will eventually reveal what the advice is that Wirral Council receives in response to this) I will point out the way the project is described by Merseyside Fire and Rescue Service’s contractors is that this is all going through the formalities and this this is essentially a done deal. Although like Cllr Blakeley I will make it clear that is merely how anybody reading these documents would think and it may just be MFRS’s contractors getting ahead of themselves in documents that I think they wouldn’t assume would be published.
However a decision is yet to be made on the land and yet to be made over planning permission. So that’s the caveat I will put here as from the tone of some of the way these are written you’d guess that these decisions had already been made.
The purpose of pre-application planning advice is so that if there are any problems plans can be changed. So therefore it is possible the planning application will vary from the above.
As detailed by the Chief Fire Officer Dan Stephens during the consultation, once a planning application is submitted there will be a period of consultation before any decisions are made.
However if you have any comments, please feel free to leave a comment.
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VIDEO: A round-up of local Wirral and Merseyside politics by John Brace (part 2)
VIDEO: A round-up of local Wirral and Merseyside politics by John Brace (part 2)
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John Brace on local Wirral and Merseyside politics (part 2)
Part 2 of this video series is shorter than part 1.
As before, this transcript of the video will include relevant links. After I recorded the video I found another bundle of papers that make up the BAM Nuttall contract on the scanner. There are also pages Wirral Council didn’t give me because of commercial confidentiality reasons. However I think you get the point that it’s a long contract!
Hello, I’m John Brace and this is the second part of my videos about local politics on Merseyside and on the Wirral.
One thing I’ll be talking about today is the Bam Nuttall contract. You may not have heard of Bam Nuttall, but they replaced Colas. If I went into the whole Colas saga and the senior officers that were suspended and paid oodles of money because Wirral Council didn’t quite get it right, well I’d probably use up all the tape on this camera.
But anyway going back to Bam Nuttall, in must have been 2014, Wirral Council signed up to a contract with them and the contract called, let’s see the Highway Services Contract. So for instance stuff to do with road works. Anything I think over a certain amount to do with traffic lights is someone else’s responsibility but I’ve scanned in the first bit of the contract which is here, see that’s the bit I’ve scanned in, but it’s an absolutely massive contract.
This is the next bit, bit not the rest of it! Then there’s this. That makes up the contract.
I have asked Wirral Council not to give me things on paper and to save the planet, not cut down so many trees and give them to me on a CD, but Wirral Council always seem to prefer paper.
Anyway the other thing I’ll be writing about in the near future is, this is some of the invoices I got during the audit for various things. For instance, this one is an invoice for £7,389.50 for the Moscow Ballet doing Giselle at the Floral Pavilion.
Now you may well say well what’s the point in getting an invoice for that? Well, the taxpayer actually subsidises the Floral Pavilion to a large amount of money.
So whereas for example Wirral Council sees closing down Lyndale School as a priority because they say they don’t have the money, they do have the money to be subsidising the tickets of rich people going to see the ballet at the Floral Pavilion. OK, I could look up the amount later.
The other thing I was going to talk about is Liverpool City Region Combined Authority. Now of course this was only set up in the recent past and has mired itself in all kinds of controversy over the devolution deal, price, prize, all that and elected Member stuff.
Anyway, what I did notice and this came as news to me, even though I report on the Liverpool City Region Combined Authority is that Knowsley Council has set up a website for the Liverpool City Region Combined Authority and they’re currently running a consultation on the things that make up the devolution deal.
Now, firstly before the Liverpool City Region Combined Authority was set up politicians quite categorically said, I’m not going to name the politician here but I’m sure people can find this out, I’ll probably find this out when I write this up on my blog.
They said the Liverpool City Region Combined Authority won’t cost any more money than the existing arrangements. Now registering a website, having a website hosted, dealing with all the stuff to do with a website does cost money! OK, the politicians will probably turn round and say, well this is from existing budgets or something, but it costs money that can’t be spent on something else.
So anyway, when I write this up on the blog, in the transcript I’ll include a link because to be honest it was news to me, it hasn’t been in a report that was submitted to the Combined Authority and as far as I’m concerned the only mention online about it is from Knowsley, whereas the Liverpool City Region Combined Authority is all the councils on Merseyside plus I think Halton and really speaking you shouldn’t just consult with the people of Knowsley, you should be consulting everybody.
So that’s a few things that I’ll be doing, let’s see today’s weather is cold, hence the jumper. When I was looking into market research as to what people want from a blog, one of the things that came up was weather forecasts. Now you’ll be glad to know that unless there’s a big demand I’m not going to start up with a map behind me and little symbols of clouds and sunshine, wind and all that because I really don’t fancy being a weather forecaster probably because people would love turning round and saying, “Well you said it would be sunny today John and now it’s raining!”.
But anyway if you really do want weather forecasts, there’s the Met Office website for that.
So that’s a summary of where I’m up to, this week there are hardly any public meetings because of the half term holidays and of course there’s Halloween at the weekend. One of the things that’s coming up of course is Bonfire Night and the Merseyside Fire and Rescue Service, ok I’m sure people are probably sick of me talking about Merseyside Fire and Rescue Service.
Merseyside Fire and Rescue Service are running, in I think conjunction with Wirral Council, trying to clear up the, say for instance the bits of wood and stuff like that people put together for bonfires because Merseyside Fire and Rescue Service probably really don’t want to be going round putting out a lot of small fires on Bonfire Night.
I mean they’re not being killjoys or anything, there are Council organised fireworks displays and things like that so people can go along. I’m sure there’ll be one in Birkenhead Park this year, people can make the usual jokes about taxpayer’s money going up in smoke, that kind of thing.
But anyway, that’s what I’ll be doing today, I’ve decided to keep it short because typing up these transcripts takes a while, but if there’s anything you want to leave a comment on or you think I should write about then please get in touch.
OK, thanks for listening.
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