Monthly Archives: February 2011

62a and 62b, Buses, cuts, eXplore card, Lollipop patrols, New Strategic direction, Schools, Suffolk Circle, Suffolk County Council, Transport, Uncategorized, Woodbridge, young people, Your councillor

SCC humanitarians? EPIC Fail!

6 Comments

Ok, I’ll admit it.  I’m depressed.

I know that the  SCC Tory administration are supposed to have hearts as hard and slippery as greasy bullets,  consciences as elastic as support stockings and moral principles as indefensible as the Maginot line (I also know – because they have confessed it  -that they read my blog,  AVIDLY, I hope!).

But it takes a very hard-hearted, very conscienceless and very very unprincipled representative of the people  to support the cutting of all our Suffolk  School Crossing Patrols for the sake of  an annual £174,000.

But they did – speaking their votes  aloud – 40 to our 26.

Because  (I quote) ‘we have to face it – in this country we have simply been living beyond our means – and we can no longer do so!”

Living beyond our means? I should coco  – in the last year alone, these very same prudent guardians have  spent

  • HALF A MILLION POUNDS on gagging orders for departed staff
  • £122,000 for the Chief Executive to spend (at her discretion) on unspecified consultancy with three extraordinarily retiring, unadvertised and otherwise  little-known firms
  • over 3p in every one of our council tax pounds on the salaries of their  senior management  and
  • THREE QUARTERS  OF A MILLION POUNDS on something called Suffolk Circle – which they brought  in to show Suffolk over-50s how to pay to keep themselves busy and be good neighbours to each other.
    (It makes you wonder what kind of neighbours our Tory councillors can be  themselves. Most of us in Suffolk know that neighbourliness comes free in our kindly county. )

I admit to being ill-tempered when posting this.

And with due cause.

I have just spent six interminable hours in the council chamber listening to an almost unbelievable degree of smug complacency from our Tory majority as they justified  their horrible choices.  Complacency  that dismissed such issues as cutting (oh no, suddenly its ‘divesting’ ) the road crossing patrols, abandoning the eXplore card, removing inconvenient buses because the countryside is so big and they’re all right Jack they have CARS, as (again I quote) ‘tosh.’

Woodbridge should be proud of itself. It punched well above its weight:   the deputy head, PTA chair and ex- PTA chair of St. Mary’s plus various parents and councillors  present a petition to Guy Mc Gregor on cutting the School Crossing patrol. Afterwards, no less than three brave Woodbridge souls asked excellent public questions  – again of Guy McGregor  -on cutting the St Mary’s School Crossing patrol, on cutting the eXplore card and on the cancelled buses. They got what could only be described as unhelpful answers.

During the afternoon I spoke four times, forcefully and increasingly desperately.  But the forces of reason (I would say the quiet voice of reason – but I was far from quiet) lost every single point and the conservative budget goes ahead in all its tarnished glory.

So that’s it for SCC’s cheap and effective school crossing patrols, the eXplore card, many of our scheduled buses…  I hope every single councillor who voted for it will feel proud of themselves! And I hope every resident of Suffolk will remember which people  voted for it.

It occurs to me that to some people present this was all just a game, where winning was all (“No, no, they do but jest. Poison in jest“). In case they have got to believing their own rhetoric I will just pass on the words of a Woodbridge constituent who was present :

I stayed for the vote on the first amendment but was so angry I had to leave after that. I was totally appalled at  their attitude and a complete lack of any decent argument for scrapping crossing patrols. I can honestly say I have never been so angry in my life. I had a rant on radio Suffolk when I left the building.

I think the fact that you can keep up your amazing enthusiasm whilst surrounded by a set of people who ( in my 12 year old sons words) would climb over a glass wall to see what’s on the other side, is incredible.

They are arrogant, unyielding and most definitely not representing the people they serve. Unlike you.

Because I believe in the principle that injustice – like justice – should not just be done, but SEEN to be done, I will, when the voting records appear, post a link to the names  of everyone who voted.

Whether with their consciences or not.

Chengyu for the day:

Chengyu for the day:

风 雨 如 晦 (feng yu ru hui)

wind and rain sweeping across a gloomy sky eg: a grim situation

Buses, New Strategic direction, Suffolk County Council, Transport, Uncategorized

A Quick Question for Suffolk Labour activists

Leave a comment

C’m on, folks, make your minds up. Is the lesser political party in a coalition responsible or not for the actions of the whole?  Helpful hint: We need a YES or a NO here.

Yet Labour activists in Suffolk have difficulty with this one.

When it comes to decisions made at Suffolk County Council,  pre-2005 (a Labour/Lib Dem coalition for those who do not suffer from political amnesia) they  remember it  as if these were their decisions  – and theirs alone.   As in:

“Labour left an exemplary council in 2005, since then this morally bankrupt group of Conservatives have done their best to run Suffolk services into the ground.”

Julian Swainson 2 Feb, “Don’t Privatise Suffolk Services” Facebook group

Yet suddenly,  when it’s politically expedient, when it’s a NATIONAL coalition  (in which it’s clear that the Lib Dems take a small – but ameliorating – role in sorting out the financial debacle of the previous Labour administration)  then suddenly all we hear from Labour is that the resultant problems are all the Lib Dems’ fault.

Yes – right.   And I’m the Akond of Swat.

Do you know, a  prominent Suffolk  Labour councillor had the crust to say to me the other day:   ” I don’t know how a moral person could be a Lib Dem.”  (Brave fellow, eh? Luckily for him  he didn’t know I go to boxing classes. My strength is as the strength of ten because my heart is pure..)

And yet he was  totally flabbergasted when I replied:

“Torture, rendition, war crimes, denial of democracy,  total failure to support public transport and social housing  in times of plenty, privatisation of the NHS by the back door, destruction of our finances by cosying up to, and deregulating the banks,   threatening to cut ‘worse than Margaret Thatcher’ when in power  and then total amnesia afterwards..   Me,  I wonder how any moral person could ever have stayed with your morally bankrupt party!”

It’s like he was believing his own spin!

Come on,  guys – don’t be such hypocrites.  Be grateful that at local AND national level there is the quiet voice of common sense to ameliorate the extravagant  amnesia of right and left alike.

At the moment we Lib Dems are providing the only practical and vocal opposition to the excesses of  Suffolk’s Tory administration, and their bureaucrats’  heaven, the NSD.  United we jolly well ought to stand.  Divided, I’m happy to point out your deficiencies.

Epilepsy in Suffolk, Uncategorized, young people

DLA: potential discrimination against people with epilepsy

7 Comments

Rt Hon David Cameron
Prime Minister
10 Downing Street,
London SW1A 2AA                                                                  14 February 2011

Dear Mr Cameron

Re: second reading of the Ten Minute Rule Bill on Epilepsy and Related Conditions (Education and Health Services) (Bill 112)

I’ve already written to you personally, urging you to find time for the second reading of the Ten Minute Rule Bill on Epilepsy and Related Conditions (Education and Health Services) (Bill 112) which is scheduled for 4 March 2011.

In my letter I told you about the double whammy suffered by my teenage daughter and many others like her – balancing the effects of severe and hard-to-control epilepsy on the one hand with poorly integrated non-strategically organised services in health, education, and social care on the other – with everyone playing pass the parcel just as hard as ever they can!

I’m now writing to you in my capacity as county councillor, urging you on behalf of the people of Suffolk to make time for this Bill.  As proof that the Bill is needed, I want to highlight a fault in the processes for managing Disability Living Allowance, a fault which provides potential discrimination against people with epilepsy.

Many people with severe epilepsy have no cognitive deficit, but are severely hampered by the effects of medication/seizures. Our teenage daughter is one of these.   On turning 16 , DLA starts to be paid directly to the patient, because the DWP (very properly) considers that the recipient should be negotiating their own services unless mentally incapable. This is admirable in theory!

Unfortunately,  the intractable nature of the epilepsy and the strength of the medicines used to attempt to control it, often have a bad effect on one’s ability to remember, understand and plan things . This is true of my daughter – it is also true of every other person who is significantly disabled by epilepsy.

Because of the DWP’s assumption of independence, in our case it took over a year for any of us to discover that the DWP had cancelled DLA payments to my daughter and that the expenses that the DLA was supposed to be funding for her (personal care, transport costs etc) were in fact being paid for out of her own pocket-money and savings. We supported her to ring and query this – whereupon she was told she had she had failed to fill in a form which had been sent out to her and that she must now reapply (with the clear implication that none of the intervening year’s DLA would be paid to her, despite clear evidence of her significant disability during this period.)

DLA recipients with epilepsy suffer from a condition that severely affects their ability to concentrate, remember, organize and plan. This is the very reason they are receiving DLA. How can this supposedly disability-aware government agency take no account of the very disability from which recipients are suffering when deciding the methods by which the benefit is managed, renewed and in this case, it seems, terminated?

It is clear that if epilepsy is to be supported by state payments like DLA (and as a carer of someone with intractable epilepsy I can confirm just how many adjustments are needed to support even half-way normal living arrangements) the state’s agencies need to recognise some of the limitations of this condition. The DLA paperwork takes account of a recipient who may be hesitent about reading and writing, or who needs help in filling in the forms, but it does not take account of the degree of mental confusion that can accompany regular epileptic seizures and/or heavy medication

If the state insists on dealing directly with DLA recipients from the age of 16, it is clearly discriminatory to fail to ensure that its methods of communication are dealing fairly with recipients and also taking account of ALL effects of disability.   DLA is not pocket money. It is intended to help a disabled person to live as close an approximation to a normal life as possible. Once again people with epilepsy suffer more than others because of the unrecognized nature of their condition

The specific problems caused by epilepsy have been poorly understood by central government in the past, particularly in regard to the provision of educational, medical and social support. Fortunately, the current more enlightened government is finally showing signs of greater understanding. It is social (and economic!) madness to prevent people with epilepsy from contributing to society as fully as they could do. In writing to you I hope that this example of the State’s clearly well-intended yet obviously ineffective interaction with epilepsy will encourage you to make time for the Bill and will strengthen the support that I know you already feel for these measures.

Yours faithfully

Caroline Page

copied to:

Epilepsy Action
NCYPE
National Society for Epilepsy/ Epilepsy Society

Chinese saying of the day:

小事聪明大事糊涂 (xiǎo​shì cōng​ming​ dà​shì​ hú​tu )

clever in trifles but muddled when it comes to huge events